Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas

Scaling data

In order to compare variables from different distributions, we would have to scale the data, which we could do with the range by using min-max scaling. We take each data point, subtract the minimum of the dataset, then divide by the range. This normalizes our data (scales it to the range [0, 1]):

This isn't the only way to scale data; we can also use the mean and standard deviation. In this case, we would subtract the mean from each observation and then divide by the standard deviation to standardize the data:

This gives us what ...