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Sigli Mumuni · Follow

Dec 3, 2021 · 6 min read · Listen

10 Essential Python Libraries for Data

Professionals
Indispensable additions to your Python toolkit

Photo by Barn Images on Unsplash

Over the last few years, Python has seen a huge surge in popularity and is fast
becoming the language of choice for many budding data professionals. It is, without
doubt, one of the fastest-growing and most in-demand programming languages, which
is no surprise given its relatively simple and easy-to-learn syntax, extensive collection
of libraries, incredible community support, and all-around versatility.

If you’re looking to step up your game in data analysis with Python, then the following
list of 10 libraries is a good place to start. Ranging from data manipulation to data
visualization and statistical computation, you’ll find these libraries an essential
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addition to your Python toolkit.

1. Numpy
Numpy, which stands for “numerical python”, is the fundamental scientific computing
package for Python. Numpy offers a comprehensive list of mathematical functions
which include linear algebra routines, random number generators, basic statistical
calculations, Fourier transforms, and many more. Several commonly used Python
libraries, including a few in this list, are built on top of Numpy. At the core of Numpy is
the array, which offers 1-dimensional, 2-dimensional, or multi-dimensional
vectorization, indexing, and broadcasting. Owing to its speed and flexibility, the
Numpy Array has become the de-facto language of multi-dimensional data interchange
in Python. You can find the official documentation here. For an introduction to the
basics of Numpy, check out this tutorial.

2. Pandas
The name Pandas is derived from the term “panel data” and is the core library for data
manipulation and analysis in Python. The primary data structures in Pandas are the
series and dataframe objects which simplify operations on data sets by presenting them
in a tabular format. It is an indispensable tool during the data preparation and
exploration phase. Among its comprehensive list of features are:

Tools for reading and writing data in formats such as CSV and text files, Microsoft
Excel, SQL databases, and the fast HDF5 format;

Handling of missing data and easy manipulation of messy data into an orderly
form;

Reshaping and pivoting of data sets between wide and long formats;

Conditional slicing, indexing, and subsetting of large data sets;

Aggregating data by performing group by operations or datetime resampling;

Merging and joining different data sets;

Time series-functionality: date range generation and frequency conversion.

Data visualization
To get started with Pandas, you can check out my Medium article on data preparation
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here. You can also refer to the official Pandas documentation via this link.

3. Matplotlib
Matplotlib is a plotting library for creating static, animated, and interactive
visualizations in Python. It offers tons of customizable chart options, visual styles, and
layouts. A growing list of third-party packages extend and build on Matplotlib
functionality. One of such packages is Seaborn, which is next on our list.

4. Seaborn
Seaborn is a high-level data visualization library that is built on top of Matplotlib and
integrates closely with Pandas dataframes. It is used for creating visually appealing and
informative statistical charts and graphs by internally performing the necessary
semantic mapping and statistical aggregations necessary. Since it’s based on
Matplotlib, you can still use Matplotlib functionality to edit or augment your Seaborn
plots, while still retaining the option of more beautiful and advanced chart types. To
see how Seaborn simplifies the data visualization process, you can check out my article
on exploratory data analysis.

5. Scipy
The name SciPy is derived from “Scientific Python” and is built upon Numpy. It offers
additional features and functionalities by providing algorithms for optimization,
integration, interpolation, eigenvalue problems, algebraic equations, differential
equations, statistics, and many other classes of problems. It also provides additional
tools for array computing and provides specialized data structures such as sparse
matrices and k-dimensional trees. You can find the official documentation here.

6. Statsmodels
The statsmodels library is primarily used for statistical modeling, hypothesis testing,
and data exploration. It provides classes and functions for the estimation of many
different statistical models, as well as for conducting statistical tests. You can get
started with statsmodels by following the steps in this tutorial. The official
documentation is available here.

7. Beautiful Soup
Ever heard the term “web scraping”? This is the means by which data is extracted from
websites and if that’s something you’re looking to do, then look no further than
Beautiful Soup. It is used for parsing HTML and XML documents by creating a parse
tree for parsed pages. To use Beautiful Soup, you’ll also need to get familiar with the
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Requests library, which is essentially an HTTP library for the Python programming
language. To get started with web scraping using the Beautiful Soup library, then check
out this tutorial on Youtube. The official documentation can be found on this link.

8. NLTK
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the fastest-growing subfields in Data
Science owing to the vast amounts of textual data that is continuously being generated.
NLTK, which stands for Natural Language Toolkit, is one of the leading NLP platforms
for processing and analyzing human language, also known as natural language. NLTK
comes with a suite of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization,
stemming, tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning. The NLTK documentation
contains examples and use cases to get you started.

9. Scikit Learn
Scikit Learn is the product of a Google Summer of Code project which has since
evolved into a comprehensive machine learning library that supports supervised and
unsupervised learning. Apart from its large selection of machine learning algorithms
for classification, regression, and clustering, it also provides various tools for model
fitting, data preprocessing, model selection and evaluation, and many other utilities.
Scikit Learn is an invaluable resource for any aspiring machine learning engineer or
data scientist owing to its ease of use, performance, and overall variety of algorithms
available.

10. Tensorflow
TensorFlow is an end-to-end open-source platform for machine learning with a
particular focus on the training and inference of deep neural networks. Using
Tensorflow, machine learning engineers can easily build and deploy large-scale neural
networks with numerous layers. It has vast applications such as computer vision, facial
recognition, time series forecasting, sentiment analysis, and voice and sound
recognition. It is often used in conjunction with Keras, another Python library that acts
as an interface for the TensorFlow library.

Conclusion
While the above list is by no means exhaustive, it is a good starting point for anyone
looking to transition into data science or analytics. There are many other amazing
libraries in Python for data science and in time you will know which others to include
in your toolkit. In the meantime, you’ll be surprised how much you can achieve by
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mastering these 10 libraries. I wish you the best of luck in your foray into the field and
do let me know in the comments section if there are any libraries you feel should have
made the cut.

References:

What is NumPy? - NumPy v1.21 Manual

NumPy is the fundamental package for scientific computing in
Python. It is a Python library that provides a…
numpy.org

pandas - Python Data Analysis Library

In 2008, pandas development began at AQR Capital Management. By the end of 2009 it
had been open sourced, and is…
pandas.pydata.org

An introduction to seaborn - seaborn 0.11.2 documentation

Seaborn is a library for making statistical graphics in Python. It
builds on top of matplotlib and integrates closely…
seaborn.pydata.org

Getting started - statsmodels

This very simple case-study is designed to get you up-and-running quickly with
statsmodels . Starting from raw data, we…
www.statsmodels.org

Beautiful Soup Documentation - Beautiful Soup 4.9.0

documentation
Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and
XML files. It works with your favorite parser to…
www.crummy.com
scikit-learn Upgrade Open in app

"We use scikit-learn to support leading-edge basic research [...]" "I

think it's the most well-designed ML package I've…
scikit-learn.org

TensorFlow Core | Machine Learning for Beginners and Experts

See tutorials See the guide The best place to start is with the user-
friendly Sequential API. You can create models by…
www.tensorflow.org