Inputting data using Python

Similarly, we can use Python to retrieve the data, as shown in the code here:

import pandas as pd 
path="http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/" 
dataset="iris/bezdekIris.data" 
inFile=path+dataset 
data=pd.read_csv(inFile,header=None) 
data.columns=["sepalLength","sepalWidth","petalLength","petalWidth","Class"] 

After retrieving data, the print(data.head(2)) function can be used to see the first two instances:

> print(data.head(2)) 
   sepalLength  sepalWidth  petalLength  petalWidth        Class
0          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  Iris-setosa
1          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  Iris-setosa

When typing pd.read.csv(), we can find the definitions of all input variables, shown in the following screenshot. Again, to save space, only the first several input variables are shown:

To prevent a future potential change in terms of a dataset link, we have a backup dataset located at the author's website, shown in the following Python code:

inFile="http://canisius.edu/~yany/data/bezdekIris.data.txt" 
import pandas as pd 
d=pd.read_csv(inFile,header=None) 

The following table shows several functions included in the pandas package that we could use to retrieve data:

Table 3.4 Functions included in the Python pandas module for inputting data

To find out detailed information on each of the preceding functions, we use the help() function. For example, if we want to get more information about the read_sas() function, we issue the following commands:

import pandas as pd 
help(pd.read_sas) 

The corresponding output, the top part only, is shown here: