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)

Working with operators on a DataFrame

A primer on operators was given in the Working with operators on a Series recipe from Chapter 1, Pandas Foundations, which will be helpful here. The Python arithmetic and comparison operators work directly on DataFrames, as they do on Series.

Getting ready

When a DataFrame operates directly with one of the arithmetic or comparison operators, each value of each column gets the operation applied to it. Typically, when an operator is used with a DataFrame, the columns are either all numeric or all object (usually strings). If the DataFrame does not contain homogeneous data, then the operation is likely to fail. Let's see an example of this failure with the college dataset, which contains...