Foundational Python for Data Science

4

Other Data Structures

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.

Samuel S. Wilks

In This Chapter

• Creating dictionaries

• Accessing and updating dictionary contents

• Creating sets

• Set operations

The order-based representation of data is powerful, but other data representations are also possible. Dictionaries and sets are data structures that do not rely on the order of the data. Both are powerful models that are integral to the Python toolbox.

Dictionaries

Imagine that you are doing a study to determine if there is a correlation between student height and grade point average (GPA). You need a data structure to represent the data for an individual student, including the person’s ...