reading-notes

Class 12: Pandas

10 minutes to pandas

CookBooks

Object creation

Data Structure Intro section

Creating a Series by passing a list of values, letting pandas create a default integer index:

In [3]: s = pd.Series([1, 3, 5, np.nan, 6, 8])

In [4]: s
Out[4]: 
0    1.0
1    3.0
2    5.0
3    NaN
4    6.0
5    8.0
dtype: float64

Creating a DataFrame by passing a NumPy array, with a datetime index and labeled columns:

In [5]: dates = pd.date_range("20130101", periods=6)

In [6]: dates
Out[6]: 
DatetimeIndex(['2013-01-01', '2013-01-02', '2013-01-03', '2013-01-04',
               '2013-01-05', '2013-01-06'],
              dtype='datetime64[ns]', freq='D')

In [7]: df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(6, 4), index=dates, columns=list("ABCD"))

In [8]: df
Out[8]: 
                   A         B         C         D
2013-01-01  0.469112 -0.282863 -1.509059 -1.135632
2013-01-02  1.212112 -0.173215  0.119209 -1.044236
2013-01-03 -0.861849 -2.104569 -0.494929  1.071804
2013-01-04  0.721555 -0.706771 -1.039575  0.271860
2013-01-05 -0.424972  0.567020  0.276232 -1.087401
2013-01-06 -0.673690  0.113648 -1.478427  0.524988

Viewing data

Basics section

DataFrame.to_numpy() gives a NumPy representation of the underlying data. Note that this can be an expensive operation when your DataFrame has columns with different data types, which comes down to a fundamental difference between pandas and NumPy: NumPy arrays have one dtype for the entire array, while pandas DataFrames have one dtype per column. When you call DataFrame.to_numpy(), pandas will find the NumPy dtype that can hold all of the dtypes in the DataFrame. This may end up being object, which requires casting every value to a Python object.

For df, our DataFrame of all floating-point values, DataFrame.to_numpy() is fast and doesn’t require copying data.

Selection

While standard Python / Numpy expressions for selecting and setting are intuitive and come in handy for interactive work, for production code, we recommend the optimized pandas data access methods, .at, .iat, .loc and .iloc.