Book Image

Numerical Computing with Python

By : Pratap Dangeti, Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim, Theodore Petrou
Book Image

Numerical Computing with Python

By: Pratap Dangeti, Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim, Theodore Petrou

Overview of this book

Data mining, or parsing the data to extract useful insights, is a niche skill that can transform your career as a data scientist Python is a flexible programming language that is equipped with a strong suite of libraries and toolkits, and gives you the perfect platform to sift through your data and mine the insights you seek. This Learning Path is designed to familiarize you with the Python libraries and the underlying statistics that you need to get comfortable with data mining. You will learn how to use Pandas, Python's popular library to analyze different kinds of data, and leverage the power of Matplotlib to generate appealing and impressive visualizations for the insights you have derived. You will also explore different machine learning techniques and statistics that enable you to build powerful predictive models. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have the perfect foundation to take your data mining skills to the next level and set yourself on the path to become a sought-after data science professional. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Statistics for Machine Learning by Pratap Dangeti • Matplotlib 2.x By Example by Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim • Pandas Cookbook by Theodore Petrou
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Contributors
About Packt
Preface
Index

Speeding up scalar selection


Both the .iloc and .loc indexers are capable of selecting a single element, a scalar value, from a Series or DataFrame. However, there exist the indexers, .iat and .at, which respectively achieve the same thing at faster speeds. Like .iloc, the .iat indexer uses integer location to make its selection and must be passed two integers separated by a comma. Similar to .loc, the .at index uses labels to make its selection and must be passed an index and column label separated by a comma.

 

Getting ready

This recipe is valuable if computational time is of utmost importance. It shows the performance improvement of .iat and .at over .iloc and .loc when using scalar selection.

How to do it...

  1. Read in the college scoreboard dataset with the institution name as the index. Pass a college name and column name to.loc in order to select a scalar value:
>>> college = pd.read_csv('data/college.csv', index_col='INSTNM')
>>> cn = 'Texas A & M University-College...