pandas

Writing a Pandas (or Dask) dataframe to Amazon S3, or Google Cloud Storage, all you need to do is pass an S3 or GCS path to a serialisation function, e.g. # df is a pandas dataframe df.to_csv(f's3://{bucket}/{key}') Under the hood Pandas uses fsspec which lets you work easily with remote filesystems, and abstracts over s3fs for Amazon S3 and gcfs for Google Cloud Storage (and other backends such as (S)FTP, SSH or HDFS).

Tabular data in Pandas is very flexible, but sometimes you just want a key value store for fast lookups. Because Python is slow, but Pandas and Numpy often have fast C implementations under the hood, the way you do something can have a large impact on its speed. The fastest way I've found to convert a dataframe to a dictionary from the columns keys to the column value is: df.set_index(keys)[value].to_dict() The rest of this article will discuss how I used this to speed up a function by a factor of 20.

One of my favourite tools in Pandas is agg for aggregation (it's a worse version of dplyrs summarise). Unfortunately it can be difficult to work with for custom aggregates, like nth largest value. If your aggregate is parameterised, like quantile, you potentially have to define a function for every parameter you use. A neat trick is to use a class to capture the parameters, making it much easier to try out variations.

Sometimes I have nested object of dictionaries and lists, frequently from a JSON object, that I need to deal with in Python. Often I want to load this into a Pandas dataframe, but accessing and mutating dictionary column is a pain, with a whole bunch of expressions like .apply(lambda x: x[0]['a']['b']). A simple way to handle this is to flatten the objects before I put them into the dataframe, and then I can access them directly.

When looking at Pandas dataframes in a Jupyter notebook it can be hard to find what you're looking for in a big mess of numbers. Something that can help is formatting the numbers, making them shorter and using graphics to highlight points of interest. Using Pandas style you can make the story of your dataframe standout in a Jupyter notebook, and even export the styling to Excel. The Pandas style documentation gives pretty clear examples of how to use it.