The Pandas data structure
Let's first get acquainted with two of Pandas' primary data structures: the Series and the DataFrame. They can handle the majority of use cases in finance, statistic, social science, and many areas of engineering.
Series
A Series is a one-dimensional object similar to an array, list, or column in table. Each item in a Series is assigned to an entry in an index:
>>> s1 = pd.Series(np.random.rand(4), index=['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']) >>> s1 a 0.6122 b 0.98096 c 0.3350 d 0.7221 dtype: float64
By default, if no index is passed, it will be created to have values ranging from 0
to N-1
, where N
is the length of the Series:
>>> s2 = pd.Series(np.random.rand(4)) >>> s2 0 0.6913 1 0.8487 2 0.8627 3 0.7286 dtype: float64
We can access the value of a Series by using the index:
>>> s1['c'] 0.3350 >>>s1['c'] = 3.14 >>...