Book Image

Advanced Python Programming

By : Dr. Gabriele Lanaro, Quan Nguyen, Sakis Kasampalis
Book Image

Advanced Python Programming

By: Dr. Gabriele Lanaro, Quan Nguyen, Sakis Kasampalis

Overview of this book

This Learning Path shows you how to leverage the power of both native and third-party Python libraries for building robust and responsive applications. You will learn about profilers and reactive programming, concurrency and parallelism, as well as tools for making your apps quick and efficient. You will discover how to write code for parallel architectures using TensorFlow and Theano, and use a cluster of computers for large-scale computations using technologies such as Dask and PySpark. With the knowledge of how Python design patterns work, you will be able to clone objects, secure interfaces, dynamically choose algorithms, and accomplish much more in high performance computing. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have the skills and confidence to build engaging models that quickly offer efficient solutions to your problems. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Python High Performance - Second Edition by Gabriele Lanaro • Mastering Concurrency in Python by Quan Nguyen • Mastering Python Design Patterns by Sakis Kasampalis
Table of Contents (41 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Pandas


Pandas is a library originally developed by Wes McKinney, which was designed to analyze datasets in a seamless and performant way. In recent years, this powerful library has seen an incredible growth and huge adoption by the Python community. In this section, we will introduce the main concepts and tools provided in this library, and we will use it to increase performance of various usecases that can't otherwise be addressed with NumPy's vectorized operations and broadcasting.

Pandas fundamentals

While NumPy deals mostly with arrays, Pandas main data structures are pandas.Series, pandas.DataFrame, and pandas.Panel. In the rest of this chapter, we will abbreviate pandas with pd.

The main difference between a pd.Series object and an np.array is that a pd.Series object associates a specific key to each element of an array. Let’s see how this works in practice with an example.

Let's assume that we are trying to test a new blood pressure drug, and we want to store, for each patient, whether...