Each of the three DataFrame components--the index, columns, and data--may be accessed directly from a DataFrame. Each of these components is itself a Python object with its own unique attributes and methods. It will often be the case that you would like to perform operations on the individual components and not on the DataFrame as a whole.

This recipe extracts the index, columns, and the data of the DataFrame into separate variables, and then shows how the columns and index are inherited from the same object.

1. Use the DataFrame attributes index, columns, and values to assign the index, columns, and data to their own variables:

>>> movie = pd.read_csv('data/movie.csv')
>>> index = movie.index
>>> columns = movie.columns
>>> data = movie.values

2. Display each component's values:

>>> index
RangeIndex(start=0, stop=5043, step=1)

>>> columns
Index(['color', 'director_name', 'num_critic_for_reviews',
       ...
       'imdb_score', 'aspect_ratio', 'movie_facebook_likes'],
       dtype='object')

>>> data
array([['Color', 'James Cameron', 723.0, ..., 7.9, 1.78, 33000],
       ..., 
       ['Color', 'Jon Gunn', 43.0, ..., 6.6, 1.85, 456]],
       dtype=object)

3. Output the type of each DataFrame component. The name of the type is the word following the last dot of the output:

>>> type(index)
pandas.core.indexes.range.RangeIndex

>>> type(columns)
pandas.core.indexes.base.Index

>>> type(data)
numpy.ndarray

4. Interestingly, both the types for both the index and the columns appear to be closely related. The built-in issubclass method checks whether RangeIndex is indeed a subclass of Index:

>>> issubclass(pd.RangeIndex, pd.Index)
True

You may access the three main components of a DataFrame with the index, columns, and values attributes. The output of the columns attribute appears to be just a sequence of the column names. This sequence of column names is technically an Index object. The output of the function type is the fully qualified class name of the object.

The built-in subclass function checks whether the first argument inherits from the second. The Index and RangeIndex objects are very similar, and in fact, pandas has a number of similar objects reserved specifically for either the index or the columns. The index and the columns must both be some kind of Index object. Essentially, the index and the columns represent the same thing, but along different axes. They’re occasionally referred to as the row index and column index.

A RangeIndex is a special type of Index object that is analogous to Python's range object. Its entire sequence of values is not loaded into memory until it is necessary to do so, thereby saving memory. It is completely defined by its start, stop, and step values.

When possible, Index objects are implemented using hash tables that allow for very fast selection and data alignment. They are similar to Python sets in that they support operations such as intersection and union, but are dissimilar because they are ordered with duplicates allowed.

Notice how the values DataFrame attribute returned a NumPy n-dimensional array, or ndarray. Most of pandas relies heavily on the ndarray. Beneath the index, columns, and data are NumPy ndarrays. They could be considered the base object for pandas that many other objects are built upon. To see this, we can look at the values of the index and columns:

>>> index.values
array([   0,    1,    2, ..., 4913, 4914, 4915])

>>> columns.values
array(['color', 'director_name', 'num_critic_for_reviews',
 ...
 'imdb_score', 'aspect_ratio', 'movie_facebook_likes'],
 dtype=object)

• Pandas official documentation of Indexing and Selecting data (http://bit.ly/2vm8f12)
• A look inside pandas design and development slide deck from pandas author, Wes McKinney (http://bit.ly/2u4YVLi)