Book Image

Pandas 1.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Matt Harrison, Theodore Petrou
Book Image

Pandas 1.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Matt Harrison, Theodore Petrou

Overview of this book

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 as one would do during an actual analysis. This book guides you, as if you were looking over the shoulder of an expert, through situations that you are highly likely to encounter. This new updated and revised edition provides you with unique, idiomatic, and fun recipes for both fundamental and advanced data manipulation tasks with pandas. 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. Many advanced recipes combine several different features across the pandas library to generate results.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
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16
Index

Understanding the difference between Python and pandas date tools

Before we get to pandas, it can help to be aware of and understand core Python's date and time functionality. The datetime module provides three data types: date, time, and datetime. Formally, a date is a moment in time consisting of just the year, month, and day. For instance, June 7, 2013 would be a date. A time consists of hours, minutes, seconds, and microseconds (one-millionth of a second) and is unattached to any date. An example of time would be 12 hours and 30 minutes. A datetime consists of both the elements of a date and time together.

On the other hand, pandas has a single object to encapsulate date and time called a Timestamp. It has nanosecond (one-billionth of a second) precision and is derived from NumPy's datetime64 data type. Both Python and pandas each have a timedelta object that is useful when doing date addition and subtraction.

In this recipe, we will first explore...