Tidy data is a term that was created in what many refer to as a famous data science paper, "Tidy Data" by Hadley Wickham, which I highly recommend that you read and it can be downloaded at http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.pdf. The paper covers many details of the process that he calls tidying data, with the result of the process being that you now have tidy data; data that is ready for analysis.
This chapter will introduce and briefly demonstrate many of the capabilities of pandas. We will not get into all of the details of the paper, but as an opening to what we will cover, I would like to create a brief summary of the reasons why you need to tidy data and what are the characteristics of tidy data, so that you know you have completed the task and are ready to move on to analysis.
Tidying of data is required for many reasons including these:
The names of the variables are different from what you require
There is missing data
Values are not in the units that you...