Collecting, Exploring, and Visualizing Data

As a first step, it is important to understand how to acquire data and how to access it in computer memory. Once data is loaded, sound practices for exploration can save time downstream. This chapter will start by showing you how to interact with different data sources such as databases, disks, and streaming. Despite the practicality of these topics, many new analysts overlook them. Indeed, you cannot actually do any work if you cannot get past this beginning step. The second half of the chapter will introduce you to Seaborn for visualizing data, and then recommend types of plots for relevant and popular problem statements. 

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Types of data sources and loading into pandas
• Access, search, and sanity checks with pandas
• Basic plotting in Seaborn
• Relevant types of plots for visualizing data