Book Image

Pandas 1.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Matthew Harrison, Theodore Petrou
Book Image

Pandas 1.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Matthew 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
Other Books You May Enjoy
16
Index

Replicating idxmax with method chaining

A good exercise is to attempt an implementation of a built-in DataFrame method on your own. This type of replication can give you a deeper understanding of other pandas methods that you normally wouldn't have come across. .idxmax is a challenging method to replicate using only the methods covered thus far in the book.

This recipe slowly chains together basic methods to eventually find all the row index values that contain a maximum column value.

How to do it…

  1. Load in the college dataset and execute the same operations as the previous recipe to get only the numeric columns that are of interest:
    >>> def remove_binary_cols(df):
    ...     binary_only = df.nunique() == 2
    ...     cols = binary_only[binary_only].index.tolist()
    ...     return df.drop(columns=cols)
    >>> college_n = (
    ...     college
    ...     .assign(
    ...         MD_EARN_WNE_P10=pd.to_numeric(
    ...             college.MD_EARN_WNE_P10...