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)

Plotting basics with pandas

Pandas makes plotting quite easy by automating much of the procedure for you. All pandas plotting is handled internally by matplotlib and is publicly accessed through the DataFrame or Series plot method. We say that the pandas plot method is a wrapper around matplotlib. When you create a plot in pandas, you will be returned a matplotlib Axes or Figure. You can use the full power of matplotlib to modify this object until you get the desired result.

Pandas is only able to produce a small subset of the plots available with matplotlib, such as line, bar, box, and scatter plots, along with kernel density estimates (KDEs) and histograms. Pandas excels at the plots it does create by making the process very easy and efficient, usually taking just a single line of code, saving lots of time when exploring data.

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