Practical Business Python

Taking care of business, one python script at a time

Tue 20 November 2018

Building a Repeatable Data Analysis Process with Jupyter Notebooks

Posted by Chris Moffitt in articles   

Over the past couple of months, there has been an ongoing discussion about Jupyter Notebooks affectionately called the “Notebook Wars”. The genesis of the discussion is Joel Grus’ presentation I Don’t Like Notebooks and has been followed up with Tim Hopper’s response, aptly titled I Like Notebooks. There have been several follow-on posts on this topic including thoughtful analysis from Yihui Xie.

The purpose of this post is to use some of the points brought up in these discussions as a background for describing my personal best practices for the analysis I frequently perform with notebooks. In addition, this approach can be tailored for your unique situation. I think many new python users do not take the time to think through some of these items I discuss. My hope is that this article will spark some discussion and provide a framework that others can build off for making repeatable and easy to understand data analysis pipelines that fit their needs.

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