Python Business Intelligence Cookbook - Roger Dempsey

This book is intended for data analysts, managers, and executives with a basic knowledge of Python, who now want to use Python for their BI tasks. If you have a good knowledge and understanding of BI applications and have a "working" system in place, this book will enhance your toolbox.

What You Will Learn
Install Anaconda, MongoDB, and everything you need to get started with your data analysis
Prepare data for analysis by querying cleaning and standardizing data
Explore your data by creating a Pandas data frame from MongoDB
Gain powerful insights, both statistical and predictive, to make informed business decisions
Visualize your data by building dashboards and generating reports
Create a complete data processing and business intelligence system
In Detail
The amount of data produced by businesses and devices is going nowhere but up. In this scenario, the major advantage of Python is that it's a general-purpose language and gives you a lot of flexibility in data structures. Python is an excellent tool for more specialized analysis tasks, and is powered with related libraries to process data streams, to visualize datasets, and to carry out scientific calculations. Using Python for business intelligence (BI) can help you solve tricky problems in one go.

Rather than spending day after day scouring Internet forums for "how-to" information, here you'll find more than 60 recipes that take you through the entire process of creating actionable intelligence from your raw data, no matter what shape or form it's in. Within the first 30 minutes of opening this book, you'll learn how to use the latest in Python and NoSQL databases to glean insights from data just waiting to be exploited.

We'll begin with a quick-fire introduction to Python for BI and show you what problems Python solves. From there, we move on to working with a predefined data set to extract data as per business requirements, using the Pandas library and MongoDB as our storage engine.

Next, we will analyze data and perform transformations for BI with Python. Through this, you will gather insightful data that will help you make informed decisions for your business. The final part of the book will show you the most important task of BI―visualizing data by building stunning dashboards using Matplotlib, PyTables, and iPython Notebook.