Understanding the interpolation technique
Interpolation is a technique used quite frequently in finance. In the following example, we have to find NaN between 2
and 6
. The pd.interpolate()
function, for a linear interpolation, is used to fill in the two missing values:
>>>import pandas as pd >>>import numpy as np >>>x=pd.Series([1,2,np.nan,np.nan,6]) >>>x.interpolate() 0 1.000000 1 2.000000 2 3.333333 3 4.666667 4 6.000000
If the two known points are represented by the coordinates (x0,y0) and (x1,y1), the linear interpolation is the straight line between these two points. For a value x in the interval of (x0,x1), the value y along the straight line is given by the following formula:
Solving this equation for y, which is the unknown value at x, gives the following result:
From the Yahoo! Finance bond page, we can get the following information:
Maturity |
Yield |
Yesterday |
Last Week |
Last Month |
---|---|---|---|---|
3 Month |
0.05 |
0.05 |
0.04 |
0.03 |
6 Month |
0.08 |
0.07 |
0.07... |