Replicating boolean indexing with index selection

It is possible to replicate specific cases of boolean selection by taking advantage of the index. Selection through the index is more intuitive and makes for greater readability.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we use the college dataset to select all institutions from a particular state with both boolean indexing and index selection and then compare each of their performance against one another.

How to do it...

1. Read in the college dataset and use boolean indexing to select all institutions from the state of Texas (TX):

>>> college = pd.read_csv('data/college.csv')
>>> college[college['STABBR'] == 'TX'].head()

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2. To replicate this using index selection, we need to move the STABBR column into the index. We can then use label-based selection with the .loc indexer:

>>> college2 = college.set_index('STABBR')
>>> college2.loc['TX'].head()

3. Let's compare the speed of both methods:

>>&gt...