Book Image

Pandas Cookbook

By : Theodore Petrou
Book Image

Pandas Cookbook

By: Theodore Petrou

Overview of this book

This book will provide you with unique, idiomatic, and fun recipes for both fundamental and advanced data manipulation tasks with pandas 0.20. Some recipes focus on achieving a deeper understanding of basic principles, or comparing and contrasting two similar operations. Other recipes will dive deep into a particular dataset, uncovering new and unexpected insights along the way. The pandas library is massive, and it's common for frequent users to be unaware of many of its more impressive features. The official pandas documentation, while thorough, does not contain many useful examples of how to piece together multiple commands like one would do during an actual analysis. This book guides you, as if you were looking over the shoulder of an expert, through practical situations that you are highly likely to encounter. Many advanced recipes combine several different features across the pandas 0.20 library to generate results.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Introduction

Visualization is a critical component in exploratory data analysis, as well as presentations and applications. During exploratory data analysis, you are usually working alone or in small groups and need to create plots quickly to help you better understand your data. It can help you identify outliers and missing data, or it can spark other questions of interest that will lead to further analysis and more visualizations. This type of visualization is usually not done with the end user in mind. It is strictly to help you better your current understanding. The plots don't have to be perfect.

When preparing visualizations for a report or application, a different approach must be used. Attention to small details must be paid. In addition, you usually will have to narrow down all possible visualizations to only the select few that best represent your data. Good data...