Introduction to pandas

The pandas module is a powerful tool used to process various types of data, including economics, financial, and accounting data. If Python was installed on your machine via Anaconda, then the pandas module was installed already. If you issue the following command without any error, it indicates that the pandas module was installed:

>>>import pandas as pd

In the following example, we generate two time series starting from January 1, 2013. The names of those two time series (columns) are A and B:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
dates=pd.date_range('20160101',periods=5)
np.random.seed(12345)
x=pd.DataFrame(np.random.rand(5,2),index=dates,columns=('A','B'))

First, we import both NumPy and pandas modules. The pd.date_range() function is used to generate an index array. The x variable is a pandas DataFrame with dates as its index. Later in this chapter, we will discuss the pd.DataFrame() function. The columns() function defines...