3. What is Pandas?#
Pandas is a fast, powerful, flexible and easy to use open source data analysis and manipulation tool, built on top of the Python programming language.
Pandas capabilities
A fast and efficient DataFrame object for data manipulation with integrated indexing;
Tools for reading and writing data between in-memory data structures and different formats: CSV and text files, Microsoft Excel, SQL databases, and the fast HDF5 format;
Intelligent data alignment and integrated handling of missing data: gain automatic label-based alignment in computations and easily manipulate messy data into an orderly form;
Flexible reshaping and pivoting of data sets;
Intelligent label-based slicing, fancy indexing, and subsetting of large data sets;
Columns can be inserted and deleted from data structures for size mutability;
Aggregating or transforming data with a powerful group by engine allowing split-apply-combine operations on data sets;
High performance merging and joining of data sets;
Hierarchical axis indexing provides an intuitive way of working with high-dimensional data in a lower-dimensional data structure;
Time series-functionality: date range generation and frequency conversion, moving window statistics, moving window linear regressions, date shifting and lagging. Even create domain-specific time offsets and join time series without losing data;
Highly optimized for performance, with critical code paths written in Cython or C.
Python with pandas is in use in a wide variety of academic and commercial domains, including Finance, Neuroscience, Economics, Statistics, Advertising, Web Analytics, and more.