pandas Cheat Sheet (via yhat)

The folks over at yhat just released a cheat sheet for pandas.  You can download the cheat sheet in PDF for here.

There’s a couple important functions that I use all the time missing from their cheat sheet (actually….there are a lot of things missing, but its a great starter cheat sheet).

A few things that I use all the time with pandas dataframes that are worth collecting in one place are provided below.

Renaming columns in a pandas dataframe:

df.rename(columns={'col1': 'Column_1', 'col2': 'Column_2'}, inplace=True)

Iterating over a pandas dataframe:

for index, row in df.iterrows():
 * DO STUFF

Splitting pandas dataframe into chunks:

The function plus the function call will split a pandas dataframe (or list for that matter) into NUM_CHUNKS chunks. I use this often when working with the multiprocessing libary.

# This function creates chunks and returns them
def chunkify(lst,n):
    return [ lst[i::n] for i in xrange(n) ]
chunks = chunkify(df, NUMCHUNKS)

Accessing the value of a specific cell:

This will give you the value of the last row’s “COLUMN” cell.  This may not be the ‘best’ way to do it, but it gets the value

df.COLUMN.tail(1).iloc[0]

Getting rows matching a condition:

The below will get all rows in a pandas dataframe that match the criteria.  In addition to finding equality, you can do all the logical operators.

df[df.COLUMN == Criteria]

Getting rows matching multiple conditions:

This gets rows that match a criteria in COLUMN1 and those that match another criteria in COLUMN2

 df[(df.COLUMN1 == Criteria) & (df.COLUMN2 == Criteria_2) ]

About the Author

Eric D. Brown, D.Sc.

Eric D. Brown, D.Sc. has a doctorate in Information Systems with a specialization in Data Sciences, Decision Support and Knowledge Management. He writes about utilizing python for data analytics at pythondata.com and the crossroads of technology and strategy at ericbrown.com

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