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

Plotting basics with pandas

pandas makes plotting quite easy by automating much of the procedure for you. Plotting is handled internally by matplotlib and is publicly accessed through the DataFrame or Series .plot attribute (which also acts as a method, but we will use the attribute for plotting). When you create a plot in pandas, you will be returned a matplotlib Axes or Figure. You can then use the full power of matplotlib to tweak this plot to your heart's delight.

pandas is only able to produce a small subset of the plots available with matplotlib, such as line, bar, box, and scatter plots, along with kernel density estimates (KDEs), and histograms. I find that pandas makes it so easy to plot, that I generally prefer the pandas interface, as it is usually just a single line of code.

One of the keys to understanding plotting in pandas is to know where the x and y-axis come from. The default plot, a line plot, will plot the index in the x-axis and each column in the...