Using Python for Business Intelligence

2 minute read

Two weeks ago I started my first teaching day, replacing a teacher that has still not gone to Ceuta (because the temporal contract was offered to many people, and all of them refuse it). Do not worry, they will have the material, I said to myself, naïvely.

However, my Phd. advisor, the coordinator of the course, has decided to replace the practice classes from Knime to Python using the different tools availables. The reason? Because the Python, with R, are very popular in Data Science. Also, in Python there are very good tools for data analysis (like numpy, pandas) or machine learning (scikit-learn, …). It seems a good idea, but I have not material, and I have only two days :-O.

Even more, I had still no access to the Moodle for the material of the course. So, after a very busy Saturday, I finished including a material, in http://github.com/dmolina/es_intro_python, with interesting references and an install introduction.

Also, I use a very curious tool, https://gitpitch.com, that allow to create slides from a markdown file from the repository github, Slides using Pitch.

My final experience was:

  • Very few students, so it was very relaxed because you can solve the problems for each student. However, using the anaconda there is few problems (and the . In prevision of the big size of the anaconda distribution, my downloaded version was copied by USB Disk to students.

  • The jupyter notebook allow to test the python code without installing or learning an IDE (later they can install which they prefer, but for teaching you do not need any of them).

  • You have to prepare exercises, because if not, you talk and show and you can finished in few minutes a material that takes you many hours.

  • When you have only a weekend for preparing material, I must have already strong knowledge about the topic (fortunately, it was my case). If not, you will not be confident teaching it.

For the second day, I was preparing another slide for teaching pandas (with the most useful operations, by my experience), available as pdf format here: slides_pandas.pdf (In a future post, I will say as I prepare my slides using Emacs+Org-mode). Unfortunately, the new teacher was ready, and I have to finish my courses using python for BI.