Learn Python by Building Data Science Applications

Chapter 10

Why should we use a special stack of packages for data analysis?

Data analysis requires a fast and easy way to operate on multiple elements at once—a so-called vectorized approach. Python's scientific stack allows this by using numpy—a package for fast array operations.

Why are NumPy computations so fast compared to normal Python?

NumPy is drastically faster than vanilla Python on numerical operations. This is all thanks to a different data representation—NumPy arrays, in contrast to standard Python collections, require all the elements to be of the same data type. Because of that, an array can be passed to a CPU as one entity and computed more effectively.

What is the use case and benefit of using Pandas over NumPy?

NumPy only ...