October 2012
Beginner to intermediate
463 pages
12h 53m
English
Content preview from Python for Data AnalysisBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 5. Getting Started with pandas
pandas will be the primary library of interest throughout much of the rest of the book. It contains high-level data structures and manipulation tools designed to make data analysis fast and easy in Python. pandas is built on top of NumPy and makes it easy to use in NumPy-centric applications.
As a bit of background, I started building pandas in early 2008 during my tenure at AQR, a quantitative investment management firm. At the time, I had a distinct set of requirements that were not well-addressed by any single tool at my disposal:
Data structures with labeled axes supporting automatic or explicit data alignment. This prevents common errors resulting from misaligned data and working with differently-indexed data coming from different sources.
Integrated time series functionality.
The same data structures handle both time series data and non-time series data.
Arithmetic operations and reductions (like summing across an axis) would pass on the metadata (axis labels).
Flexible handling of missing data.
Merge and other relational operations found in popular database databases (SQL-based, for example).
I wanted to be able to do all of these things in one place, preferably in a language well-suited to general purpose software development. Python was a good candidate language for this, but at that time there was not an integrated set of data structures and tools providing this functionality.
Over the last four years, pandas has matured into a quite large ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.