We Keep Coding

Pandas How does the corrwith() work in this funcrion?

The Function is to find the correlation of any store with another store
input=store number which is to be compared
output=dataframe with correlation coefficient values
def calcCorr(store):
a=[]
metrix=pre_df[['TOT_SALES','TXN_PER_CUST']]```#add metrics as required e.g.
,'TXN_PER_CUST'
for i in metrix.index:
a.append(metrix.loc[store].corrwith(metrix.loc[i[0]]))
df= pd.DataFrame(a)
df.index=metrix.index
df=df.drop_duplicates()
df.index=[s[0] for s in df.index]
df.index.name="STORE_NBR"
return df
I dont' understand this part :corrwith(metrix.loc[i[0]])) Why there has a [0]? Thanks for your help!
The dataframe pre_df is looked like this:
enter image description here

As commented, this should not be the way to go as it produces a lot of duplicates (looping through all the rows but only keep the first level). The function can be written as:
def calcCorr1(store, df):
return pd.DataFrame({k:df.loc[store].corrwith(df.loc[k])
for k in df.index.unique('STORE_NBR')
}).T
Notice that instead of looping through all the rows, we just loop through the unique values in the first level (STORE_NBR) only. Since each store contains many rows, we are looking at a magnitude less of runtime here.

Paritition matrix into smaller matrices based on multiple values

So I have this giant matrix (~1.5 million rows x 7 columns) and am trying to figure out an efficient way to split it up. For simplicity of what I'm trying to do, I'll work with this much smaller matrix as an example for what I'm trying to do. The 7 columns consist of (in this order): item number, an x and y coordinate, 1st label (non-numeric), data #1, data #2, and 2nd label (non-numeric). So using pandas, I've imported from an excel sheet my matrix called A that looks like this:
What I need to do is partition this based on both labels (i.e. so I have one matrix that is all the 13G + Aa together, another matrix that is 14G + Aa, and another one that is 14G + Ab together -- this would have me wind up with 3 separate 2x7 matrices). The reason for this is because I need to run a bunch of statistics on the dataset of numbers of the "Marker" column for each individual matrix (e.g. in this example, break the 6 "marker" numbers into three sets of 2 "marker" numbers, and then run statistics on each set of two numbers). Since there are going to be hundreds of these smaller matrices on the real data set I have, I was trying to figure out some way to make the smaller matrices be labeled something like M1, M2, ..., M500 (or whatever number it ends up being) so that way later, I can use some loops to apply statistics to each individual matrix all at once without having to write it 500+ times.
What I've done so far is to use pandas to import my data set into python as a matrix with the command:
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
df = pd.read_csv(r"C:\path\cancerdata.csv")
A = df.as_matrix() #Convert excel sheet to matrix
A = np.delete(A, (0),axis=0) #Delete header row
Unfortunately, I haven't come across many resources for how to do what I want, which is why I wanted to ask here to see if anyone knows how to split up a matrix into smaller matrices based on multiple labels.

Your question has many implications, so instead of giving you a straight answer I'll try to give you some pointers on how to tackle this problem.
First off, don't transform your DataFrame into a Matrix. DataFrames are well-optimised for slicing and indexing operations (a Pandas Series object is in reality a fancy Numpy array anyway), so you only lose functionality by converting it to a Matrix.
You could probably convert your label columns into a MultiIndex. This way, you'll be able to access slices of your original DataFrame using df.loc, with a syntax similar to df.loc[label1].loc[label2].
A MultiIndex may sound confusing at first, but it really isn't. Try executing this code block and see for yourself how the resulting DataFrame looks like:
df = pd.read_csv("C:\path\cancerdata.csv")
labels01 = df["Label 1"].unique()
labels02 = df["Label 2"].unique()
index = pd.MultiIndex.from_product([labels01, labels02])
df.set_index(index, inplace=True)
print(df)
Here, we extracted all unique values in the columns "Label 1" and "Label 2", and created an MultiIndex based on all possible combinations of Label 1 vs. Label 2. In the df.set_index line, we extracted those columns from the DataFrame - now they act as indices for your other columns. For example, in order to access the DataFrame slice from your original DataFrame whose Label 1 = 13G and Label 2 = Aa, you can simply write:
sliced_df = df.loc["13G"].loc["Aa"]
And perform whatever calculations/statistics you need with it.
Lastly, instead of saving each sliced DataFrame into a list or dictionary, and then iterating over them to perform the calculations, consider rearranging your code so that, as soon as you create your sliced DataFrame, you peform the calculations, save them to a output/results file/DataFrame, and move on to the next slicing operation. Something like:
for L1 in labels01:
for L2 in labels02:
sliced_df = df.loc[L1].loc[L2]
results = perform_calculations(sub_df)
save_results(results)
This will both improve memory consumption and performance, which may be important considering your large dataset.

How to to arrange a loop in order to loop over columns and then do something

I'm a complete newbie to python, and I'm currently trying to work on a problem that allows me to take the average of each column except the number of columns is unknown.
I figured how to do it if I knew how many columns it is and to do each calculation separate. I'm supposed to do it by creating an empty list and looping the columns back into it.
import numpy as np
#average of all data not including NAN
def average (dataset):
return np.mean (dataset [np.isfinite (dataset)])
#this is how I did it by each column separate
dataset = np.genfromtxt("some file")
print (average(dataset [:,0]))
print (average(dataset [:,1]))
#what I'm trying to do with a loop
def avg (dataset):
for column in dataset:
lst = []
column = #i'm not sure how to define how many columns I have
Avg = average (column)
return Avg

You can use the numpy.mean() function:
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.mean.html
with:
np.mean(my_data, axis=0)
The axis indicates whether you are taking the average along columns or rows (axis = 0 means you take the average of each column, what you are trying to do). The output will be a vector whose length is the same as the number of columns (or rows) along which you took the average, and each element is the average of the corresponding column (or row). You do not need to know the shape of the matrix in advance to do this.
You CAN do this using a for loop, but it's not a good idea -- looping over matrices in numpy is slow, whereas using vectorized operations like np.mean() is very very fast. So in general when using numpy one tries to use those types of built-in operations instead of looping over everything at least if possible.
Also -- if you want the number of columns in your matrix -- it's
my_matrix.shape[1]
returns number of columns;
my_matrix.shape[0] is number of rows.

What is a good heuristic to detect if a column in a pandas.DataFrame is categorical?

I've been developing a tool that automatically preprocesses data in pandas.DataFrame format. During this preprocessing step, I want to treat continuous and categorical data differently. In particular, I want to be able to apply, e.g., a OneHotEncoder to only the categorical data.
Now, let's assume that we're provided a pandas.DataFrame and have no other information about the data in the DataFrame. What is a good heuristic to use to determine whether a column in the pandas.DataFrame is categorical?
My initial thoughts are:
1) If there are strings in the column (e.g., the column data type is object), then the column very likely contains categorical data
2) If some percentage of the values in the column is unique (e.g., >=20%), then the column very likely contains continuous data
I've found 1) to work fine, but 2) hasn't panned out very well. I need better heuristics. How would you solve this problem?
Edit: Someone requested that I explain why 2) didn't work well. There were some tests cases where we still had continuous values in a column but there weren't many unique values in the column. The heuristic in 2) obviously failed in that case. There were also issues where we had a categorical column that had many, many unique values, e.g., passenger names in the Titanic data set. Same column type misclassification problem there.

Here are a couple of approaches:
Find the ratio of number of unique values to the total number of unique values. Something like the following
likely_cat = {}
for var in df.columns:
likely_cat[var] = 1.*df[var].nunique()/df[var].count() < 0.05 #or some other threshold
Check if the top n unique values account for more than a certain proportion of all values
top_n = 10
likely_cat = {}
for var in df.columns:
likely_cat[var] = 1.*df[var].value_counts(normalize=True).head(top_n).sum() > 0.8 #or some other threshold
Approach 1) has generally worked better for me than Approach 2). But approach 2) is better if there is a 'long-tailed distribution', where a small number of categorical variables have high frequency while a large number of categorical variables have low frequency.

There's are many places where you could "steal" the definitions of formats that can be cast as "number". ##,#e-# would be one of such format, just to illustrate. Maybe you'll be able to find a library to do so.
I try to cast everything to numbers first and what is left, well, there's no other way left but to keep them as categorical.

You could define which datatypes count as numerics and then exclude the corresponding variables
If initial dataframe is df:
numerics = ['int16', 'int32', 'int64', 'float16', 'float32', 'float64']
dataframe = df.select_dtypes(exclude=numerics)

I think the real question here is whether you'd like to bother the user once in a while or silently fail once in a while.
If you don't mind bothering the user, maybe detecting ambiguity and raising an error is the way to go.
If you don't mind failing silently, then your heuristics are ok. I don't think you'll find anything that's significantly better. I guess you could make this into a learning problem if you really want to. Download a bunch of datasets, assume they are collectively a decent representation of all data sets in the world, and train based on features over each data set / column to predict categorical vs. continuous.
But of course in the end nothing can be perfect. E.g. is the column [1, 8, 22, 8, 9, 8] referring to hours of the day or to dog breeds?

I've been thinking about a similar problem and the more that I consider it, it seems that this itself is a classification problem that could benefit from training a model.
I bet if you examined a bunch of datasets and extracted these features for each column / pandas.Series:
% floats: percentage of values that are float
% int: percentage of values that are whole numbers
% string: percentage of values that are strings
% unique string: number of unique string values / total number
% unique integers: number of unique integer values / total number
mean numerical value (non numerical values considered 0 for this)
std deviation of numerical values
and trained a model, it could get pretty good at inferring column types, where the possible output values are: categorical, ordinal, quantitative.
Side note: as far as a Series with a limited number of numerical values goes, it seems like the interesting problem would be determining categorical vs ordinal; it doesn't hurt to think a variable is ordinal if it turns out to be quantitative right? The preprocessing steps would encode the ordinal values numerically anyways without one-hot encoding.
A related problem that is interesting: given a group of columns, can you tell if they are already one-hot encoded? E.g in the forest-cover-type-prediction kaggle contest, you would automatically know that soil type is a single categorical variable.

IMO the opposite strategy, identifying categoricals is better because it depends on what the data is about. Technically address data can be thought of as unordered categorical data, but usually I wouldn't use it that way.
For survey data, an idea would be to look for Likert scales, e.g. 5-8 values, either strings (which might probably need hardcoded (and translated) levels to look for "good", "bad", ".agree.", "very .*",...) or int values in the 0-8 range + NA.
Countries and such things might also be identifiable...
Age groups (".-.") might also work.

I've been looking at this, thought it maybe useful to share what I have. This builds on #Rishabh Srivastava answer.
import pandas as pd
def remove_cat_features(X, method='fraction_unique', cat_cols=None, min_fraction_unique=0.05):
"""Removes categorical features using a given method.
X: pd.DataFrame, dataframe to remove categorical features from."""
if method=='fraction_unique':
unique_fraction = X.apply(lambda col: len(pd.unique(col))/len(col))
reduced_X = X.loc[:, unique_fraction>min_fraction_unique]
if method=='named_columns':
non_cat_cols = [col not in cat_cols for col in X.columns]
reduced_X = X.loc[:, non_cat_cols]
return reduced_X
You can then call this function, giving a pandas df as X and you can either remove named categorical columns or you can choose to remove columns with a low number of unique values (specified by min_fraction_unique).

Finding Pandas row location

Say we have two dataframes, with one being a slice of the other.
If I'm iterating over the smaller DF, how do I find the index in the bigger DF, then find the row it is on?
So it would be something like this:
for idx in smaller.index:
loc = bigger.ix[ix]**.row_location???**
while not fin:
looking_for_something = bigger.iloc[loc]
if looking_for_something != criteria:
loc += 1
else:
fin = 1
I'm sure it is something simple but I can't seem to locate the way to do this.

If smaller is a slice of bigger, isn't all the information you are looking for in bigger already available in smaller?
If not, perhaps there are some columns in bigger not present in smaller. (Perhaps smaller should have been defined to include those columns?) In any case, you could use pd.merge or smaller.join(bigger, how='inner', ...) to match-up the rows in bigger with the rows in smaller that share the same index. This will accomplish in one fell swoop all the matches you are looking for with
for idx in smaller.index:
loc = bigger.ix[ix]**.row_location???**
Moreover, it will be quicker. In general, performing operations row-by-row will not be the fastest way to achieve results. It is better to think in terms of joins or merges or groupbys or some such operation that works on whole arrays at a time.