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)

Tidying when variables are stored in column names and values

One particularly difficult form of messy data to diagnose appears whenever variables are stored both horizontally across the column names and vertically down column values. You will typically encounter this type of dataset, not in a database, but from a summarized report that someone else has already generated.

Getting ready

In this recipe, variables are identified both vertically and horizontally and reshaped into tidy data with the melt and pivot_table methods.

How to do it...

  1. Read in the sensors dataset and...