What Is Data Science?
This is a book about doing data science with Python, which immediately begs the question: what is data science ? Its a surprisingly hard definition to nail down, especially given how ubiquitous the term has become. Vocal critics have variously dismissed the term as a superfluous label (after all, what science doesnt involve data?) or a simple buzzword that only exists to salt rsums and catch the eye of overzealous tech recruiters.
In my mind, these critiques miss something important. Data science, despite its hype-laden veneer, is perhaps the best label we have for the cross-disciplinary set of skills that are becoming increasingly important in many applications across industry and academia. This cross-disciplinary piece is key: in my mind, the best existing definition of data science is illustrated by ).
Figure P-1. Drew Conways Data Science Venn Diagram
While some of the intersection labels are a bit tongue-in-cheek, this diagram captures the essence of what I think people mean when they say data science: it is fundamentally an interdisciplinary subject. Data science comprises three distinct and overlapping areas: the skills of a statistician who knows how to model and summarize datasets (which are growing ever larger); the skills of a computer scientist who can design and use algorithms to efficiently store, process, and visualize this data; and the domain expertise what we might think of as classical training in a subject necessary both to formulate the right questions and to put their answers in context.
With this in mind, I would encourage you to think of data science not as a new domain of knowledge to learn, but as a new set of skills that you can apply within your current area of expertise. Whether you are reporting election results, forecasting stock returns, optimizing online ad clicks, identifying microorganisms in microscope photos, seeking new classes of astronomical objects, or working with data in any other field, the goal of this book is to give you the ability to ask and answer new questions about your chosen subject area.
Who Is This Book For?
In my teaching both at the University of Washington and at various tech-focused conferences and meetups, one of the most common questions I have heard is this: how should I learn Python? The people asking are generally technically minded students, developers, or researchers, often with an already strong background in writing code and using computational and numerical tools. Most of these folks dont want to learn Python per se, but want to learn the language with the aim of using it as a tool for data-intensive and computational science. While a large patchwork of videos, blog posts, and tutorials for this audience is available online, Ive long been frustrated by the lack of a single good answer to this question; that is what inspired this book.
The book is not meant to be an introduction to Python or to programming in general; I assume the reader has familiarity with the Python language, including defining functions, assigning variables, calling methods of objects, controlling the flow of a program, and other basic tasks. Instead, it is meant to help Python users learn to use Pythons data science stack libraries such as IPython, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn, and related tools to effectively store, manipulate, and gain insight from data.
Why Python?
Python has emerged over the last couple decades as a first-class tool for scientific computing tasks, including the analysis and visualization of large datasets. This may have come as a surprise to early proponents of the Python language: the language itself was not specifically designed with data analysis or scientific computing in mind. The usefulness of Python for data science stems primarily from the large and active ecosystem of third-party packages: NumPy for manipulation of homogeneous array-based data, Pandas for manipulation of heterogeneous and labeled data, SciPy for common scientific computing tasks, Matplotlib for publication-quality visualizations, IPython for interactive execution and sharing of code, Scikit-Learn for machine learning, and many more tools that will be mentioned in the following pages.
If you are looking for a guide to the Python language itself, I would suggest the sister project to this book, A Whirlwind Tour of the Python Language . This short report provides a tour of the essential features of the Python language, aimed at data scientists who already are familiar with one or more other programming languages.
Python 2 Versus Python 3
This book uses the syntax of Python 3, which contains language enhancements that are not compatible with the 2.x series of Python. Though Python 3.0 was first released in 2008, adoption has been relatively slow, particularly in the scientific and web development communities. This is primarily because it took some time for many of the essential third-party packages and toolkits to be made compatible with the new language internals. Since early 2014, however, stable releases of the most important tools in the data science ecosystem have been fully compatible with both Python 2 and 3, and so this book will use the newer Python 3 syntax. However, the vast majority of code snippets in this book will also work without modification in Python 2: in cases where a Py2-incompatible syntax is used, I will make every effort to note it explicitly.