Top 10 tools a data scientist should use in 2021

The work of a data scientist centers around the process of extraction of meaningful data from unstructured information and analyzing that data for necessary interpretation. This requires a lot of useful tools. The following are the top 10 most necessary tools that a data scientist needs to know about in 2021.

Python

Python is the most widely used programming language for data science and machine learning and one of the most popular languages overall. The Python open-source project’s website describes it as “an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics,” as well as built-in data structures and dynamic typing and binding capabilities. The site also touts Python’s simple syntax, saying it’s easy to learn and its emphasis on readability reduces the cost of program maintenance. The multipurpose language can be used for a wide range of tasks, including data analysis, data visualization, AI, natural language processing, and robotic process automation. Developers can create web, mobile, and desktop applications in Python, too. In addition to object-oriented programming, it supports procedural, functional, and other types, plus extensions written in C or C++.

Jupyter Notebook

Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that enables interactive collaboration among data scientists, data engineers, mathematicians, researchers, and other users. It’s a computational notebook tool that can be used to create, edit and share code, as well as explanatory text, images, and other information. Jupyter users can add software code, computations, comments, data visualizations, and rich media representations of computation results to a single document, known as a notebook, which can then be shared with and revised by colleagues. As a result, notebooks “can serve as a complete computational record” of interactive sessions among the members of data science teams, according to Jupyter Notebook’s documentation. The notebook documents are JSON files that have version control capabilities. In addition, a Notebook Viewer service enables them to be rendered as static web pages for viewing by users who don’t have Jupyter installed on their systems.

Apache Spark

Apache Spark is an open-source data processing and analytics engine that can handle large amounts of data, upward of several petabytes, according to proponents. Spark’s ability to rapidly process data has fueled significant growth in the use of the platform since it was created in 2009, helping to make the Spark project one of the largest open-source communities among big data technologies. Due to its speed, Spark is well suited for continuous intelligence applications powered by near-real-time processing of streaming data. However, as a general-purpose distributed processing engine, Spark is equally suited for extract, transform and load uses and other SQL batch jobs. Spark initially was touted as a faster alternative to the MapReduce engine for batch processing in Hadoop clusters.

D3.js

Another open-source tool, D3.js is a JavaScript library for creating custom data visualizations in a web browser. Commonly known as D3, which stands for Data-Driven Documents, it uses web standards, such as HTML, Scalable Vector Graphics, and CSS, instead of its graphical vocabulary. D3’s developers describe it as a dynamic and flexible tool that requires a minimum amount of effort to generate visual representations of data. D3.js lets visualization designers bind data to documents via the Document Object Model and then use DOM manipulation methods to make data-driven transformations to the documents. First released in 2011, it can be used to design various types of data visualizations and supports features such as interaction, animation, annotation, and quantitative analysis. D3 includes more than 30 modules and 1,000 visualization methods, making it complicated to learn. In addition, many data scientists don’t have JavaScript skills. As a result, they may be more comfortable with a commercial visualization tool, like Tableau, leaving D3 to be used more by data visualization developers and specialists who are also members of data science teams.

TensorFlow

TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning platform developed by Google that’s particularly popular for implementing deep learning neural networks. The platform takes inputs in the form of tensors that are akin to NumPy multidimensional arrays and then uses a graph structure to flow the data through a list of computational operations specified by developers. It also offers an eager execution programming environment that runs operations individually without graphs, which provides more flexibility for research and debugging machine learning models. Google made TensorFlow open source in 2015, and Release 1.0.0 became available in 2017. TensorFlow uses Python as its core programming language and now incorporates the Keras high-level API for building and training models. Alternatively, a TensorFlow.js library enables model development in JavaScript, and custom operations can be built in C++.

Keras

Keras is a programming interface that enables data scientists to more easily access and use the TensorFlow machine learning platform. It’s an open-source deep-learning API and framework written in Python that runs on top of TensorFlow and is now integrated into that platform. Keras previously supported multiple back ends but was tied exclusively to TensorFlow starting with its 2.4.0 release in June 2020. As a high-level API, Keras was designed to drive easy and fast experimentation that requires less coding than other deep learning options. The goal is to accelerate the implementation of machine learning models, in particular, deep learning neural networks through a development process with “high iteration velocity,” as the Keras documentation puts it. The Keras framework includes a sequential interface for creating relatively simple linear stacks of layers with inputs and outputs, as well as a functional API for building more complex graphs of layers or writing deep learning models from scratch.

Xplenty

Xplenty, is data integration, ETL, and an ELT platform that can bring all the data sources together. It is a complete toolkit for building data pipelines. This elastic and scalable cloud platform can integrate, process, and prepare data for analytics on the cloud. It provides solutions for marketing, sales, customer support, and developers. Sales solution has the features to understand your customers, for data enrichment, centralizing metrics & sales tools, and for keeping your CRM organized. Its customer support solution will provide comprehensive insights, help you with better business decisions, customized support solutions, and features of automatic Upsell & Cross-Sell. Xplenty’s marketing solution will help you to build effective, comprehensive campaigns and strategies. Xplenty contains the features of data transparency, easy migrations, and connections to legacy systems.

IBM SPSS

IBM SPSS is a family of software for managing and analyzing complex statistical data. It includes two primary products: SPSS Statistics, a statistical analysis, data visualization, and reporting tool, and SPSS Modeler, a data science and predictive analytics platform with a drag-and-drop UI and machine learning capabilities. SPSS Statistics covers every step of the analytics process, from planning to model deployment, and enables users to clarify relationships between variables, create clusters of data points, identify trends and make predictions, among other capabilities. It can access common structured data types and offers a combination of a menu-driven UI, its command syntax, and the ability to integrate R and Python extensions, plus features for automating procedures and import-export ties to SPSS Modeler. Created by SPSS Inc. in 1968, initially with the name Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, the statistical analysis software was acquired by IBM in 2009, along with the predictive modeling platform, which SPSS had previously bought. While the product family is officially called IBM SPSS, the software is still usually known simply as SPSS.

PyTorch

An open-source framework used to build and train deep learning models based on neural networks, PyTorch, is touted by its proponents for supporting fast and flexible experimentation and a seamless transition to production deployment. The Python library was designed to be easier to use than Torch, a precursor machine learning framework that’s based on the Lua programming language. PyTorch also provides more flexibility and speed than Torch, according to its creators. First released publicly in 2017, PyTorch uses arraylike tensors to encode model inputs, outputs, and parameters. Its tensors are similar to the multidimensional arrays supported by NumPy, another Python library for scientific computing, but PyTorch adds built-in support for running models on GPUs. NumPy arrays can be converted into tensors for processing in PyTorch, and vice versa.

Knime

KNIME, for data scientists, will help them in blending tools and data types. It is an open-source platform. It will allow them to use the tools of their choice and expand them with additional capabilities. It is very useful for the repetitive and time-consuming aspects. Experiments and expands to Apache Spark and Big data. It can work with many data sources and different types of platforms.

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Researchers at Texas A&M can predict whether metallic nanoparticles in soil are likely to be absorbed by plants, which could cause toxicity.

While crop yield has achieved a substantial boost from nanotechnology in recent years, alarms over the health risks posed by nanoparticles within fresh produce and grains have also increased. In particular, nanoparticles entering the soil through irrigation, fertilizers and other sources have raised concerns about whether plants absorb these minute particles enough to cause toxicity.

In a new study published online in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, researchers at Texas A&M University have used machine learning to evaluate the salient properties of metallic nanoparticles that make them more susceptible for plant uptake. The researchers said their algorithm could indicate how much plants accumulate nanoparticles in their roots and shoots.

Nanoparticles are a burgeoning trend in several fields, including medicine, consumer products and agriculture. Depending on the type of nanoparticle, some have favorable surface properties, charge and magnetism, among other features. These qualities make them ideal for a number of applications. For example, in agriculture, nanoparticles may be used as antimicrobials to protect plants from pathogens. Alternatively, they can be used to bind to fertilizers or insecticides and then programmed for slow release to increase plant absorption.

These agricultural practices and others, like irrigation, can cause nanoparticles to accumulate in the soil. However, with the different types of nanoparticles that could exist in the ground and a staggeringly large number of terrestrial plant species, including food crops, it is not clearly known if certain properties of nanoparticles make them more likely to be absorbed by some plant species than others.

“As you can imagine, if we have to test the presence of each nanoparticle for every plant species, it is a huge number of experiments, which is very time-consuming and expensive,” said Xingmao “Samuel” Ma, associate professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “To give you an idea, silver nanoparticles alone can have hundreds of different sizes, shapes and surface coatings, and so, experimentally testing each one, even for a single plant species, is impractical.”

Instead, for their study, the researchers chose two different machine learning algorithms, an artificial neural network and gene-expression programming. They first trained these algorithms on a database created from past research on different metallic nanoparticles and the specific plants in which they accumulated. In particular, their database contained the size, shape and other characteristics of different nanoparticles, along with information on how much of these particles were absorbed from soil or nutrient-enriched water into the plant body.

Once trained, their machine learning algorithms could correctly predict the likelihood of a given metallic nanoparticle to accumulate in a plant species. Also, their algorithms revealed that when plants are in a nutrient-enriched or hydroponic solution, the chemical makeup of the metallic nanoparticle determines the propensity of accumulation in the roots and shoots. But if plants are grown in soil, the contents of organic matter and the clay in soil are key to nanoparticle uptake.

Ma said that while the machine learning algorithms could make predictions for most food crops and terrestrial plants, they might not yet be ready for aquatic plants. He also noted that the next step in his research would be to investigate if the machine learning algorithms could predict nanoparticle uptake from leaves rather than through the roots.

“It is quite understandable that people are concerned about the presence of nanoparticles in their fruits, vegetables and grains,” said Ma. “But instead of not using nanotechnology altogether, we would like farmers to reap the many benefits provided by this technology but avoid the potential food safety concerns.”

Other contributors include Xiaoxuan Wang, Liwei Liu and Weilan Zhang from the civil and environmental engineering department.

This research is partly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan under the Graduate Students Study Abroad Program.

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