pandas DataFrames

A pandas DataFrame is a data structure, which is a labeled two-dimensional object and is similar in spirit to an Excel worksheet or a relational database table. A similar concept, by the way, was invented originally in the R programming language. (For more information, refer to http://www.r-tutor.com/r-introduction/data-frame.) A DataFrame can be created in the following ways:

  • From another DataFrame.
  • From a NumPy array or a composite of arrays that has a two-dimensional shape.
  • Likewise, we can create a DataFrame out of another pandas data structure called Series. We will learn about Series in the following section.
  • A DataFrame can also be produced from a file, such as a CSV file.

As an example, we will use data that can be retrieved from http://www.exploredata.net/Downloads/WHO-Data-Set. The original datafile is quite big and has many columns, so we will use an edited file instead, which only contains the first nine columns and is called WHO_first9cols.csv; the file is in the code bundle of this book. These are the first two lines including the header:

Country,CountryID,Continent,Adolescent fertility rate (%),Adult literacy rate (%),Gross national income per capita (PPP international $),Net primary school enrolment ratio female (%),Net primary school enrolment ratio male (%),Population (in thousands) total
Afghanistan,1,1,151,28,,,,26088

In the next steps, we will take a look at pandas DataFrames and its attributes:

  1. To kick off, load the datafile into a DataFrame and print it on the screen:
    from pandas.io.parsers import read_csv

df = read_csv("WHO_first9cols.csv")
print "Dataframe", df

    The printout is a summary of the DataFrame. It is too long to be displayed entirely, so we will just grab the last few lines:

    57                             1340
58                            81021
59                              833
                                ...

[202 rows x 9 columns]
  2. The DataFrame has an attribute that holds its shape as a tuple, similar to ndarray. Query the number of rows of a DataFrame as follows:
    print "Shape", df.shape
print "Length", len(df)

    The values we obtain comply with the printout of the preceding step:

    Shape (202, 9)
Length 202
  3. Check the column's header and data types with the other attributes:
    print "Column Headers", df.columns
print "Data types", df.dtypes

    We receive the column headers in a special data structure:

    Column Headers Index([u'Country', u'CountryID', u'Continent', u'Adolescent fertility rate (%)', u'Adult literacy rate (%)', u'Gross national income per capita (PPP international $)', u'Net primary school enrolment ratio female (%)', u'Net primary school enrolment ratio male (%)', u'Population (in thousands) total'], dtype='object')

    The data types are printed as follows:

    pandas DataFrames
  4. The pandas DataFrame has an index, which is like the primary key of relational database tables. We can either specify the index or have pandas create it automatically. The index can be accessed with a corresponding property as follows:
    print "Index", df.index

    An index helps us search for items quickly, just like the index in this book. The index in this case is a wrapper around an array starting at 0, with an increment of one for each row:

    Index Int64Index([0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, ...], dtype='int64')
  5. Sometimes, we wish to iterate over the underlying data of a DataFrame. Iterating over column values can be inefficient if we utilize the pandas iterators. It's much better to extract the underlying NumPy arrays and work with those. The pandas DataFrame has an attribute that can aid with this as well:
    print "Values", df.values

    Please note that some values are designated nan in the output, for not a number. These values come from empty fields in the input datafile:

    Values [['Afghanistan' 1 1 ..., nan nan 26088.0]
 ['Albania' 2 2 ..., 93.0 94.0 3172.0]
 ['Algeria' 3 3 ..., 94.0 96.0 33351.0]
 ...,
 ['Yemen' 200 1 ..., 65.0 85.0 21732.0]
 ['Zambia' 201 3 ..., 94.0 90.0 11696.0]
 ['Zimbabwe' 202 3 ..., 88.0 87.0 13228.0]]

The code for the following example can be located in the df_demo.py file of this book's code bundle:

from pandas.io.parsers import read_csv

df = read_csv("WHO_first9cols.csv")
print "Dataframe", df
print "Shape", df.shape
print "Length", len(df)
print "Column Headers", df.columns
print "Data types", df.dtypes
print "Index", df.index
print "Values", df.values
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