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)

Introduction

All the datasets used in the preceding chapters have not had much or any work done to change their structure. We immediately began processing the datasets in their original shape. Many datasets in the wild will need a significant amount of restructuring before commencing a more detailed analysis. In some cases, an entire project might only be concerned with formatting the data in such a way that it can be easily processed by someone else.

There are many terms that are used to describe the process of data restructuring, with tidy data being the most common to data scientists. Tidy data is a term coined by Hadley Wickham to describe a form of data that makes analysis easy to do. This chapter will cover many ideas formulated by Hadley and how to accomplish them with pandas. To learn a great deal more about tidy data, read Hadley's paper (http://vita.had.co.nz/papers...