Why Python is Ideal for Data Science Functions
Data science is about extrapolating useful information from large datasets. These large datasets are unsorted and difficult to correlate unless one uses machine learning to make connections between different data points. The process requires serious computation and power to make sense of this data.
Python can very well fulfill this need. Being a general programming language, it allows one to create CSV output for easy data interpretation in a spreadsheet. Python is not only multi-functional but also lightweight and efficient at executing code. It can support object-oriented, structural, and functional programming styles and thus can be used anywhere.
Python also offers many libraries specific to data science, for example, the pandas library.
So, irrespective of the application, data scientists can use Python for a variety of powerful functions including casual analytics and predictive analytics.
Popular Data Science Libraries in Python
As discussed above, a key reason for using Python for data science is because Python offers access to numerous data science libraries. Some popular data science libraries are:
- Pandas: It is one of the most popular Python libraries and is ideal for data manipulation and analysis. It provides useful functions for manipulating large volumes of structured data. Pandas is also a perfect tool for data wrangling. Series and DataFrame are two data structures in the Pandas library.
- NumPy: NumPy or Numerical Python is a Python library that offers mathematical functions to handle large dimension arrays. NumPy offers vectorization of mathematical operations on the NumPy array type. This makes it ideal for working with large multi-dimensional arrays and matrices.
- SciPy: It is also a popular Python library for data science and scientific computing. It provides great functionality to scientific mathematics and computing programming. It contains submodules for integration, linear algebra, optimization, special functions, etc.
- Matplotlib: Matplotlib is a comprehensive library for creating static, animated, and interactive visualizations in Python. It is a useful Python library for data visualization. Matplotlib provides various ways of visualizing data effectively and enables quick creation of line graphs, pie charts, and histograms.
- scikit-learn: It is a Python library focused on machine learning. scikit-learn provides easy tools for data mining and data analysis. It provides common machine learning algorithms and helps to quickly implement popular algorithms on datasets and solve real-world problems.
Conclusion
Python is an important tool for data analysts. The reason for its huge popularity among data scientists is the slew of features it offers along with a wide range of data-science-specific libraries that it has.
Moreover, Python is tailor-made for carrying out repetitive tasks and data manipulation. Anyone who has worked with a large amount of data would be aware of how often repetition happens. Python can thus be used to quickly and easily automate the grunt work while freeing up the data scientists to work on more interesting parts of the job.
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