Cookbook

This is a repository for short and sweet examples and links for useful pandas recipes. We encourage users to add to this documentation.

Adding interesting links and/or inline examples to this section is a great First Pull Request.

Simplified, condensed, new-user friendly, in-line examples have been inserted where possible to augment the Stack-Overflow and GitHub links. Many of the links contain expanded information, above what the in-line examples offer.

Pandas (pd) and Numpy (np) are the only two abbreviated imported modules. The rest are kept explicitly imported for newer users.

These examples are written for Python 3. Minor tweaks might be necessary for earlier python versions.

Idioms

These are some neat pandas idioms

if-then/if-then-else on one column, and assignment to another one or more columns:

In [1]: df = pd.DataFrame({'AAA': [4, 5, 6, 7],
   ...:                    'BBB': [10, 20, 30, 40],
   ...:                    'CCC': [100, 50, -30, -50]})
   ...: 

In [2]: df
Out[2]: 
   AAA  BBB  CCC
0    4   10  100
1    5   20   50
2    6   30  -30
3    7   40  -50

if-then…

An if-then on one column

An if-then with assignment to 2 columns:

Add another line with different logic, to do the -else

Or use pandas where after you’ve set up a mask

if-then-else using numpy’s where()

Splitting

Split a frame with a boolean criterion

Building criteria

Select with multi-column criteria

…and (without assignment returns a Series)

…or (without assignment returns a Series)

…or (with assignment modifies the DataFrame.)

Select rows with data closest to certain value using argsort

Dynamically reduce a list of criteria using a binary operators

One could hard code:

…Or it can be done with a list of dynamically built criteria

Selection

DataFrames

The indexing docs.

Using both row labels and value conditionals

Use loc for label-oriented slicing and iloc positional slicing

There are 2 explicit slicing methods, with a third general case

  1. Positional-oriented (Python slicing style : exclusive of end)

  2. Label-oriented (Non-Python slicing style : inclusive of end)

  3. General (Either slicing style : depends on if the slice contains labels or positions)

Ambiguity arises when an index consists of integers with a non-zero start or non-unit increment.

Using inverse operator (~) to take the complement of a mask

New columns

Efficiently and dynamically creating new columns using applymap

Keep other columns when using min() with groupby

Method 1 : idxmin() to get the index of the minimums

Method 2 : sort then take first of each

Notice the same results, with the exception of the index.

MultiIndexing

The multindexing docs.

Creating a MultiIndex from a labeled frame

Arithmetic

Performing arithmetic with a MultiIndex that needs broadcasting

Slicing

Slicing a MultiIndex with xs

To take the cross section of the 1st level and 1st axis the index:

…and now the 2nd level of the 1st axis.

Slicing a MultiIndex with xs, method #2

Setting portions of a MultiIndex with xs

Sorting

Sort by specific column or an ordered list of columns, with a MultiIndex

Partial selection, the need for sortedness;

Levels

Prepending a level to a multiindex

Flatten Hierarchical columns

Missing data

The missing data docs.

Fill forward a reversed timeseries

cumsum reset at NaN values

Replace

Using replace with backrefs

Grouping

The grouping docs.

Basic grouping with apply

Unlike agg, apply’s callable is passed a sub-DataFrame which gives you access to all the columns

Using get_group

Apply to different items in a group

Expanding apply

Replacing some values with mean of the rest of a group

Sort groups by aggregated data

Create multiple aggregated columns

Create a value counts column and reassign back to the DataFrame

Shift groups of the values in a column based on the index

Select row with maximum value from each group

Grouping like Python’s itertools.groupby

Expanding data

Alignment and to-date

Rolling Computation window based on values instead of counts

Rolling Mean by Time Interval

Splitting

Splitting a frame

Create a list of dataframes, split using a delineation based on logic included in rows.

Pivot

The Pivot docs.

Partial sums and subtotals

Frequency table like plyr in R

Plot pandas DataFrame with year over year data

To create year and month cross tabulation:

Apply

Rolling apply to organize - Turning embedded lists into a MultiIndex frame

Rolling apply with a DataFrame returning a Series

Rolling Apply to multiple columns where function calculates a Series before a Scalar from the Series is returned

Rolling apply with a DataFrame returning a Scalar

Rolling Apply to multiple columns where function returns a Scalar (Volume Weighted Average Price)

Timeseries

Between times

Using indexer between time

Constructing a datetime range that excludes weekends and includes only certain times

Vectorized Lookup

Aggregation and plotting time series

Turn a matrix with hours in columns and days in rows into a continuous row sequence in the form of a time series. How to rearrange a Python pandas DataFrame?

Dealing with duplicates when reindexing a timeseries to a specified frequency

Calculate the first day of the month for each entry in a DatetimeIndex

Resampling

The Resample docs.

Using Grouper instead of TimeGrouper for time grouping of values

Time grouping with some missing values

Valid frequency arguments to Grouper

Grouping using a MultiIndex

Using TimeGrouper and another grouping to create subgroups, then apply a custom function

Resampling with custom periods

Resample intraday frame without adding new days

Resample minute data

Resample with groupby

Merge

The Concat docs. The Join docs.

Append two dataframes with overlapping index (emulate R rbind)

Depending on df construction, ignore_index may be needed

Self Join of a DataFrame

How to set the index and join

KDB like asof join

Join with a criteria based on the values

Using searchsorted to merge based on values inside a range

Plotting

The Plotting docs.

Make Matplotlib look like R

Setting x-axis major and minor labels

Plotting multiple charts in an ipython notebook

Creating a multi-line plot

Plotting a heatmap

Annotate a time-series plot

Annotate a time-series plot #2

Generate Embedded plots in excel files using Pandas, Vincent and xlsxwriter

Boxplot for each quartile of a stratifying variable

../_images/quartile_boxplot.png

Data In/Out

Performance comparison of SQL vs HDF5

CSV

The CSV docs

read_csv in action

appending to a csv

Reading a csv chunk-by-chunk

Reading only certain rows of a csv chunk-by-chunk

Reading the first few lines of a frame

Reading a file that is compressed but not by gzip/bz2 (the native compressed formats which read_csv understands). This example shows a WinZipped file, but is a general application of opening the file within a context manager and using that handle to read. See here

Inferring dtypes from a file

Dealing with bad lines

Dealing with bad lines II

Reading CSV with Unix timestamps and converting to local timezone

Write a multi-row index CSV without writing duplicates

Reading multiple files to create a single DataFrame

The best way to combine multiple files into a single DataFrame is to read the individual frames one by one, put all of the individual frames into a list, and then combine the frames in the list using pd.concat():

You can use the same approach to read all files matching a pattern. Here is an example using glob:

Finally, this strategy will work with the other pd.read_*(...) functions described in the io docs.

Parsing date components in multi-columns

Parsing date components in multi-columns is faster with a format

Skip row between header and data

Option 1: pass rows explicitly to skip rows

Option 2: read column names and then data

SQL

The SQL docs

Reading from databases with SQL

Excel

The Excel docs

Reading from a filelike handle

Modifying formatting in XlsxWriter output

HTML

Reading HTML tables from a server that cannot handle the default request header

HDFStore

The HDFStores docs

Simple queries with a Timestamp Index

Managing heterogeneous data using a linked multiple table hierarchy

Merging on-disk tables with millions of rows

Avoiding inconsistencies when writing to a store from multiple processes/threads

De-duplicating a large store by chunks, essentially a recursive reduction operation. Shows a function for taking in data from csv file and creating a store by chunks, with date parsing as well. See here

Creating a store chunk-by-chunk from a csv file

Appending to a store, while creating a unique index

Large Data work flows

Reading in a sequence of files, then providing a global unique index to a store while appending

Groupby on a HDFStore with low group density

Groupby on a HDFStore with high group density

Hierarchical queries on a HDFStore

Counting with a HDFStore

Troubleshoot HDFStore exceptions

Setting min_itemsize with strings

Using ptrepack to create a completely-sorted-index on a store

Storing Attributes to a group node

Binary files

pandas readily accepts NumPy record arrays, if you need to read in a binary file consisting of an array of C structs. For example, given this C program in a file called main.c compiled with gcc main.c -std=gnu99 on a 64-bit machine,

the following Python code will read the binary file 'binary.dat' into a pandas DataFrame, where each element of the struct corresponds to a column in the frame:

Note

The offsets of the structure elements may be different depending on the architecture of the machine on which the file was created. Using a raw binary file format like this for general data storage is not recommended, as it is not cross platform. We recommended either HDF5 or parquet, both of which are supported by pandas’ IO facilities.

Computation

Numerical integration (sample-based) of a time series

Correlation

Often it’s useful to obtain the lower (or upper) triangular form of a correlation matrix calculated from DataFrame.corr(). This can be achieved by passing a boolean mask to where as follows:

The method argument within DataFrame.corr can accept a callable in addition to the named correlation types. Here we compute the distance correlation matrix for a DataFrame object.

Timedeltas

The Timedeltas docs.

Using timedeltas

Adding and subtracting deltas and dates

Another example

Values can be set to NaT using np.nan, similar to datetime

Aliasing axis names

To globally provide aliases for axis names, one can define these 2 functions:

Creating example data

To create a dataframe from every combination of some given values, like R’s expand.grid() function, we can create a dict where the keys are column names and the values are lists of the data values:

Reference : https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/user_guide/cookbook.html

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