Pandas (software)


In computer programming, pandas is a software library written for the Python programming language for data manipulation and analysis. In particular, it offers data structures and operations for manipulating numerical tables and time series. It is free software released under the three-clause BSD license. The name is derived from the term "panel data", an econometrics term for data sets that include observations over multiple time periods for the same individuals.

Library features

The library is highly optimized for performance, with critical code paths written in Cython or C.

Dataframes

Pandas is mainly used for data analysis. Pandas allows importing data from various file formats such as comma-separated values, JSON, SQL, Microsoft Excel. Pandas allows various data manipulation operations such as merging, reshaping, selecting, as well as data cleaning, and data wrangling features.

History

Developer Wes McKinney started working on pandas in 2008 while at AQR Capital Management out of the need for a high performance, flexible tool to perform quantitative analysis on financial data. Before leaving AQR he was able to convince management to allow him to open source the library.
Another AQR employee, Chang She, joined the effort in 2012 as the second major contributor to the library.
In 2015, pandas signed on as a fiscally sponsored project of NumFOCUS, a 501 nonprofit charity in the United States.