Pandas and MatPlotLib

Question 1

Dataframes

Answer 1

For those who are familiar with R know the data frame as a way to store data in rectangular grids that can easily be overviewed. Each row of these grids corresponds to measurements or values of an instance, while each column is a vector containing data for a specific variable. This means that a data frame’s rows do not need to contain, but can contain, the same type of values: they can be numeric, character, logical, etc.

Data frames in Python are very similar: they come with the Pandas library, and they are defined as a two-dimensional labeled data structures with columns of potentially different types.

In general, you could say that the Pandas data frame consists of three main components: the data, the index, and the columns.

Question 2

matplotlib

Answer 2

matplotlib is probably the single most used Python package for 2D-graphics. It provides both a very quick way to visualize data from Python and publication-quality figures in many formats. We are going to explore matplotlib in interactive mode covering most common cases.

pyplot provides a convenient interface to the matplotlib object-oriented plotting library. It is modeled closely after Matlab(TM). Therefore, the majority of plotting commands in pyplot have Matlab(TM) analogs with similar arguments. Important commands are explained with interactive examples.