Leverage the computational power of Python with more than 60 recipes that arm you with the required skills to make informed business decisions

About This Book

• Want to minimize risk and optimize profits of your business? Learn to create efficient analytical reports with ease using this highly practical, easy-to-follow guide
• Learn to apply Python for business intelligence tasks—preparing, exploring, analyzing, visualizing and reporting—in order to make more informed business decisions using data at hand
• Learn to explore and analyze business data, and build business intelligence dashboards with the help of various insightful recipes

Who This Book Is For

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.

Style and approach

This is a step-by-step guide to help you prepare, explore, analyze and report data, written in a conversational tone to make it easy to grasp. Whether you're new to BI or are looking for a better way to work, you'll find the knowledge and skills here to get your job done efficiently.