Reviewing foundational data science packages

In this section, we’ll cover a handful of more generalized data science packages, which will be useful within your spatial data science workflows. While these packages are useful for spatial data science, they are not purpose-built for spatial data science workflows, such as the packages covered previously in this chapter.

pandas

pandas is the primary Python package for reading, writing, and manipulating tabular data. As you may recall, the GeoPandas package is built on top of pandas and leverages most of pandas’ core functionality. In our coverage of GeoPandas, we did not cover all of the specialized functionality of pandas, which we’ll work to cover in this section. Let’s start with data structures.

Data structures

The primary pandas data structures are Series and DataFrame. As you may recall from the previous chapter, the GeoPandas’ GeoSeries and GeoDataFrame data structures are based on...