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)

Replicating nlargest with sort_values

The previous two recipes work similarly by sorting values in slightly different manners. Finding the top n values of a column of data is equivalent to sorting the entire column descending and taking the first n values. Pandas has many operations that are capable of doing this in a variety of ways.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will replicate the Selecting the smallest from the largest recipe with the sort_values method and explore the differences between the two.

How to do it...

  1. Let's recreate the result from the final step...