Pandas is a Python package providing fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with “relational” or “labeled” data both easy and intuitive. It aims to be the fundamental high-level building block for doing practical, real world data analysis in Python. Additionally, it has the broader goal of becoming the most powerful and flexible open source data analysis / manipulation tool available in any language. It is already well on its way toward this goal.
pandas is well suited for many different kinds of data:
Tabular data with heterogeneously-typed columns, as in an SQL table or Excel spreadsheet
Ordered and unordered (not necessarily fixed-frequency) time series data.
Arbitrary matrix data (homogeneously typed or heterogeneous) with row and column labels
Any other form of observational / statistical data sets. The data actually need not be labeled at all to be placed into a pandas data structure
The two primary data structures of pandas, Series(1-dimensional) and DataFrame (2-dimensional), handle the vast majority of typical use cases in finance, statistics, social science, and many areas of engineering. For R users, DataFrame provides everything that R’s data.frame provides and much more. pandas is built on top of NumPy and is intended to integrate well within a scientific computing environment with many other 3rd party libraries.
Here are just a few of the things that pandas does well:
Easy handling of missing data (represented as NaN) in floating point as well as non-floating point data
Size mutability: columns can be inserted and deleted from DataFrame and higher dimensional objects
Automatic and explicit data alignment: objects can be explicitly aligned to a set of labels, or the user can simply ignore the labels and let Series, DataFrame, etc. automatically align the data for you in computations
Powerful, flexible group by functionality to perform split-apply-combine operations on data sets, for both aggregating and transforming data
Make it easy to convert ragged, differently-indexed data in other Python and NumPy data structures into DataFrame objects
Intelligent label-based slicing, fancy indexing, and subsetting of large data sets
Intuitive merging and joining data sets
Flexible reshaping and pivoting of data sets
Hierarchical labeling of axes (possible to have multiple labels per tick)
Robust IO tools for loading data from flat files (CSV and delimited), Excel files, databases, and saving / loading data from the ultrafast HDF5 format
Time series-specific functionality: date range generation and frequency conversion, moving window statistics, moving window linear regressions, date shifting and lagging, etc.
Many of these principles are here to address the shortcomings frequently experienced using other languages / scientific research environments. For data scientists, working with data is typically divided into multiple stages: munging and cleaning data, analyzing / modeling it, then organizing the results of the analysis into a form suitable for plotting or tabular display. pandas is the ideal tool for all of these tasks.
Some other notes
pandas is fast. Many of the low-level algorithmic bits have been extensively tweaked in Cython code. However, as with anything else generalization usually sacrifices performance. So if you focus on one feature for your application you may be able to create a faster specialized tool.
pandas is a dependency of statsmodels, making it an important part of the statistical computing ecosystem in Python.
pandas has been used extensively in production in financial applications.
Content of the Guide
What’s New Installation Contributing to pandas Package overview 10 Minutes to pandas Tutorials Cookbook Intro to Data Structures Essential Basic Functionality Working with Text Data Options and Settings Indexing and Selecting Data MultiIndex / Advanced Indexing Computational tools Working with missing data Group By: split-apply-combine Merge, join, and concatenate Reshaping and Pivot Tables Time Series / Date functionality Time Deltas Categorical Data Visualization Styling IO Tools (Text, CSV, HDF5, …) Enhancing Performance Sparse data structures Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) rpy2 / R interface pandas Ecosystem Comparison with R / R libraries Comparison with SQL Comparison with SAS Comparison with Stata API Reference Developer Internals Extending Pandas Release Notes
Download the guide, or read it online, here.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Analytikus. Staff authors are listed in https://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/free-book-the-definitive-guide-to-pandas
