Introduction to the Python pandas package

The Python pandas package is very useful when dealing with data. The pandas package is a wonderful tool for data preprocessing, which is essential for data analysis. There is a humorous way of describing the importance of data cleaning: "A data scientist spends 80% of their time cleaning the data and the other 20% complaining about cleaning the data". To test if the package is preinstalled, we can type import pandas as pd after we launch Python. If we don't see any error messages, it means that the package was preinstalled. If we do, then we can use conda install pandas to install the package. To find all available functions, we could use the following three lines of Python code:

To find out about the usage or examples of inpidual functions, the help() function can be used. For example, for the to_pickle functionality shown at the bottom of the previous screenshot, we type help(pd.to_pickle), shown in the first line here: