Book Image

Learning Pandas

By : Michael Heydt
Book Image

Learning Pandas

By: Michael Heydt

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning pandas
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Benefits and characteristics of NumPy arrays


NumPy arrays have several advantages over Python lists. These benefits are focused on providing high-performance manipulation of sequences of homogenous data items. Several of these benefits are as follows:

  • Contiguous allocation in memory

  • Vectorized operations

  • Boolean selection

  • Sliceability

Contiguous allocation in memory provides benefits in performance by ensuring that all elements of an array are directly accessible at a fixed offset from the beginning of the array. This also is a computer organization technique that facilities providing vectorized operations across arrays.

Vectorized operation is a technique of applying an operation across all or a subset of elements without explicit coding of loops. Vectorized operations are often orders of magnitude more efficient in execution as compared to loops implemented in a higher-level language. They are also excellent for reducing the amount of code that needs to be written, which also helps in minimizing...