12.1: Python for Data Analytics
- Page ID
- 48134
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Python for Data Analytics
Python is a versatile, general-purpose language widely used in data analytics. Its syntax is easy to learn, and it has a large ecosystem of libraries for data manipulation, scientific computing, and machine learning. The core libraries include:
- NumPy: Fundamental package for numerical computing with array objects. It provides fast operations on arrays and matrices and underlies many other libraries [3].
- pandas: Provides DataFrame structures similar to R data frames. Pandas includes tools for loading, cleaning, and transforming data (e.g. read_csv, groupby, merge). Its development was described by McKinney (2010) as enabling “data structures for statistical computing in Python”[3].
- scikit-learn: A machine learning library with tools for classification, regression, clustering, and preprocessing. The library’s API emphasizes ease of use and consistent interface. It was introduced in the Journal of Machine Learning Research by Pedregosa et al. (2011) [5].

These libraries build on general Python features and are typically used within interactive or scripted environments.


