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

Tidying variable values as column names with melt


Like most large Python libraries, pandas has many different ways to accomplish the same task--the differences usually being readability and performance. Pandas contains a DataFrame method named melt that works similarly to the stack method described in the previous recipe but gives a bit more flexibility.

Note

Before pandas version 0.20, melt was only provided as a function that had to be accessed with pd.melt. Pandas is still an evolving library and you need to expect changes with each new version. Pandas has been making a push to move all functions that only operate on DataFrames to methods, such as they did with melt. This is the preferred way to use melt and the way this recipe uses it. Check the What's New part of the pandas documentation to stay up to date with all the changes (http://bit.ly/2xzXIhG).

Getting ready

In this recipe, we use the melt method to tidy a simple DataFrame with variable values as column names.

 

 

 

How to do it...

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