Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas

Data collection

Data collection is the natural first step for any data analysis—we can't analyze data we don't have. In reality, our analysis can begin even before we have the data: when we decide what we want to investigate or analyze, we have to think of what kind of data we can collect that will be useful for our analysis. While data can come from anywhere, we will explore the following sources throughout this book:

• Web scraping to extract data from a website's HTML (often with Python packages such as selenium, requests, scrapy, and beautifulsoup)
• Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for web services from which we can collect data with the requests package
• Databases (data can be extracted with SQL or another database-querying language) ...