What is Exploratory Data Analysis in Python? Learn From Scratch

Exploratory Data Analysis or EDA, in short, comprises almost 70% of Data Science Project. EDA is the process of exploring the data by using various analytics tools to get out the inferential statistics from the data. These explorations are done either by seeing plain numbers or by plotting graphs and charts of different types.

Each graph or chart depicts a different story and an angle to the same data. For most of the data analysis and cleaning part, Pandas is the most used tool. For the visualizations and plotting graphs/charts, plotting libraries such as Matplotlib, Seaborn and Plotly are used. 

EDA is extremely necessary to be carried out as it makes the data confess to you. A Data Scientist who does a very good EDA knows a lot about the data and hence the model that they will build will be automatically better than the Data Scientist who does not do a good EDA. 

By the end of this tutorial, you will know the following:

• Checking the basic overview of the data
• Checking the descriptive statistics of the data
• Manipulating column names and data types
• Handling missing values & duplicate rows
• Bivariate Analysis

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Basic Overview of Data

We will be using the Cars Dataset for this tutorial which can be downloaded from Kaggle. The first step for almost any dataset is to import it and check its basic overview – its shape, columns, column types, top 5 rows, etc. This step gives you a quick gist of the data you’ll be working with. Let’s see how to do this in Python. 

Data Head & Tail

The head function prints the top 5 indexes of the data frame by default. You can also specify how many top indexes you need to see bypassing that value to the head. Printing the head instantly gives us a quick look at what type of data we have, what type of features are present and what values they contain. Of course, this does not tell the whole story about the data, but it does give you a quick peek at the data. You can similarly print the bottom part of the data frame by using the tail function.

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One thing to notice here is that both the functions-head and tail give us the top or the bottom indexes. But the top or bottom rows not always are a good preview of the data. So you can also print any number of rows randomly sampled from the dataset using the sample() function.

Descriptive Statistics

Next, let’s check out the descriptive statistics of the dataset. Descriptive stats consist of everything that “describes” the dataset. We check the shape of the data frame, what all columns are present, what all numeric and categorical features are there. We will also see how to do all this in simple functions.

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Shape

As we see, this data frame contains 11914 rows and 16 columns. 

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Columns

Dataframe information

As you see, the info() function gives us all the columns, how many non-null or non-missing values are there in those columns and lastly the data type of those columns. This is a nice quick way of seeing what all features are numeric and what all are categorical/text-based. Also, we now have information about what all columns have missing values. We will look at how to work with missing values later.

Manipulating Column Names and Data Types

Carefully checking and manipulating each column is extremely crucial in EDA. We need to see what all type of content a column/feature contains and what has pandas read its data type. The numeric data types are mostly int64 or float64. The text-based or categorical features are assigned the ‘object’ data type.

The date-time based features are assigned  There are times where Pandas doesn’t understand a feature’s data type. In such cases, it just lazily assigns it the ‘object’ data type. We can specify the column datatypes explicitly while reading the data with read_csv. 

Selecting Categorical and Numerical Columns

Here the type that we passed as ‘number’ selects all columns with data types that have any kind of number- be it int64 or float64.

Renaming the Columns

The rename function just takes in a dictionary with the column names to be renamed and their new names.

Handling Missing Values and Duplicate Rows

Missing values is one of the most common issues/discrepancies in any real-life dataset. Handling missing values is in itself a vast topic as there are multiple ways to do it. Some ways are more generic ways, and some are more specific to the dataset one might be dealing with.

Checking Missing Values

This gives us the number of the values missing in all the columns. We can also see the percentage of values missing.

Checking the percentages might be useful when there are a lot of columns that have missing values. In such cases, the columns with a lot of missing values (for example, >60% missing) can be just dropped. 

Imputing Missing Values

Here we simply impute the missing values in the numeric columns by their respective means and the ones in the categorical columns by their modes. And as we can see, there are no missing values now.

Please note that this is the most primitive way of imputing the values and doesn’t work in real-life cases where more sophisticated ways are developed, for example, interpolation, KNN, etc. 

Handling Duplicate Rows

This just drops the duplicate rows.

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Bivariate Analysis

Now let’s see how to get more insights by doing bivariate analysis. Bivariate means an analysis that consists of 2 variables or features. There are different types of plots available for different types of features. 

For Numerical – Numerical

1. Scatter plot
2. Line plot
3. Heatmap for correlations

For Categorical-Numerical

1. Bar Chart
2. Violin plot
3. Swarm plot

For Categorical-Categorical

1. Bar chart
2. Point plot

Heatmap for Correlations

Bar Plot

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Conclusion

As we saw, there are a lot of steps to be covered while exploring a dataset. We only covered a handful of aspects in this tutorial but this will give you more than just basic knowledge of a good EDA. 

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