What is it?
pandas is a Python package providing fast, flexible, and expressive data
structures designed to make working with "relational" or "labeled" data both
easy and intuitive. It aims to be the fundamental high-level building block for
doing practical, real world data analysis in Python. Additionally, it has
the broader goal of becoming the most powerful and flexible open source data
analysis / manipulation tool available in any language. It is already well on
its way towards this goal.
Main Features
Here are just a few of the things that pandas does well:
- Easy handling of missing data (represented as
NaN) in floating point as well as non-floating point data
- Size mutability: columns can be inserted and
deleted from DataFrame and higher dimensional
objects
- Automatic and explicit data alignment: objects can
be explicitly aligned to a set of labels, or the user can simply
ignore the labels and let Series, DataFrame, etc. automatically
align the data for you in computations
- Powerful, flexible group by functionality to perform
split-apply-combine operations on data sets, for both aggregating
and transforming data
- Make it easy to convert ragged,
differently-indexed data in other Python and NumPy data structures
into DataFrame objects
- Intelligent label-based slicing, fancy
indexing, and subsetting of
large data sets
- Intuitive merging and joining data
sets
- Flexible reshaping and pivoting of
data sets
- Hierarchical labeling of axes (possible to have multiple
labels per tick)
- Robust IO tools for loading data from flat files
(CSV and delimited), Excel files, databases,
and saving/loading data from the ultrafast HDF5 format
- Time series-specific functionality: date range
generation and frequency conversion, moving window statistics,
date shifting and lagging.
Where to get it
The source code is currently hosted on GitHub at:
https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas
Binary installers for the latest released version are available at the Python
package index and on conda.
# conda
conda install pandas
# or PyPI
pip install pandas
Dependencies
See the full installation instructions for minimum supported versions of required, recommended and optional dependencies.
Installation from sources
To install pandas from source you need Cython in addition to the normal
dependencies above. Cython can be installed from pypi:
pip install cython
In the pandas directory (same one where you found this file after
cloning the git repo), execute:
python setup.py install
or for installing in development mode:
python -m pip install -e . --no-build-isolation --no-use-pep517
If you have make, you can also use make develop to run the same command.
or alternatively
python setup.py develop
See the full instructions for installing from source.
License
BSD 3
Documentation
The official documentation is hosted on PyData.org: https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable
Background
Work on pandas started at AQR (a quantitative hedge fund) in 2008 and
has been under active development since then.
Getting Help
For usage questions, the best place to go to is StackOverflow.
Further, general questions and discussions can also take place on the pydata mailing list.
Discussion and Development
Most development discussion is taking place on github in this repo. Further, the pandas-dev mailing list can also be used for specialized discussions or design issues, and a Gitter channel is available for quick development related questions.
Contributing to pandas 
All contributions, bug reports, bug fixes, documentation improvements, enhancements and ideas are welcome.
A detailed overview on how to contribute can be found in the contributing guide. There is also an overview on GitHub.
If you are simply looking to start working with the pandas codebase, navigate to the GitHub "issues" tab and start looking through interesting issues. There are a number of issues listed under Docs and good first issue where you could start out.
You can also triage issues which may include reproducing bug reports, or asking for vital information such as version numbers or reproduction instructions. If you would like to start triaging issues, one easy way to get started is to subscribe to pandas on CodeTriage.
Or maybe through using pandas you have an idea of your own or are looking for something in the documentation and thinking ‘this can be improved’...you can do something about it!
Feel free to ask questions on the mailing list or on Gitter.
As contributors and maintainers to this project, you are expected to abide by pandas' code of conduct. More information can be found at: Contributor Code of Conduct
