How did it go?

I attended the Austin Data Science Python Meetup on 15 November and it was a very good learning experience for me. I want to explore the python third-party library and I chose the ‘pandas’ because that library is mostly used in the data science. They not only covered the theory but also encouraging everyone to be hands on as much as possible.

What did you learn?

I learned that Pandas is an open source Python package that is most widely used for data science/data analysis and machine learning tasks. It is built on top of another package named Numpy, which provides support for multi-dimensional arrays. In between of the session I was also trying to implement thier teaching on the dataset. I found the dataset of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and used pandas for following things:-

• create DataFrame
• Preprocess the data
• Handle missing values
• resizing or modification of rows and columns

Besides from learning, I made a new friends who have same interest as me in python. We talk about the amazing stuff that python is capabale of and what we can do in the future.

Would you find value in this kind of event after class?

Yes. Because my basics of python and programming was already covered so I went overboard and implemented the following things on the dataset also:-

• Interesting relationships between data fields in the data.
• The stats about the percentage of datapoints in the population that have graduated college.
• The relationship between Education Level (DMDEDUC2) and Ratio of family income to poverty (INDFMPIR).

How was the experience different from your expectations?

I learned a lot not only about pandas but also the other libraries used in the ML like TensorFlow, Sci-Kit Learn. The presenter was easy to understand and provided a lot of resources to help you understand the presentation. I think it would be interesting to explore this topic more with the additional resources available and few more information sessions like this one.

Could you see yourself becomming a member of a professional community like this in the future?

OfCourse! I like to explore more about the Python and what we can do just by writing few lines of code. Although my focus is on Web Development, but I like to combine the knowledge and technology of Data Science and Development to built a smart platform.