John Hawkins

John Hawkins

Data Scientist & Machine Learning Researcher

dfsummarizer : A command line application for summarizing data frames

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Summarizing data is one of those small tasks that data scientists and analysts need to do routinely. However, we often need to write bespoke scripts to get exactly what we want, coping with missing values and assorted data types. We then need to go through a tedious process to format it for sharing or publication.

Many of the standard data summarizing routines in analytics packages leave a lot to be desired. The pandas dataframe summary function ignores missing values and only summarises numeric data. Most data scientists require more comprehensive summaries of a dataset to be sure that they are taking a reasonable modelling approach. There is no substitute for deeper dives into specific columns and features using plots and other visualisations, however, high level summarisation is a great guide to where to spend your efforts.

For all of these reasons I have built a small and focused command line application that will allow you to generate a summary table of your data and output it as either Latex or Markdown.

Get it here

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