🐍 Python Topics for Data Science
1. Core Python (must master first)
Basics: variables, data types (int, float, str, bool)
Operators (arithmetic, comparison, logical)
Control flow: if, for, while, break, continue
Functions (default arguments, return values, scope)
Data structures:
o List, Tuple, Set, Dictionary
o Comprehensions ([x for x in ...])
String handling & formatting (f-strings, regex basics)
File handling (open, read/write CSV, JSON)
Error handling (try-except-finally)
2. Intermediate Python (for DS workflows)
Modules & Packages (import, custom modules)
Virtual environments & pip (venv, requirements.txt)
Iterators & Generators (yield, memory-efficient loops)
Lambda, map(), filter(), reduce()
Decorators (useful for ML pipelines)
OOP basics: Classes, Objects, Inheritance (not heavy, just basics)
3. Data Science-Specific Python Libraries
📊 Data handling
NumPy → arrays, broadcasting, vectorized operations
Pandas → DataFrames, indexing, filtering, grouping, merging, time-
series basics
OpenPyXL / xlrd → working with Excel if needed
📈 Visualization
Matplotlib → line, bar, scatter, histograms
Seaborn → statistical plots (heatmaps, pairplots, boxplots)
Plotly (optional) → interactive plots
4. Statistics & ML with Python
SciPy → stats, probability distributions, hypothesis testing
Scikit-learn →
o Train/test split, cross-validation
o Regression, classification, clustering
o Model evaluation (accuracy, F1, ROC-AUC, RMSE)
o Pipelines, GridSearchCV
Imbalanced-learn (imblearn) → SMOTE, undersampling
5. Data Wrangling & Cleaning
Missing data handling (fillna, dropna)
String cleaning (str.replace, regex in pandas)
Date & time handling (pd.to_datetime, .dt accessor)
Outlier detection & handling
6. Advanced / Extra (Good to Know)
Statsmodels → regression, ANOVA, time-series
Requests, BeautifulSoup, Selenium → web scraping (optional
but useful)
SQLAlchemy → connecting Python with databases
PySpark / Dask → big data handling
Streamlit / Flask → quick deployment of ML models
7. Project Skills
Jupyter Notebook / Google Colab basics
Writing clean, reusable code
Using Git/GitHub for version control
Building small end-to-end projects (data cleaning → EDA → model →
visualization)
