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

Getting started with matplotlib

For many data scientists, the vast majority of their plotting commands will use pandas or seaborn, both rely on matplotlib to do the plotting. However, neither pandas nor seaborn offers a complete replacement for matplotlib, and occasionally you will need to use matplotlib. For this reason, this recipe will offer a short introduction to the most crucial aspects of matplotlib.

One thing to be aware if you are a Jupyter user. You will want to include the:

>>> %matplotlib inline

directive in your notebook. This tells matplotlib to render plots in the notebook.

Let's begin our introduction with a look at the anatomy of a matplotlib plot in the following figure:

matplotlib hierarchy

Matplotlib hierarchy

Matplotlib uses a hierarchy of objects to display all of its plotting items in the output. This hierarchy is key to understanding everything about matplotlib. Note that these terms are referring to matplotlib and not pandas objects...