ISOM 3400 – PYTHON FOR BUSINESS ANALYTICS

2. Python Basics
Yingpeng Robin Zhu

JUN 22, 2022

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Recap

 Advantages vs. disadvantages of Python

 Course focus is on business analytics, whose core goal is to
 To extract useful information from data to make decision

 Two main categories of machine learning

 Supervised machine learning
 Unsupervised machine learning

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 Recap

In this course, we will apply Python language enabled with packages

such as pandas to build machine learning model in order to analyze
the business problem

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Recap

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Recap

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About Guest Speaker
Final Exam (Date)

WeChat or WhatsApp or Zoom

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Assignments of Lab Session 1

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Class Objectives

Basic syntax for statements

Variables and values
Datatypes
Operators
Functions
Strings

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Python Syntax

Execute Python Syntax

 As we learned in the previous session, Python syntax can be executed by writing
directly in the Command Line:

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Python Indentation

Python Indentation
 Indentation refers to the spaces at the beginning of a code line
 Where in other programming languages the indentation in code is for readability
only, the indentation in Python is very important
 Python uses indentation to indicate a block of code

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Python Indentation

Python Indentation
 The number of spaces is up to you as a programmer, the most common use is four
(after you finish one line, press the key “Enter”), but it has to be at least one.

Number of space = 4

Number of space = 1

Number of space = 8

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Python Indentation

Python Indentation
 You have to use the same number of spaces in the same block of code, otherwise
Python will give you an error

Number of space = 1
Number of space = 4

How can you fix this error?

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Class Objectives

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Print() Method

 The Python print() function takes in any number of parameters and prints them out on
one line of text. The items are each converted to text form, separated by spaces, and
there is a single '\n' at the end (the "newline" char)
 Syntax: print(object(s), sep=separator, end=end, file=file, flush=flush)
 print("Hello World")
 print("Hello",'World')
 print('hi', 'there', 'great')
 print('hi' 'there' 'great')
 print("Hello", "World", sep='...', end='!!')
 print("Hello", "New", "World", sep='...', end='!!')

 Note that print is different in old versions of Python (2.7) where it was a statement and
did not need parenthesis around its arguments

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Variables & Values

A name that is used to denote something or a value is called a variable. In

python, variables can be declared by assigning values to them

The basic data types built into Python include int (integers), float (floating
point numbers), str (unicode character strings) and bool (boolean). Some
examples of each are provided in the following slides

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Variables & Values

Variables are created when you assign a value to it.

Bind a name on the left to the right object

When we enter a name in python, it gives us back the object bound to it

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Variables & Values

Variables do not need to be declared with any particular type, and can even
change type after they have been set

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Variables & Values

Rules for Python variables

 A variable name must start with a letter or the underscore character
 A variable name cannot start with a number
 A variable name can only contain alpha-numeric characters and underscores (A-z, 0-
9, and _ )
 Variable names are case-sensitive (age, Age and AGE are three different variables)

myvar = “Robin"
my_var = "Robin" 2myvar = "Robin"
_my_var = "Robin" my-var = "Robin"
myVar = "Robin" my var = "Robin"
MYVAR =  "Robin"
myvar2 = "Robin"

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Variables & Values

Operation on variables (more details about operation will be shown in the

next a few slides):

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Variables & Values

Output Variables
 The Python print() function is often used to output variables
 In the print() function, you output multiple variables, separated by a comma

 You can also use the + operator to output multiple variables

Notice the space character after "Python " and "is ", without them the result would be "Pythonisawesome"

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Variables & Values

Output Variables
 In the print() function, when you try to combine a string and a number with the +
operator, Python will give you an error

 The best way to output multiple variables in the print() function is to separate them
with commas, which even support different data types

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Variables & Values

Global Variables
 Variables that are created outside of a function (as in all of the examples above) are
known as global variables
 Global variables can be used by everyone, both inside of functions and outside

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Variables & Values

Global Variables
 If you create a variable with the same name inside a function, this variable will be
local, and can only be used inside the function.
 The global variable with the same name will remain as it was, global and with the
original value

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Python Data Types
Data Type Examples
Text Type str “Hi”, “Mike", 'Hello Python’
Numeric Types int 1,2,3
float 5.0, 6.01
complex 5+7j
Sequence Types list ["apple", "banana", "cherry"]
tuple ("apple", "banana", "cherry")
range range(6)
Set set {"apple", "banana", "cherry"}
Mapping Type dict {"name" : "John", "age" : 36}
boolean bool True, False

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Python Data Types

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Python Data Types
Setting/Changing the Specific Data Type

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Basic syntax for statements

Comments
 The ‘#’ character indicates that the rest of the line is a comment
 Typically, you use comments to explain formulas, algorithms, and complex business
logic
 When executing a program, the Python interpreter ignores the comments and only
interprets the code

The '''.....''' (triple single quotation marks) characters indicate that text
inside is a multi-line comment. << See an example in the next cell>>

Writing comments is a good habit, why?

 Interpretation of the code (for yourself and for your collaborators)
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Examples of Comments

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Basic syntax for statements

The basic rules for writing simple statements and expressions in

Python are:
No spaces or tab characters allowed at the start of a statement:
Indentation plays a special role in Python (see the section on control
statements). For now, simply ensure that all statements start at the
beginning of the line
Statements finish at the end of the line, except for several cases

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Help()

Python has extensive help built in. You can execute help() for an
overview or help(x) for any library, object or type x to get more
information. For example:
Help(max) - shows you the meaning of this function, and statements.

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Help()

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Some Basic Built-in Functions

https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html

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Some Basic Built-in Functions

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Content

 So far, we have discussed:

 Basic syntax for statements
 Variables and values
 Different data types supported by Python
 Built-in Functions
 We will continue to learn:
 Different operators you can perform on different types of data (e.g., arithmetic,
relational, boolean)
 A few mathematical functions and conversion functions
 How to accept user input
 String type and indexing

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Python

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Content

 So far, we have discussed:

 Basic syntax for statements
 Variables and values
 Different data types supported by Python
 Built-in Functions
 We will continue to learn:
 Different operators you can perform on different types of data (e.g., arithmetic,
relational, boolean)
 A few mathematical functions and conversion functions
 How to accept user input
 String type and indexing

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Operators

Python Operators
 Operators are used to perform operations on variables and values
 In the example below, we use the + operator to add together two values

Python divides the operators in the following groups

 Arithmetic operators
 Assignment operators
 Comparison operators
 Logical operators
 Identity operators
 Membership operators
 Bitwise operators 38
Operators

Python Arithmetic Operators

 Arithmetic operators are used with numeric values to perform common
mathematical operations

divides two numbers and rounds the result down to the nearest integer

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Operators

Python Assignment Operators

 Assignment operators are used to assign values to variables

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Operators

 Relational/Comparison Operators
 These operators compare the values on either sides of them and decide the
relation among them. It returns a value of True or False.

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Operators

Logical Operators
 Logical operators are used to combine conditional statements. It returns a value of
True or False.

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Operators

Membership Operators
 Membership operators are used to test if a sequence is presented in an object.

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Mathematical functions

Mathematical functions include logarithms, trigonometric functions,

power and so on. For example, you can define:

 Once a function is defined, we can “call” it by name with necessary inputs provided
(i.e., 𝑓(3,5))
 Python looks up its definition and returns a putout (11 for 𝑓(3,5))

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Functions in Python Math Module

 The math module is a standard module in Python and is always available.

To use mathematical functions under this module, you have to import the
module using import math

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Accepting User Inputs

Input(prompt), prompts for and returns input as a string. You may assign
the input value into a variable, to be used later

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Accepting User Inputs

Input(prompt), prompts for and returns input as a string. You may assign
the input value into a variable, to be used later

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String

Strings are constructed by enclosing string literals in single quote or

double quotes

A string is a sequence of characters. Strings are reducible to their

component characters

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String

Multiline Strings
 You can assign a multiline string to a variable by using three quotes

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String

The characters in a string are indexed by integers

(representing positions in the sequence), and can be
individually accessed by using the indexing operator (Square
brackets [ ] that enclose the index)

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String Slicing Operator

 Characters from a specific index of the string can be accessed with the string[index]
operator, indexing starts with zero in Python

 If we claim a positive number, then start from the left. Remember to start reading
from zero
 The negative indices can be used to start counting from the back. Remember
negative indexing starts reading from -1
 Out of range indexing will give an error message

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String Slicing Operator

 string[a], returns a character from a positive index a of the string from the left side

 string[-a], returns a character from a negative index a of the string from the right side

 string[a:b], returns characters from positive index a to positive index b, the last
character is not included

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String Slicing Operator

 string[a:-b], returns characters from positive index a to the negative index b, the last
character is not included

 string[a:], returns characters from positive index a to the end of the string

 string[:b], returns characters from the start of the string to the positive index b

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String Concatenate Operator

 The + operator can be used to concatenate two different strings

 Appending the same string to a string can be done using the * operator (Repetition)

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Jupyter Notebook

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