Python Pandas Tutorial - Introduction and Installation

Python Pandas Tutorial - Introduction

Python Pandas or Python Data Analysis Library is an open-source library which provides high-performance, easy-to-use data structures and data analysis tools for the Python programming language. Python Pandas is also used for timeseries data analysis. Python Pandas is derived from the term “panel data”, an econometrics term for data sets that include observations over multiple time periods for the same individuals (wikipedia).

Data scientists love to use python pandas for data analysis because:-

• It handles the missing data very efficiently and easily.
• It is faster and provides a highly optimized performance as it is built on the top of numpy.
• It can be used to easily manipulate the data using functions like merge, concatenate or reshape.
• It works smoothly and efficiently with time series data.
• It provides series and dataframes for handling one-dimensional and multi-dimensional data.
• It can easily extract the data from various data forms like txt, csv, excel and present it in a tabular (dataframe) form.

How to install Python Pandas?

Installing with anaconda

Python Pandas is buit on the top of Numpy and Scipy and hence for installing python pandas you need to install numpy and scipy also.Which makes it little difficult for novice users to install it. Hence, the simplest way to install python pandas (as recommended by the official python pandas website also) is to install it using anaconda. You can check installation guide for anaconda from here.

Installing python pandas with miniconda

The disadvantage of using the above method is that, it will result in installing hundreds of packages included with Anaconda. To overcome this and have more control on the number of packages you want to install, you can use miniconda.
Use this installer to run miniconda, which will install conda for you. Once you are done doing that, you can simply run the following command to install pandas.

conda install pandas

Installing Python Pandas from PyPi
Pandas can also be installed from Pypi using the following command:-
pip install pandas

Check out our one minute video for installing pandas using pypi

Installing Python Pandas using Linux distribution’s package

You can also install pandas for python 3 on linux using the commands in the following table:-