Thinking in pandas: How to use the python data analysis library the right way

Abstract

Understand and implement big data analysis solutions in pandas with an emphasis on performance. This book strengthens your intuition for working with pandas, the Python data analysis library, by exploring its underlying implementation and data structures. Thinking in Pandas introduces the topic of big data and demonstrates concepts by looking at exciting and impactful projects that pandas helped to solve. From there, you will learn to assess your own projects by size and type to see if pandas is the appropriate library for your needs. Author Hannah Stepanek explains how to load and normalize data in pandas efficiently, and reviews some of the most commonly used loaders and several of their most powerful options. You will then learn how to access and transform data efficiently, what methods to avoid, and when to employ more advanced performance techniques. You will also go over basic data access and munging in pandas and the intuitive dictionary syntax. Choosing the right DataFrame format, working with multi-level DataFrames, and how pandas might be improved upon in the future are also covered.