Several months ago, I participated in my first crowd-sourced Data Science competition in the Twin Cities run by Analyze This!. In my previous post, I described the benefits of working through the competition and how much I enjoyed the process. I just completed the second challenge and had another great experience that I wanted to share and (hopefully) encourage others to try these types of practical challenges to build their Data Science/Analytics skills.

In this second challenge, I felt much more comfortable with the actual process of cleaning the data, exploring it and building and testing models. I found that the python tools continue to serve me well. However, I also identified a lot of things that I need to do better in future challenges or projects in order to be more systematic about my process. I am curious if the broader community has tips or tricks they can share related to some of the items I will cover below. I will also highlight a few of the useful python tools I used throughout the process. This post does not include any code but is focused more on the process and python tools for Data Science.

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In my last article, I discussed building a financial model in pandas that could be used for multiple amortization scenarios. Unfortunately, I realized that I made a mistake in that approach so I had to rethink how to solve the problem. Thanks to the help of several individuals, I have a new solution that resolves the issues and produces the correct results.

In addition to posting the updated solution, I have taken this article as an opportunity to take a step back and examine what I should have done differently in approaching the original problem. While it is never fun to make a mistake in front of thousands of people, I’ll try to swallow my pride and learn from it.

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In my previous articles, I have discussed how to use pandas as a replacement for Excel when it comes to data wrangling. In many cases, a python + pandas solution is superior to the highly manual processes many people use for manipulating data in Excel. However, Excel is used for many scenarios in a business environment - not just data wrangling. This specific post will discuss how to do financial modeling in pandas instead of Excel. For this example, I will build a simple amortization table in pandas and show how to model various outcomes.

In some ways, building the model is easier in Excel (there are many examples just a google search away). However, as an exercise in learning about pandas, it is useful because it forces you to think about how to use pandas strengths to solve a problem in a way different from the Excel solution. In my opinion the solution is more powerful because you can build on it to run multiple scenarios, easily chart various outcomes and focus on aggregating the data in a way most useful for your needs.

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Whenever I am doing analysis with pandas my first goal is to get data into a panda’s DataFrame using one of the many available options. For the vast majority of instances, I use read_excel, read_csv, or read_sql.

However, there are instances when I just have a few lines of data or some calculations that I want to include in my analysis. In these cases it is helpful to know how to create DataFrames from standard python data structures such as lists or dictionaries. The basic process is not difficult but because there are several different options it is helpful to understand how each works. I can never remember whether I should use from_dict, from_records, from_items or the default DataFrame constructor. Normally, through some trial and error, I figure it out. Since it is still confusing to me, I thought I would walk through several examples below to clarify the different approaches. At the end of the article, I briefly show how this can be useful when generating Excel reports.

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Despite being over 1 year old, one of the most popular articles I have written is Overview of Python Visualization Tools. After these many months, it is one of my most frequently searched for, linked to and read article on this site. I think this fact speaks to hunger in the python community for one visualization tool to rise above the rest. I am not sure I want (or need) one to “win” but I do continue to watch the changes in this space with interest.

All of the tools I mentioned in the original article are still alive and many have changed quite a bit over the past year or so. Anyone looking for a visualization tool should investigate the options and see which ones meet their needs. They all have something to offer and different use-cases will drive different solutions.

In the spirit of keeping up with the latest options in this space, I recently heard about Altair which calls itself a “declarative statistical visualization library for Python.” One of the things that peaked my interest was that it is developed by Brian Granger and Jake Vanderplas. Brian is a core developer in the IPython project and very active in the scientific python community. Jake is also active in the scientific python community and has written a soon to be released O’Reilly book called Python Data Science Handbook. Both of these individuals are extremely accomplished and knowledgeable about python and the various tools in the python scientific ecosystem. Because of their backgrounds, I was very curious to see how they approached this problem.

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