Pandas Cookbook

Book excerpt: Over 95 hands-on recipes to leverage the power of pandas for efficient scientific computation and data analysis About This Book Use the power of pandas to solve most complex scientific computing problems with ease Leverage fast, robust data structures in pandas to gain useful insights from your data Practical, easy to implement recipes for quick solutions to common problems in data using pandas Who This Book Is For This book is for data scientists, analysts and Python developers who wish to explore data analysis and scientific computing in a practical, hands-on manner. The recipes included in this book are suitable for both novice and advanced users, and contain helpful tips, tricks and caveats wherever necessary. Some understanding of pandas will be helpful, but not mandatory. What You Will Learn Master the fundamentals of pandas to quickly begin exploring any dataset Isolate any subset of data by properly selecting and querying the data Split data into independent groups before applying aggregations and transformations to each group Restructure data into tidy form to make data analysis and visualization easier Prepare real-world messy datasets for machine learning Combine and merge data from different sources through pandas SQL-like operations Utilize pandas unparalleled time series functionality Create beautiful and insightful visualizations through pandas direct hooks to Matplotlib and Seaborn In Detail This book will provide you with unique, idiomatic, and fun recipes for both fundamental and advanced data manipulation tasks with pandas. Some recipes focus on achieving a deeper understanding of basic principles, or comparing and contrasting two similar operations. Other recipes will dive deep into a particular dataset, uncovering new and unexpected insights along the way. The pandas library is massive, and it's common for frequent users to be unaware of many of its more impressive features. The official pandas documentation, while thorough, does not contain many useful examples of how to piece together multiple commands like one would do during an actual analysis. This book guides you, as if you were looking over the shoulder of an expert, through practical situations that you are highly likely to encounter. Many advanced recipes combine several different features across the pandas library to generate results. Style and approach The author relies on his vast experience teaching pandas in a professional setting to deliver very detailed explanations for each line of code in all of the recipes. All code and dataset explanations exist in Jupyter Notebooks, an excellent interface for exploring data.