pandas: powerful Python data analysis toolkit
What is it
pandas is a Python package providing fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with "relational" or "labeled" data both easy and intuitive. It aims to be the fundamental high-level building block for doing practical, real world data analysis in Python. Additionally, it has the broader goal of becoming the most powerful and flexible open source data analysis / manipulation tool available in any language. It is already well on its way toward this goal.
Main Features
Here are just a few of the things that pandas does well:
- Easy handling of missing data (represented as NaN) in floating point as well as non-floating point data
- Size mutability: columns can be inserted and deleted from DataFrame and higher dimensional objects
- Automatic and explicit data alignment: objects can be explicitly aligned to a set of labels, or the user can simply ignore the labels and let Series, DataFrame, etc. automatically align the data for you in computations
- Powerful, flexible group by functionality to perform split-apply-combine operations on data sets, for both aggregating and transforming data
- Make it easy to convert ragged, differently-indexed data in other Python and NumPy data structures into DataFrame objects
- Intelligent label-based slicing, fancy indexing, and subsetting of large data sets
- Intuitive merging and joining data sets
- Flexible reshaping and pivoting of data sets
- Hierarchical labeling of axes (possible to have multiple labels per tick)
- Robust IO tools for loading data from flat files (CSV and delimited), Excel files, databases, and saving / loading data from the ultrafast HDF5 format
- Time series-specific functionality: date range generation and frequency conversion, moving window statistics, moving window linear regressions, date shifting and lagging, etc.
Where to get it
The source code is currently hosted on GitHub at: http://github.com/pydata/pandas
Binary installers for the latest released version are available at the Python package index:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pandas/
And via easy_install or pip:
easy_install pandas pip install pandas
Dependencies
- NumPy: 1.6.1 or higher
- python-dateutil 1.5 or higher
- pytz
- Needed for time zone support with
date_range
Highly Recommended Dependencies
- numexpr
- Needed to accelerate some expression evaluation operations
- Required by PyTables
- bottleneck
- Needed to accelerate certain numerical operations
Optional dependencies
- Cython: Only necessary to build development version. Version 0.17.1 or higher.
- SciPy: miscellaneous statistical functions
- PyTables: necessary for HDF5-based storage
- matplotlib: for plotting
- statsmodels
- Needed for parts of :mod:`pandas.stats`
- lxml, or Beautiful Soup 4: for reading HTML tables
- The differences between lxml and Beautiful Soup 4 are mostly speed (lxml is faster), however sometimes Beautiful Soup returns what you might intuitively expect. Both backends are implemented, so try them both to see which one you like. They should return very similar results.
- Note that lxml requires Cython to build successfully
- boto: necessary for Amazon S3 access.
Installation from sources
To install pandas from source you need cython in addition to the normal dependencies above,
which can be installed from pypi:
pip install cython
In the pandas directory (same one where you found this file after cloning the git repo), execute:
python setup.py install
or for installing in development mode:
python setup.py develop
Alternatively, you can use pip if you want all the dependencies pulled in automatically
(the optional -e option is for installing it in
development mode):
pip install -e .
On Windows, you will need to install MinGW and execute:
python setup.py build --compiler=mingw32 python setup.py install
See http://pandas.pydata.org/ for more information.
License
BSD
Documentation
The official documentation is hosted on PyData.org: http://pandas.pydata.org/
The Sphinx documentation should provide a good starting point for learning how to use the library. Expect the docs to continue to expand as time goes on.
Background
Work on pandas started at AQR (a quantitative hedge fund) in 2008 and
has been under active development since then.
Discussion and Development
Since pandas development is related to a number of other scientific
Python projects, questions are welcome on the scipy-user mailing
list. Specialized discussions or design issues should take place on
the pystatsmodels mailing list / Google group, where
scikits.statsmodels and other libraries will also be discussed:
http://groups.google.com/group/pystatsmodels