Prev: Indexes and NaN values       |      Next: Data access in DataFrame

The 'DataFrame' object¶

• A DataFrame object is a multi-dimensional table-like data structure (similar to a multidimensional array) containing a labeled collection of columns, each of which can be a different value type (numeric, string, boolean, etc.).

Example¶

• Suppose that now your country data table includes additionally: (a) the full country name and (b) the percentage of world population that each country population corresponds to.
• Thus, for each country you have a row of data (instead of just a column entry as in a Series object).
• Suppose also that your country data are still label-indexed by the country two-letter code. The DataFrame object for this data representation would look like the following:
• Data for each country in rows
• Index labels (country code) for each country (row)
• Names for each column

(data for this table come from: Wikipedia: List of countries and dependencies by population)

Constructing a DataFrame object¶

• To better understand how to construct a DataFrame object consider the following first:
• The DataFrame has many rows and columns; each column can be thought of as a Series object and all columns (Series objects) share the same label indexes.
• As with the Series, the most convenient way to construct a DataFrame is from a dictionary with 'column_name:columns' as 'key:value' pairs. This dictionary is then passed as argument to the DataFrame constructor.
• Remember also that usually you will need to read data from an external file. Understanding, however, how to construct a DataFrame using a dictionary is useful as well.
In [1]:
import pandas as pd

data = {'country': ['Italy','Spain','Greece','France','Portugal'],
'popu': [61, 46, 11, 65, 10],
'percent': [0.83,0.63,0.15,0.88,0.14]}

df = pd.DataFrame(data, index=['ITA', 'ESP', 'GRC', 'FRA', 'PRT'])
print(df)

      country  percent  popu
ITA     Italy     0.83    61
ESP     Spain     0.63    46
GRC    Greece     0.15    11
FRA    France     0.88    65
PRT  Portugal     0.14    10

• Observe the way that the 'df' DataFrame is printed: columns do not necessarily appear in the order they were declared (of course, you can later change the column order as you like)

DataFrame from 'nested' dictionary¶

• If a nested dictionary is passed to DataFrame constructor, then:
• the outer dict keys will become columns and
• the inner keys will become the row indices
In [2]:
# Data are on unemployment percentage in GRC and ESP

import pandas as pd

un_data = {'GRC':{'2013':25, '2014':26, '2015':24.5},
'ESP':{'2013':23, '2014':27, '2015':26.5}}

df = pd.DataFrame(un_data)
df

Out[2]:
ESP GRC
2013 23.0 25.0
2014 27.0 26.0
2015 26.5 24.5

Import from xls, xlsx¶

• Use the read_excel() function to import data from xls/xlsx formatted file.
• In the following example, tha data refer to world countries population (source: "The World Bank")
• The 'sampledata.xls' file used is available here
In [3]:
import pandas as pd

df

Out[3]:
Country 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Code
ESP Spain 44397319 45226803 45954106 46362946 46576897 46742697 46773055 46620045 46480882 46418269
FRA France 63621376 64016229 64374990 64707044 65027512 65342776 65659790 65972097 66495940 66808385
GRC Greece 11020362 11048473 11077841 11107017 11121341 11104899 11045011 10965211 10892413 10823732
IRL Ireland 4273591 4398942 4489544 4535375 4560155 4576794 4586897 4598294 4617225 4640703
ITA Italy 58143979 58438310 58826731 59095365 59277417 59379449 59539717 60233948 60789140 60802085
MLT Malta 405308 406724 409379 412477 414508 416268 419455 423374 427364 431333
PRT Portugal 10522288 10542964 10558177 10568247 10573100 10557560 10514844 10457295 10401062 10348648
CYP Cyprus 1048293 1063040 1077010 1090486 1103685 1116644 1129303 1141652 1153658 1165300
• We call the read_excel() mathod passing the following arguments:
• a) "../../data/sampledata.xls": the path and name of the data file (../../ denotes moving two levels above the folder where our code file is)
• b) sheetname="Data-8": give the name of the sheet we want to read (note that there are also other sheets in the xls file)
• c) skiprows=3: we skipped 3 rows in the beginning of the file that contain no data (check the xls file to see these rows)
• d) header=0: we defined as column names the first row after skipping (zero-indexed; in this case it would be the same even without setting the 'header' argument)
• e) _indexcol=0: finally, we define as label indexes the first (zero-indexed) column with country codes (if this was not set then new integer-based indexes would have been assigned - try it out in the code)

Import from csv¶

• In the following example we use the read_csv() function to read the same data from a csv formatted file
• A csv file is a file where data are separated with ',' as delimiter (csv = 'comma separated values')
• The 'sampledata.csv' file used is available here
In [4]:
import pandas as pd

df

Out[4]:
Country 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Code
ESP Spain 44397319 45226803 45954106 46362946 46576897 46742697 46773055 46620045 46480882 46418269
FRA France 63621376 64016229 64374990 64707044 65027512 65342776 65659790 65972097 66495940 66808385
GRC Greece 11020362 11048473 11077841 11107017 11121341 11104899 11045011 10965211 10892413 10823732
IRL Ireland 4273591 4398942 4489544 4535375 4560155 4576794 4586897 4598294 4617225 4640703
ITA Italy 58143979 58438310 58826731 59095365 59277417 59379449 59539717 60233948 60789140 60802085
MLT Malta 405308 406724 409379 412477 414508 416268 419455 423374 427364 431333
PRT Portugal 10522288 10542964 10558177 10568247 10573100 10557560 10514844 10457295 10401062 10348648
CYP Cyprus 1048293 1063040 1077010 1090486 1103685 1116644 1129303 1141652 1153658 1165300
• As you can see we passed the same arguments and additionally sep=','

• Although it is not needed in this case, it is useful to know that you can explicitely state in read_csv() what the delimiter is. Assigning a delimiter value through 'sep' makes it easy to read data from csv files with various types of delimiters (for example ';').