Pandas Cookbook

How it works...

The pivot_table method is very versatile and flexible but performs a rather similar operation to a groupby aggregation with step 1 showing a simple example. The index parameter takes a column (or columns) that will not be pivoted and whose unique values will be placed in the index. The columns parameter takes a column (or columns) that will be pivoted and whose unique values will be made into column names. The values parameter takes a column (or columns) that will be aggregated.

There also exists an aggfunc parameter that takes an aggregating function (or functions) that determines how the columns in the values parameter get aggregated. It defaults to the mean, and, in this example, we change it to calculate the sum. Additionally, ...