Data Cleaning in Python using Pandas
Why Learn Data Cleaning?
Data scientists can end up doing a wide variety of things across a wide variety of industries, but almost every data science job shares at least one thing in common: data cleaning.
When some part of our data is missing, due to whichever reason, the accuracy of our predictions plummets.Hence, in such a case Data Cleansing comes into picture. With the help of Data Cleansing one can get the accurate results.
According to IBM Data Analytics you can expect to spend up to 80% of your time cleaning data.
Sources of Missing Values
Before we understand the working of code, let’s find out the sources of missing values in the given set of data.
- User forgot to fill in a field.
- Data was lost while transferring manually from a legacy database.
- There was a programming error.
- Users chose not to fill out a field tied to their beliefs about how the results would be used or interpreted.
Ways to Cleanse Missing Data in Python:
To perform a Python data cleansing, you can drop the missing values, replace them, replace each NaN with a scalar value, or fill forward or backward.
1️⃣ Dropping Missing Values
You can exclude missing values from your dataset using the dropna() method.
Inorder to see the working of dropna() method, first of all let’s create a data frame with random values as shown below:
Now using dropna() method >>> frame.dropna() we get the following result:
Hence, with the help of this method all the values will be dropped.
2️⃣ Replacing Missing Values
To replace each NaN we have in the dataset, we can use the replace() method.
>>> from numpy import NaN
>>> frame.replace({NaN:0.00})
In the above code, it’s clear that all the missing values are replaced by 0.00 .
3️⃣ Replacing with a Scalar Value
We can use the fillna() method for this.
>>> frame.fillna(7)
4️⃣ Filling Forward or Backward
If we supply a method parameter to the fillna() method, we can fill forward or backward as we need. To fill forward, use the methods pad or fill, and to fill backward, use bfill and backfill.
>>> frame.fillna(method=’pad’)
Conclusion
Hence, in this Python Data Cleansing, we learned how data is Cleans In Python Programming Language for this purpose, we used two libraries- pandas and numpy. Since data scientists spend 80% of their time cleaning and manipulating data, that makes it an essential skill to learn with data science.
Python is the “most powerful language you can still read”.
- Paul Dubois
