Book Image

Pandas Cookbook

By : Theodore Petrou
Book Image

Pandas Cookbook

By: Theodore Petrou

Overview of this book

This book will provide you with unique, idiomatic, and fun recipes for both fundamental and advanced data manipulation tasks with pandas 0.20. Some recipes focus on achieving a deeper understanding of basic principles, or comparing and contrasting two similar operations. Other recipes will dive deep into a particular dataset, uncovering new and unexpected insights along the way. The pandas library is massive, and it's common for frequent users to be unaware of many of its more impressive features. The official pandas documentation, while thorough, does not contain many useful examples of how to piece together multiple commands like one would do during an actual analysis. This book guides you, as if you were looking over the shoulder of an expert, through practical situations that you are highly likely to encounter. Many advanced recipes combine several different features across the pandas 0.20 library to generate results.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Replicating pivot_table with a groupby aggregation

At first glance, it may seem that the pivot_table method provides a unique way to analyze data. However, after a little massaging, it is possible to replicate its functionality exactly with a groupby aggregation. Knowing this equivalence can help shrink the universe of pandas functionality.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we use the flights dataset to create a pivot table and then recreate it using groupby operations.

How to do it...

  1. Read in the flights dataset, and use the pivot_table method to find the total number of...