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)

Ordering column names sensibly

One of the first tasks to consider after initially importing a dataset as a DataFrame is to analyze the order of the columns. This basic task is often overlooked but can make a big difference in how an analysis proceeds. Computers have no preference for column order and computations are not affected either. As human beings, we naturally view and read columns left to right, which directly impacts our interpretations of the data. Haphazard column arrangement is similar to haphazard clothes arrangement in a closet. It does no good to place suits next to shirts and pants on top of shorts. It's far easier to find and interpret information when column order is given consideration.

There are no standardized set of rules that dictate how columns should be organized within a dataset. However, it is good practice to develop a set of guidelines that you...