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

Selecting Series data

Series and DataFrames are complex data containers that have multiple attributes that use an index operation to select data in different ways. In addition to the index operator itself, the .iloc and .loc attributes are available and use the index operator in their own unique ways.

Series and DataFrames allow selection by position (like Python lists) and by label (like Python dictionaries). When we index off of the .iloc attribute, pandas selects only by position and works similarly to Python lists. The .loc attribute selects only by index label, which is similar to how Python dictionaries work.

The .loc and .iloc attributes are available on both Series and DataFrames. This recipe shows how to select Series data by position with .iloc and by label with .loc. These indexers accept scalar values, lists, and slices.

The terminology can get confusing. An index operation is when you put brackets, [], following a variable. For instance, given a Series s,...