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12 Python Features Every Data Scientist Should Know

The document outlines 12 essential Python features for data scientists, including comprehensions, enumerate, zip, and generators, which enhance data manipulation and processing efficiency. It also covers lambda functions, map, filter, reduce, and various built-in functions like any, all, and next, which are useful for handling datasets. Additionally, it discusses defaultdict, partial, lru_cache, and dataclasses for optimizing code and managing data structures effectively.

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amp212663
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13 views

12 Python Features Every Data Scientist Should Know

The document outlines 12 essential Python features for data scientists, including comprehensions, enumerate, zip, and generators, which enhance data manipulation and processing efficiency. It also covers lambda functions, map, filter, reduce, and various built-in functions like any, all, and next, which are useful for handling datasets. Additionally, it discusses defaultdict, partial, lru_cache, and dataclasses for optimizing code and managing data structures effectively.

Uploaded by

amp212663
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ramchandrapadwal

12 PYTHON
FEATURES
Every Data Scientist Should
Know
1. COMPREHENSIONS
Comprehensions in Python are a useful tool for machine
learning and data science tasks as they allow for the creation
of complex data structures in a concise and readable
manner.
List comprehensions can be used to generate lists of data,
such as creating a list of squared values from a range of
numbers.
Nested list comprehensions can be used to flatten
multidimensional arrays, a common preprocessing task in
data science.

Dictionary and set comprehensions are useful for creating


dictionaries and sets of data, respectively. For example,
dictionary comprehension can be used to create a dictionary
of feature names and their corresponding feature importance
scores in a machine learning model.

ramchandrapadwal
Generator comprehensions are particularly useful for
working with large datasets, as they generate values on-the-
fly rather than creating a large data structure in memory. This
can help to improve performance and reduce memory usage.

ramchandrapadwal
2. ENUMERATE
enumerate is a built-in function that allows for iterating over a
sequence (such as a list or tuple) while keeping track of the
index of each element.

This can be useful when working with datasets, as it allows


for easily accessing and manipulating individual elements
while keeping track of their index position.

Here we use enumerate to iterate over a list of strings and


print out the value if the index is an even number.

ramchandrapadwal
3. ZIP
zip is a built-in function allowing iterating over multiple
sequences (such as lists or tuples) in parallel.

Below we use zip to iterate over two lists x and y


simultaneously and perform operations on their
corresponding elements.

In this case, it prints out the values of each element in x and


y, their sum, and their product.

ramchandrapadwal
4. GENERATORS
Generators in Python are a type of iterable that allows for
generating a sequence of values on-the-fly, rather than
generating all the values at once and storing them in memory.

This makes them useful for working with large datasets that
won’t fit in memory, as the data is processed in small chunks
or batches rather than all at once.

Below we use a generator function to generate the first n


numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. The yield keyword is
used to generate each value in the sequence one at a time,
rather than generating the entire sequence at once.

ramchandrapadwal
5. LAMBDA FUNCTIONS
lambda is a keyword used to create anonymous functions,
which are functions that do not have a name and can be
defined in a single line of code.

They are useful for defining custom functions on-the-fly for


feature engineering, data preprocessing, or model evaluation.

Below we use lambda to create a simple function for filtering


even numbers from a list of numbers.

Here’s another code snippet for using lambda functions with


Pandas

ramchandrapadwal
6. MAP, FILTER, REDUCE
The functions map, filter, and reduce are three built-in
functions used for manipulating and transforming data.

map is used to apply a function to each element of an


iterable, filter is used to select elements from an iterable
based on a condition, and reduce is used to apply a function
to pairs of elements in an iterable to produce a single result.

Below we use all of them in a single pipeline, calculating the


sum of squares of even numbers.

ramchandrapadwal
7. ANY AND ALL
any and all are built-in functions that allow for checking if any
or all elements in an iterable meet a certain condition.

any and all can be useful for checking if certain conditions


are met across a dataset or a subset of a dataset. For
example, they can be used to check if any values in a column
are missing or if all values in a column are within a certain
range.

Below is a simple example of checking for the presence of


any even values and all odd values.

ramchandrapadwal
8. NEXT
next is used to retrieve the next item from an iterator. An
iterator is an object that can be iterated (looped) upon, such
as a list, tuple, set, or dictionary.

next is commonly used in data science for iterating through


an iterator or generator object. It allows the user to retrieve
the next item from the iterable and can be useful for handling
large datasets or streaming data.

Below, we define a generator random_numbers() that yields


random numbers between 0 and 1. We then use the next()
function to find the first number in the generator greater than
0.9

ramchandrapadwal
9. DEFAULTDICT
defaultdict is a subclass of the built-in dict class that allows
for providing a default value for missing keys.

defaultdict can be useful for handling missing or incomplete


data, such as when working with sparse matrices or feature
vectors. It can also be used for counting the frequency of
categorical variables.

An example is counting the frequency of items in a list. int is


used as the default factory for the defaultdict, which
initializes missing keys to 0.

ramchandrapadwal
10. PARTIAL
partial is a function in the functools module that allows for
creating a new function from an existing function with some
of its arguments pre-filled.

partial can be useful for creating custom functions or data


transformations with specific parameters or arguments pre-
filled. This can help to reduce the amount of boilerplate code
needed when defining and calling functions.

Here we use partial to create a new function increment from


the existing add function with one of its arguments fixed to
the value 1.

Calling increment(1) is essentially calling add(1, 1)

ramchandrapadwal
11. LRU_CACHE
lru_cache is a decorator function in the functools module
that allows for caching the results of functions with a limited-
size cache.

lru_cache can be useful for optimizing computationally


expensive functions or model training procedures that may
be called with the same arguments multiple times.

Caching can help to speed up the execution of the function


and reduce the overall computational cost.

Here’s an example of efficiently computing Fibonacci


numbers with a cache (known as memoization in computer
science)

ramchandrapadwal
12. DATACLASSES
The @dataclass decorator automatically generates several
special methods for a class, such as __init__, __repr__, and
__eq__, based on the defined attributes.

This can help to reduce the amount of boilerplate code


needed when defining classes. dataclass objects can
represent data points, feature vectors, or model parameters,
among other things.

In this example, dataclass is used to define a simple class


Person with three attributes: name, age, and city.

ramchandrapadwal

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