online retail transactions dataset the online retail transactions dataset is available from the uci machine learning repository we already used some datasets from this repository in our earlier and this should underline the importance of this repository to the users the dataset we will be using for our analysis is quite simple based on its description on the uci web siteit contains all the transactions occurring between and for uk-based and registered non-store online retail from the web sitewe also learn that the company sells unique all-occasion gift items and lot of customers of the organization are wholesalers the last piece of information is particularly important as gives us an opportunity to explore purchase behaviors of large-scale customers instead of normal retail customers only the dataset does not have any information that will help us distinguish between wholesale purchase and retail purchase before we get startedmake sure you load the following dependencies import pandas as pd import datetime import math import numpy as np import matplotlib pyplot as plt import matplotlib mlab as mlab %matplotlib inline ##note we encourage you to check out the uci machine learning repository and the page for this particular dataset at research papers that use the same dataset we believe the papers along with the analysis performed in this will make an interesting read for all our readers exploratory data analysis we have always maintained that irrespective of the actual use case or the algorithmwe intend to implement the standard analysis workflowwhich should always start with exploratory data analysis (edaso following the traditionwe will start with eda on our dataset the first thing you should notice about the dataset is its format unlike most of the datasets that we have handled in this book the dataset is not in csv format and instead comes as an excel file in some other languages (or even frameworksit could have been cause of problem but with python and particularly pandas we don' face any such problem and we can read the dataset using the function read_excel provided by the pandas library we also take look at some of the lines in the dataset in [ ]cs_df pd read_excel(io= 'online retail xlsx'