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)

Understanding the differences between seaborn and pandas

Outside of pandas, the seaborn library is one of the most popular in the Python data science community to create visualizations. Like pandas, it does not do any actual plotting itself and is completely reliant on matplotlib for the heavy lifting. Seaborn plotting functions work directly with pandas DataFrames to create aesthetically pleasing visualizations.

While seaborn and pandas both reduce the overhead of matplotlib, the way they approach data is completely different. Nearly all of the seaborn plotting functions require tidy (or long) data. When data is in tidy form, it is not ready for consumption or interpretation until some function is applied to it to yield a result. Tidy data is the raw building blocks that makes all other analysis possible. Processing tidy data during data analysis often creates aggregated or wide...