dataset

[soumya rai (Soumya-3010)]

how can i download the data set or where could i get it from i have just started this course and reading example section first for better understanding. but in load data example i dont have csv file

[ramiz (rmz-oz)]

Hi soumya rai (@Soumya-3010), welcome to the course!

You don't need to download the dataset separately. It is already in the repository, in the data folder at the top level: data/birds.csv. The other examples use files from the same folder (03_simple_analysis.py and 04_basic_visualization.py read data/honey.csv).

The loading example opens it with a relative path (line 33):

data = pd.read_csv('../data/birds.csv')

../data/birds.csv means "go up one folder from where I am running Python, then into data". So it only works if you have the whole repository and you run the script from inside the examples folder:

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/Data-Science-For-Beginners.git
cd Data-Science-For-Beginners/examples
pip install pandas
python 02_loading_data.py

(The main README also shows a lighter clone that skips the translations, if the full one is too big.)

I tried it with Python 3.12 and pandas 3.0.6:

• from inside examples/: works, prints Dataset size: 443 rows × 13 columns
• from the repository root (python examples/02_loading_data.py): FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '../data/birds.csv'
• with only the .py file downloaded on its own: the same FileNotFoundError

If you only want to try the example without cloning, you can point pandas at the file on GitHub instead. This worked for me:

data = pd.read_csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/Data-Science-For-Beginners/main/data/birds.csv")

And if you want the script to work no matter which folder you run it from, you can build the path from the script's own location:

from pathlib import Path
data_file = Path(__file__).resolve().parent.parent / "data" / "birds.csv"
data = pd.read_csv(data_file)

With that change it ran fine from examples/, from the repository root and from my home folder.