Python_data pre-processing

All of the tech are basic solving solution. In order to obtain robust predictive model, missing value imputation should be consider case by case. 

如果是个小白，比如我，就可以这样非常generally clean data.

0. Check for shape, missing value and variable types in dataset

data.dtypes
data.isnull.sum()
data.info()

1. impute numeric missing value with pandas

data['column name'].fillna(0.0, inplace=True)
data['column name'].fillna('U1', inplace=True)

2. encode categorical columns with number (otherwise may cause problem in machine learning algorithms)

cleanup_nums = {
               "stage":{"IV":0,"IIB":1,"III":2,"IIA":3,"I":4},
               "side":{"both":2,"right":1,"left":0}}

data.replace(cleanup_nums, inplace=True)

3. Check for correlation between variables 

corr = data.iloc[:,1:31].corr()

mask = np.zeros_like(corr) 
mask[np.triu_indices_from(mask)] = True

sns.set(style="white") 
sns.heatmap(corr, mask = mask)

4. Check whether binary output are skewed 

data['label name'].value_counts().plot(kind='bar')