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)

Visualizing the flights dataset

Exploratory data analysis is mainly guided by visualizations, and pandas provides a great interface for quickly and effortlessly creating them. A simple strategy when beginning a visualization of any dataset is to focus only on univariate plots. The most popular univariate plots tend to be bar charts for categorical data (usually strings) and histograms, boxplots, or KDEs for continuous data (always numeric). Attempting to analyze multiple variables at the same time, directly at the start of a project, can be quite overwhelming.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we do some basic exploratory data analysis on the flights dataset by creating univariate and multivariate plots directly with pandas.

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