Re-indexing a Series

Re-indexing in pandas is a process that makes the data in a Series conform to a set of labels. It is used by pandas to perform much of the alignment process and is hence a fundamental operation.

Re-indexing achieves several things:

  • Re-ordering existing data to match a set of labels
  • Inserting NaN markers where no data exists for a label
  • Possibly filling missing data for a label using some type of logic (defaulting to adding NaN values)

Re-indexing can be as simple as simply assigning a new index to the .index property of a Series. The following demonstrates changing the index of a Series in this manner:

The number of ...

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