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)

Tidying when multiple variables are stored as column values

Tidy datasets must have a single column for each variable. Occasionally, multiple variable names are placed in a single column with their corresponding value placed in another. The general format for this kind of messy data is as follows:

In this example, the first and last three rows represent two distinct observations that should each be rows. The data needs to be pivoted such that it ends up like this:

Getting ready

In this recipe, we identify the column containing the improperly structured variables and pivot it to create tidy data.

How to do it...

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