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)

Selecting Series data

Series and DataFrames are complex data containers that have multiple attributes that use the indexing operator to select data in different ways. In addition to the indexing operator itself, the .iloc and .loc attributes are available and use the indexing operator in their own unique ways. Collectively, these attributes are called the indexers.

The indexing terminology can get confusing. The term indexing operator is used here to distinguish it from the other indexers. It refers to the brackets, [] directly after a Series or DataFrame. For instance, given a Series s, you can select data in the following ways: s[item] and s.loc[item]. The first uses the indexing operator. The second uses the .loc indexer.

Series and DataFrame indexers allow selection by integer location (like Python lists) and by label (like Python dictionaries). The .iloc indexer selects only...