6. Working with Dataframes Using pandas#

Data scientists work with data stored in tables. This chapter introduces dataframes, one of the most widely used ways to represent data tables. We also introduce pandas, the standard Python package for working with dataframes. Here is an example of a dataframe that holds information about popular dog breeds:

grooming food_cost kids size
breed
Labrador Retriever weekly 466.0 high medium
German Shepherd weekly 466.0 medium large
Beagle daily 324.0 high small
Golden Retriever weekly 466.0 high medium
Yorkshire Terrier daily 324.0 low small
Bulldog weekly 466.0 medium medium
Boxer weekly 466.0 high medium

In a dataframe, each row represents a single record—in this case, a single dog breed. Each column represents a feature about the record—for example, the grooming column represents how often each dog breed needs to be groomed.

Dataframes have labels for both columns and rows. For instance, this dataframe has a column labeled grooming and a row labeled German Shepherd. The columns and rows of a dataframe are ordered—we can refer to the Labrador Retriever row as the first row of the dataframe.

Within a column, data have the same type. For instance, the the cost of food contains numbers, and the size of the dog consists of categories. But data types can be different within a row.

Because of these properties, dataframes enable all sorts of useful operations.

Note

Data scientists often find themselves working with people from different backgrounds who use different terms. For instance, computer scientists say that the columns of a dataframe represent features of the data, while statisticians call them variables instead.

Other times, people use the same term to refer to slightly different ideas. Data types in a programming sense refers to how a computer stores data internally. For instance, the size column has a string data type in Python. But from a statistical point of view, the type of the size column is ordered categorical data (ordinal data). We talk more about this specific distinction in Exploratory Data Analysis.

In this chapter, we introduce common dataframe operations using pandas. Data scientists use the pandas library when working with dataframes in Python. First, we explain the main objects that pandas provides: the DataFrame and Series classes. Then we show how to use pandas to perform common data manipulation tasks, like slicing, filtering, sorting, grouping, and joining.