Pandas in Action

2 The Series object

This chapter covers

• Instantiating Series objects from lists, dictionaries, tuples, and more
• Setting a custom index on a Series
• Accessing attributes and invoking methods on a Series
• Performing mathematical operations on one or more Series
• Passing the Series to Python’s built-in functions

One of pandas’ core data structures, the Series is a one-dimensional labeled array for homogeneous data. An array is an ordered collection of values comparable to a Python list. The term homogeneous means that the values are of the same data type (all integers or all Booleans, for example).

Pandas assigns each Series value a label—an identifier we can use to locate the value. The library also assigns each Series value an order—a position ...