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)

Getting started with matplotlib

For many data scientists, the vast majority of their plotting commands will come directly from pandas or seaborn, which both rely completely on matplotlib to do the actual plotting. However, neither pandas nor seaborn offers a complete replacement for matplotlib, and occasionally you will need to use it directly. For this reason, this recipe will offer a short introduction to the most crucial aspects of matplotlib.

Getting ready

Let's begin our introduction with a look at the anatomy of a matplotlib plot in the following figure:

Matplotlib uses a hierarchy of objects to display all of its plotting items in the output. This hierarchy is key to understanding everything about matplotlib....