Data Visualization with Python

Hi everyone/noone. I realize that probably nobody reads these blog posts at this time, but I have found enormous value in writing these posts as I have been learning a lot by writing these. Today’s post is about visualizing data using Python, Anaconda, Matplotlib, Seaborn, & Bokeh. The information in this post is based off of a number of sources including “The Complete Python Data Visualization Course” tutorial by Zenva, wikipedia for definitions, and some other supplemental sources whenever I have a question the tutorial doesn’t answer.

The purpose of this post will be to learn the basics about plotting data with Python.

Data Science

The process of using scientific methods, processes, and algorithms to extract insights from structural and unstructured data is known as Data Science. It is utilized in data mining, machine learning, and big data. Data science combines principles from many fields including mathematics, statistics, computer science, and much more to help us understand and analyze phenomena with data.

Tools

Anaconda

A python and r programming distribution for scientific computing (data science, machine learning, etc) that simplifies package management and deployment. It includes data science packages for all of the common operating systems. The packages in Anaconda are managed by the package management system conda.

Spyder

An IDE for python.

Jupyter

A popular application used for data analysis. It is an IPython notebook (“interactive python”). You can run each block of code separately using this.

Python Libraries

matplotlib

A comprehensive library for creating static, animated, and interactive visualizations in python.

seaborn

A python data visualization library based on matplot lib. It provides a different API than matplotlib.

pickle

A library that serializes and deserializes a Python object structure. Serialization, or “pickling” converts an object into a bytestream, and deserialization, or “unpickling” converts a bytestream into an object. This library is not secure and should only be used on data you trust.