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Querying a Series

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Introduction to Data Science in Python

University of Michigan

4.5 (10,711 ratings) | 260K Students Enrolled

Course 1 of 5 in the Applied Data Science with Python Specialization

This course will introduce the learner to the basics of the python programming environment, including fundamental python programming techniques such as lambdas, reading and manipulating csv files, and the numpy library. The course will introduce data manipulation and cleaning techniques using the popular python pandas data science library and introduce the abstraction of the Series and DataFrame as the central data structures for data analysis, along with tutorials on how to use functions such as groupby, merge, and pivot tables effectively. By the end of this course, students will be able to take tabular data, clean it, manipulate it, and run basic inferential statistical analyses. This course should be taken before any of the other Applied Data Science with Python courses: Applied Plotting, Charting & Data Representation in Python, Applied Machine Learning in Python, Applied Text Mining in Python, Applied Social Network Analysis in Python.

Skills You'll Learn

Python Programming, Numpy, Pandas, Data Cleansing

Reviews

4.5 (10,711 ratings)

5 stars
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4 stars
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3 stars
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2 stars
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1 star
176 ratings

GS

Feb 20, 2017

This course was fast paced but the material was interesting and not to complex. I can only recommend this course to anyone interested in Data Science and who already has a basic knowledge of Python.

NF

Jun 18, 2018

I thought this was course was good, and was fairly challenging for an online-only course. I thought the lectures could have been a little longer to ensure proper coverage of materials and functions.

From the lesson

Week 2

In this week of the course you'll learn the fundamentals of one of the most important toolkits Python has for data cleaning and processing -- pandas. You'll learn how to read in data into DataFrame structures, how to query these structures, and the details about such structures are indexed. The module ends with a programming assignment and a discussion question.

Introduction2:55

The Series Data Structure4:46

Querying a Series8:54

The DataFrame Data Structure7:16

DataFrame Indexing and Loading5:19

Querying a DataFrame5:16

Indexing Dataframes5:24

Missing Values4:54

Taught By

Christopher Brooks

A panda.Series can be queried, either by the index position or the index label.

As we saw, if you don't give an index to the series, the position and

the label are effectively the same values.

To query by numeric location, starting at zero, use the iloc attribute.

To query by the index label, you can use the loc attribute.

Here's an example using national sporting event data from Wikipedia.

Let's say we want to have a list of all of the sports in our index and

a list of countries as values.

You might keep these in a dictionary and create a series as we discussed.

If you wanted to see the fourth country on this,

we would use the iloc attribute with the parameter 3.

If you wanted to see which country has golf as its national sport,

we would use the loc attribute with parameter golf.

Keep in mind that iloc and loc are not methods, they are attributes.

So you don't use parentheses to query them, but square brackets instead,

which we'll call the indexing operator.

Though in Python,

this calls get and set an item methods depending on the context of its use.

This might seem a bit confusing if you're used to languages where encapsulation of

attributes, variables, and properties is common, such as in Java.

Pandas tries to make our code a bit more readable and provides a sort of

smart syntax using the indexing operator directly on the series itself.

For instance, if you pass in an integer parameter,

the operator will behave as if you want it to query via the iloc attribute.

If you pass in an object,

it will query as if you wanted to use the label based loc attribute.

So what happens if your index is a list of integers?

This is a bit complicated, and Pandas can't determine

automatically whether you're intending to query by index position or index label.

So you need to be careful when using the indexing operator on the series itself.

And the safer option is to be more explicit and use the iloc or

loc attributes directly.

Here's an example using some new sports data,

where countries are indexed by integer.

If we try and call s sub zero, we get a key error,

because there's no item in the sports list with an index of zero.

Instead we have to call iloc explicitly if we want the first item.

Okay, so now we know how to get data out of the series.

Let's talk about working with the data.

A common task is to want to consider all of the values inside of a series and

want to do some sort of operation.

This could be trying to find a certain number, summarizing data or

transforming the data in some way.

A typical programmatic approach to this would be to iterate over

all the items in the series, and invoke the operation one is interested in.

For instance, we could create a data frame of floating point values.

Let's think of these as prices for different products.

We could write a little routine which iterates over all of the items in

the series and adds them together to get a total.

This works, but it's slow.

Modern computers can do many tasks simultaneously, especially, but

not only, tasks involving mathematics.

Pandas and the underlying NumPy libraries support a method of computation called

vectorization.

Vectorization works with most of the functions in the NumPy library,

including the sum function.

Here's how we would really write the code using the NumPy sum method.

First we need to import the numpy module, and then we just call np.sum and

pass in an iterable item.

In this case, our panda series.

Now both of these methods create the same value, but is one actually faster?

The Jupyter Notebook has a magic function which can help.

First, let's create a big series of random numbers.

You'll see this used a lot when demonstrating techniques with Pandas.

Note that I've just used the head method, which reduces the amount of

data printed out by the series to the first five elements.

We can actually verify that length of the series is correct using the len function.

Magic functions begin with a percentage sign.

If we type this sign and then hit the Tab key,

we can see a list of the available magic functions.

You could write your own magic functions too, but

that's a little bit outside of the scope of this course.

We're actually going to use what's called a cellular magic function.

These start with two percentage signs and

modify a raptor code in the current Jupyter cell.

The function we're going to use is called timeit.

And as you may have guessed from the name, this function will run our code a few

times to determine, on average, how long it takes.

Let's run timeit with our original iterative code.

You can give timeit the number of loops that you would like to run.

By default, we'll use 1,000 loops.

I'll ask timeit here to use 100 runs because we're recording this.

Not bad.

Timeit ran this code and it doesn't seem like it takes very long at all.

Now let's try with vectorization.

Wow!

This is a pretty shocking difference in the speed and

demonstrates why data scientists need to be aware of parallel computing features

and start thinking in functional programming terms.

Related feature in Pandas and NumPy is called broadcasting.

With broadcasting, you can apply an operation to every value in the series,

changing the series.

For instance, if we wanted to increase every random variable by 2,

we could do so quickly using the += operator directly on the series object.

Here I'll just use the head operator to just print out the top five rows in

the series.

The procedural way of doing this would be to iterate through all of

the items in the series and increase the values directly.

A quick aside here.

Pandas does support iterating through a series much like a dictionary,

allowing you to unpack values easily.

But if you find yourself iterating through a series,

you should question whether you're doing things in the best possible way.

Here's how we would do this using the series set value method.

Let's try and time the two approaches.

Amazing.

Not only is it significantly faster, but it's more concise and

maybe even easier to read too.

The typical mathematical operations you would expect are vectorized, and the NumPy

documentation outlines what it takes to create vectorized functions of your own.

One last note on using the indexing operators to access series data.

The .loc attribute lets you not only modify data in place, but

also add new data as well.

If the value you pass in as the index doesn't exist, then a new entry is added.

And keep in mind, indices can have mixed types.

While it's important to be aware of the typing going on underneath,

Pandas will automatically change the underlying NumPy types as appropriate.

Here's an example using a series of a few numbers.

We could add some new value, maybe an animal, as you know, I like bears.

Just by calling the .loc indexing operator.

We see that mixed types for data values or index labels are no problem for Pandas.

Up until now I've shown only examples of a series where the index values were unique.

I want to end this lecture by showing an example where index values are not unique,

and this makes data frames different,

conceptually, that a relational database might be.

Revisiting the issue of countries and their national sports,

it turns out that many countries seem to like this game cricket.

We go back to our original series on sports.

It's possible to create a new series object with multiple entries for

cricket, and then use append to bring these together.

There are a couple of important considerations when using append.

First, Pandas is going to take your series and

try to infer the best data types to use.

In this example, everything is a string, so there's no problems here.

Second, the append method doesn't actually change the underlying series.

It instead returns a new series which is made up of the two appended together.

We can see this by going back and printing the original series of values and

seeing that they haven't changed.

This is actually a significant issue for

new Pandas users who are used to objects being changed in place.

So watch out for it, not just with append but with other Pandas functions as well.

Finally, we see that when we query the appended series for those who have cricket

as their national sport, we don't get a single value, but a series itself.

This is actually very common, and

if you have a relational database background, this is very similar to

every table query resulting in a return set which itself is a table.

In this lecture,

we focused on one of the primary data types of the Pandas library, the series.

There are many more methods associated with this series object that we haven't

talked about.

But with these basics down, we'll move on to talking about

the Panda's two-dimensional data structure, the data frame.

The data frame is very similar to the series object, but

includes multiple columns of data, and is the structure that you'll spend

the majority of your time working with when cleaning and aggregating data.

But before we move on to a discussion of the data frame, our tutorial assistant for

this course will provide a more in-depth look at how the series object can be used.

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