Data Analysis and Visualisation With Python
Data Analysis and Visualisation With Python
“Exploratory data analysis can never be the whole story, but nothing else can
serve as the foundation stone.”
- John Tukey.
Download the data
Download the Pokemon dataset from:
https://github.com/LewBrace/da_and_vis_python
Unzip the folder, and save the data file in a location you’ll remember.
Reading in the data
First we import the Python packages we are going to use.
Then we use Pandas to load in the dataset as a data frame.
NOTE: The argument index_col argument states that we'll treat the first
column of the dataset as the ID column.
NOTE: The encoding argument allows us to by pass an input error created
by special characters in the data set.
Examine the data set
We could spend time staring at these
numbers, but that is unlikely to offer us
any form of insight.
We could begin by conducting all of our
statistical tests.
However, a good field commander never
goes into battle without first doing a
recognisance of the terrain…
This is exactly what EDA is for…
Plotting a histogram in Python
Bins
You may have noticed the two histograms we’ve seen so far look different,
despite using the exact same data.
This is because they have different bin values.
The left graph used the default bins generated by plt.hist(), while the one on the
right used bins that I specified.
There are a couple of ways to manipulate bins in matplotlib.
Here, I specified where the edges of the bars of the histogram are; the bin
edges.
You could also specify the number of bins, and Matplotlib will automatically
generate a number of evenly spaced bins.
Seaborn
Matplotlib is a powerful, but sometimes unwieldy, Python library.
Seaborn provides a high-level interface to Matplotlib and makes it easier to
produce graphs like the one on the right.
Some IDEs incorporate elements of this “under the hood” nowadays.
Benefits of Seaborn
Seaborn offers:
- Using default themes that are aesthetically pleasing.
- Setting custom colour palettes.
- Making attractive statistical plots.
- Easily and flexibly displaying distributions.
- Visualising information from matrices and DataFrames.
The last three points have led to Seaborn becoming the exploratory data
analysis tool of choice for many Python users.
Plotting with Seaborn
One of Seaborn's greatest strengths is its diversity of plotting functions.
Most plots can be created with one line of code.
For example….
Histograms
Allow you to plot the distributions of numeric variables.
Other types of graphs: Creating a scatter plot
Name of our
Name of variable we dataframe fed to the
want on the x-axis “data=“ command
Colour by stage.
Separate by stage.
Generate using a swarmplot.
Rotate axis on x-ticks by 45 degrees.
A box plot
The total, stage, and legendary entries are not combat stats so we should remove
them.
Pandas makes this easy to do, we just create a new dataframe
We just use Pandas’ .drop() function to create a dataframe that doesn’t include the
variables we don’t want.
Seaborn’s theme
Seaborn has a number of themes you can use to alter the appearance of
plots.
For example, we can use “whitegrid” to add grid lines to our boxplot.
Violin plots
Violin plots are useful alternatives to box plots.
They show the distribution of a variable through the thickness of the violin.
Here, we visualise the distribution of attack by Pokémon's primary type:
• Dragon types tend to have higher Attack stats than Ghost types, but they also have greater
variance. But there is something not right here….
• The colours!
Seaborn’s colour palettes
Seaborn allows us to easily set custom colour palettes by providing it with
an ordered list of colour hex values.
We first create our colours list.
Then we just use the palette= function and feed in our colours list.
Because of the limited number of observations, we could also use a swarm
plot.
Here, each data point is an observation, but data points are grouped
together by the variable listed on the x-axis.
Overlapping plots
Both of these show similar information, so it might be useful to overlap
them.
Set size of print canvas.
• All 6 of the stat columns have been "melted" into one, and
the new Stat column indicates the original stat (HP, Attack,
Defense, Sp. Attack, Sp. Defense, or Speed).
• It's hard to see here, but each pokemon now has 6 rows of
data; hende the melted_df has 6 times more rows of data.
This graph could be made to look nicer with a few tweaks.