Pandas: Groupby

groupby is an amazingly powerful function in pandas. But it is also complicated to use and understand. The point of this lesson is to make you feel confident in using groupby and its cousins, resample and rolling.

These notes are loosely based on the Pandas GroupBy Documentation.

Imports:

In [1]:
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (12,7)
%matplotlib inline
import pandas as pd

First we read the Earthquake data from our previous assignment:

In [2]:
df = pd.read_csv('http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~rpa/usgs_earthquakes_2014.csv', parse_dates=['time'], index_col='id')
df['country'] = df.place.str.split(', ').str[-1]
df_small = df[df.mag<4]
df = df[df.mag>4]
df.head()
Out[2]:
time latitude longitude depth mag magType nst gap dmin rms net updated place type country
id
usc000mqlp 2014-01-31 23:08:03.660 -4.9758 153.9466 110.18 4.2 mb NaN 98.0 1.940 0.61 us 2014-04-08T01:43:19.000Z 115km ESE of Taron, Papua New Guinea earthquake Papua New Guinea
usc000mqln 2014-01-31 22:54:32.970 -28.1775 -177.9058 95.84 4.3 mb NaN 104.0 1.063 1.14 us 2014-04-08T01:43:19.000Z 120km N of Raoul Island, New Zealand earthquake New Zealand
usc000mqls 2014-01-31 22:49:49.740 -23.1192 179.1174 528.34 4.4 mb NaN 80.0 5.439 0.95 us 2014-04-08T01:43:19.000Z South of the Fiji Islands earthquake South of the Fiji Islands
usc000mf1x 2014-01-31 22:19:44.330 51.1569 -178.0910 37.50 4.2 mb NaN NaN NaN 0.83 us 2014-04-08T01:43:19.000Z 72km E of Amatignak Island, Alaska earthquake Alaska
usc000mqlm 2014-01-31 21:56:44.320 -4.8800 153.8434 112.66 4.3 mb NaN 199.0 1.808 0.79 us 2014-04-08T01:43:19.000Z 100km ESE of Taron, Papua New Guinea earthquake Papua New Guinea

An Example

This is an example of a "one-liner" that you can accomplish with groupby.

In [3]:
df.groupby('country').mag.count().nlargest(20).plot(kind='bar', figsize=(12,6))
Out[3]:
In [4]:
df_small.groupby('country').mag.count().nlargest(20).plot(kind='bar', figsize=(12,6))
Out[4]:
In [ ]:
 

What Happened?

Let's break apart this operation a bit. The workflow with groubpy can be divided into three general steps:

  1. Split: Partition the data into different groups based on some criterion.
  2. Apply: Do some caclulation within each group. Different types of "apply" steps might be
    1. Aggregation: Get the mean or max within the group.
    2. Transformation: Normalize all the values within a group
    3. Filtration: Eliminate some groups based on a criterion.
  3. Combine: Put the results back together into a single object.

The groupby method

Both Series and DataFrame objects have a groupby method. It accepts a variety of arguments, but the simplest way to think about it is that you pass another series, whose unique values are used to split the original object into different groups.

In [5]:
df.groupby(df.country)
Out[5]:

There is a shortcut for doing this with dataframes: you just pass the column name:

In [6]:
df.groupby('country')
Out[6]:

The GroubBy object

When we call, groupby we get back a GroupBy object:

In [7]:
gb = df.groupby('country')
gb
Out[7]:

The length tells us how many groups were found:

In [8]:
len(gb)
Out[8]:
262

All of the groups are available as a dictionary via the .groups attribute:

In [9]:
groups = gb.groups
len(groups)
Out[9]:
262
In [10]:
list(groups.keys())
Out[10]:
['',
 'Afghanistan',
 'Alaska',
 'Albania',
 'Algeria',
 'American Samoa',
 'Angola',
 'Anguilla',
 'Antarctica',
 'Argentina',
 'Arizona',
 'Aruba',
 'Ascension Island region',
 'Australia',
 'Azerbaijan',
 'Azores Islands region',
 'Azores-Cape St. Vincent Ridge',
 'Balleny Islands region',
 'Banda Sea',
 'Bangladesh',
 'Barbados',
 'Barbuda',
 'Bay of Bengal',
 'Bermuda',
 'Bhutan',
 'Bolivia',
 'Bosnia and Herzegovina',
 'Bouvet Island',
 'Bouvet Island region',
 'Brazil',
 'British Indian Ocean Territory',
 'British Virgin Islands',
 'Burma',
 'Burundi',
 'California',
 'Canada',
 'Cape Verde',
 'Carlsberg Ridge',
 'Cayman Islands',
 'Celebes Sea',
 'Central East Pacific Rise',
 'Central Mid-Atlantic Ridge',
 'Chagos Archipelago region',
 'Chile',
 'China',
 'Christmas Island',
 'Colombia',
 'Comoros',
 'Cook Islands',
 'Costa Rica',
 'Crozet Islands region',
 'Cuba',
 'Cyprus',
 'Davis Strait',
 'Democratic Republic of the Congo',
 'Djibouti',
 'Dominica',
 'Dominican Republic',
 'Drake Passage',
 'East Timor',
 'East of Severnaya Zemlya',
 'East of the Kuril Islands',
 'East of the North Island of New Zealand',
 'East of the Philippine Islands',
 'East of the South Sandwich Islands',
 'Easter Island region',
 'Eastern Greenland',
 'Ecuador',
 'Ecuador region',
 'Egypt',
 'El Salvador',
 'Eritrea',
 'Ethiopia',
 'Falkland Islands region',
 'Federated States of Micronesia region',
 'Fiji',
 'Fiji region',
 'France',
 'French Polynesia',
 'French Southern Territories',
 'Galapagos Triple Junction region',
 'Georgia',
 'Greece',
 'Greenland',
 'Greenland Sea',
 'Guadeloupe',
 'Guam',
 'Guatemala',
 'Gulf of Alaska',
 'Haiti',
 'Hawaii',
 'Honduras',
 'Iceland',
 'Idaho',
 'India',
 'India region',
 'Indian Ocean Triple Junction',
 'Indonesia',
 'Iran',
 'Iraq',
 'Italy',
 'Japan',
 'Japan region',
 'Jordan',
 'Kansas',
 'Kazakhstan',
 'Kermadec Islands region',
 'Kosovo',
 'Kuril Islands',
 'Kyrgyzstan',
 'Labrador Sea',
 'Laptev Sea',
 'Macedonia',
 'Macquarie Island region',
 'Malawi',
 'Malaysia',
 'Mariana Islands region',
 'Martinique',
 'Mauritania',
 'Mauritius',
 'Mauritius - Reunion region',
 'Mexico',
 'Micronesia',
 'Mid-Indian Ridge',
 'Molucca Sea',
 'Mongolia',
 'Montana',
 'Montenegro',
 'Morocco',
 'Mozambique',
 'Mozambique Channel',
 'Nepal',
 'New Caledonia',
 'New Mexico',
 'New Zealand',
 'Nicaragua',
 'Niue',
 'North Atlantic Ocean',
 'North Indian Ocean',
 'North Korea',
 'North of Ascension Island',
 'North of Franz Josef Land',
 'North of New Zealand',
 'North of Severnaya Zemlya',
 'North of Svalbard',
 'Northern East Pacific Rise',
 'Northern Mariana Islands',
 'Northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge',
 'Northwest of Australia',
 'Norway',
 'Norwegian Sea',
 'Off the coast of Central America',
 'Off the coast of Ecuador',
 'Off the coast of Oregon',
 'Off the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand',
 'Off the south coast of Australia',
 'Off the west coast of northern Sumatra',
 'Oklahoma',
 'Oman',
 'Oregon',
 'Owen Fracture Zone region',
 'Pacific-Antarctic Ridge',
 'Pakistan',
 'Palau',
 'Palau region',
 'Panama',
 'Papua New Guinea',
 'Peru',
 'Peru-Ecuador border region',
 'Philippine Islands region',
 'Philippines',
 'Poland',
 'Portugal',
 'Portugal region',
 'Prince Edward Islands',
 'Prince Edward Islands region',
 'Puerto Rico',
 'Republic of the Congo',
 'Reykjanes Ridge',
 'Romania',
 'Russia',
 'Russia region',
 'Saint Helena',
 'Saint Lucia',
 'Saint Vincent and the Grenadines',
 'Samoa',
 'Santa Cruz Islands region',
 'Saudi Arabia',
 'Scotia Sea',
 'Sea of Okhotsk',
 'Serbia',
 'Slovenia',
 'Socotra region',
 'Solomon Islands',
 'Somalia',
 'South Africa',
 'South Atlantic Ocean',
 'South Carolina',
 'South Georgia Island region',
 'South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands',
 'South Indian Ocean',
 'South Napa Earthquake',
 'South Sandwich Islands',
 'South Sandwich Islands region',
 'South Shetland Islands',
 'South Sudan',
 'South of Africa',
 'South of Australia',
 'South of Panama',
 'South of Tasmania',
 'South of Tonga',
 'South of the Fiji Islands',
 'South of the Kermadec Islands',
 'South of the Mariana Islands',
 'Southeast Indian Ridge',
 'Southeast central Pacific Ocean',
 'Southeast of Easter Island',
 'Southern East Pacific Rise',
 'Southern Mid-Atlantic Ridge',
 'Southern Pacific Ocean',
 'Southwest Indian Ridge',
 'Southwest of Africa',
 'Southwest of Australia',
 'Southwestern Atlantic Ocean',
 'Spain',
 'Sudan',
 'Svalbard and Jan Mayen',
 'Sweden',
 'Syria',
 'Taiwan',
 'Tajikistan',
 'Tanzania',
 'Thailand',
 'Tonga',
 'Tonga region',
 'Trinidad and Tobago',
 'Tristan da Cunha region',
 'Turkey',
 'Turkmenistan',
 'Uganda',
 'Ukraine',
 'United Kingdom',
 'Utah',
 'Uzbekistan',
 'Vanuatu',
 'Vanuatu region',
 'Venezuela',
 'Vietnam',
 'Wallis and Futuna',
 'West Chile Rise',
 'West of Australia',
 'West of Macquarie Island',
 'West of Vancouver Island',
 'West of the Galapagos Islands',
 'Western Australia',
 'Western Indian-Antarctic Ridge',
 'Yemen',
 'Zambia',
 'north of Ascension Island',
 'northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge',
 'south of Panama',
 'western Xizang']

Iterating and selecting groups

You can loop through the groups if you want.

In [11]:
for key, group in gb:
    display(group.head())
    print(f'The key is "{key}"')
    break
time latitude longitude depth mag magType nst gap dmin rms net updated place type country
id
usc000mkc8 2014-01-25 16:10:38.760 -55.2925 -27.0527 10.00 4.1 mb NaN 97.0 5.553 0.35 us 2014-03-27T18:15:40.000Z 156km N of Visokoi Island, earthquake
usc000mkc7 2014-01-25 09:43:23.230 -55.9434 -27.6772 103.48 4.3 mb NaN 87.0 5.324 0.62 us 2014-03-27T18:15:40.000Z 89km NNW of Visokoi Island, earthquake
usc000mh0c 2014-01-19 15:42:45.510 -56.9656 -26.7803 120.25 4.6 mb NaN 151.0 6.120 0.39 us 2014-03-22T00:05:23.000Z 39km SE of Visokoi Island, earthquake
usb000m7f2 2014-01-10 13:50:38.730 -56.0110 -26.1186 10.00 4.2 mb NaN 106.0 6.192 0.71 us 2014-03-15T03:38:58.000Z 101km NE of Visokoi Island, earthquake
usb000m78v 2014-01-07 06:51:09.160 -56.9651 -26.6696 124.37 4.3 mb NaN 109.0 6.176 0.59 us 2014-03-07T00:26:01.000Z 43km SE of Visokoi Island, earthquake
The key is ""

And you can get a specific group by key.

In [12]:
gb.get_group('Chile').head()
Out[12]:
time latitude longitude depth mag magType nst gap dmin rms net updated place type country
id
usc000mqlq 2014-01-31 20:00:16.000 -33.6550 -71.9810 25.10 4.5 mb NaN NaN NaN 1.63 us 2014-04-08T01:43:19.000Z 34km WSW of San Antonio, Chile earthquake Chile
usc000mql6 2014-01-31 13:48:23.000 -18.0690 -69.6630 149.10 4.3 mb NaN NaN NaN 1.77 us 2014-04-08T01:43:18.000Z 17km NW of Putre, Chile earthquake Chile
usc000mqk8 2014-01-30 14:20:56.560 -19.6118 -70.9487 15.16 4.1 mb NaN 159.0 1.227 1.34 us 2014-04-08T01:43:17.000Z 107km NW of Iquique, Chile earthquake Chile
usc000mdi2 2014-01-30 10:02:14.000 -32.1180 -71.7860 25.70 4.5 mwr NaN NaN NaN 1.10 us 2015-01-30T21:28:21.955Z 64km NW of La Ligua, Chile earthquake Chile
usc000mqeh 2014-01-29 18:58:23.000 -18.6610 -69.6440 123.10 4.8 mb NaN NaN NaN 1.52 us 2014-04-08T01:43:16.000Z 51km S of Putre, Chile earthquake Chile

Aggregation

Now that we know how to create a GroupBy object, let's learn how to do aggregation on it.

One way us to use the .aggregate method, which accepts another function as its argument. The result is automatically combined into a new dataframe with the group key as the index.

In [13]:
gb.aggregate(np.max).head()
Out[13]:
time latitude longitude depth mag magType nst gap dmin rms net updated place type
country
2014-12-31 14:49:19.200 -37.5219 78.9418 248.18 6.9 mww NaN 195.0 28.762 1.47 us 2015-03-17T02:38:27.040Z 99km NW of Visokoi Island, earthquake
Afghanistan 2014-12-27 06:37:50.010 37.0112 71.6062 248.39 5.6 mww NaN 172.0 3.505 1.55 us 2015-06-22T20:12:10.712Z 8km SE of Ashkasham, Afghanistan earthquake
Alaska 2014-12-30 21:22:21.580 67.9858 179.9288 266.61 7.9 mww 152.0 338.0 7.712 2.15 us 2015-05-30T05:34:08.822Z 9km WSW of Little Sitkin Island, Alaska earthquake
Albania 2014-05-20 04:43:25.500 41.5297 20.2804 28.26 5.0 mwr NaN 69.0 1.299 1.34 us 2015-01-30T15:28:03.533Z 6km NE of Durres, Albania earthquake
Algeria 2014-12-26 17:55:18.140 36.9391 5.6063 21.40 5.5 mww NaN 174.0 3.250 1.45 us 2015-03-17T02:37:18.040Z 5km SSW of Bougara, Algeria earthquake

By default, the operation is applied to every column. That's usually not what we want. We can use both . or [] syntax to select a specific column to operate on. Then we get back a series.

In [14]:
gb.mag.aggregate(np.max).head()
Out[14]:
country
               6.9
Afghanistan    5.6
Alaska         7.9
Albania        5.0
Algeria        5.5
Name: mag, dtype: float64
In [15]:
gb.mag.aggregate(np.max).nlargest(10)
Out[15]:
country
Chile                         8.2
Alaska                        7.9
Solomon Islands               7.6
Papua New Guinea              7.5
El Salvador                   7.3
Mexico                        7.2
Fiji                          7.1
Indonesia                     7.1
Southern East Pacific Rise    7.0
                              6.9
Name: mag, dtype: float64

There are shortcuts for common aggregation functions:

In [16]:
gb.mag.max().nlargest(10)
Out[16]:
country
Chile                         8.2
Alaska                        7.9
Solomon Islands               7.6
Papua New Guinea              7.5
El Salvador                   7.3
Mexico                        7.2
Fiji                          7.1
Indonesia                     7.1
Southern East Pacific Rise    7.0
                              6.9
Name: mag, dtype: float64
In [17]:
gb.mag.min().nsmallest(10)
Out[17]:
country
Mexico         4.01
Oregon         4.02
California     4.04
               4.10
Afghanistan    4.10
Alaska         4.10
Albania        4.10
Algeria        4.10
Angola         4.10
Antarctica     4.10
Name: mag, dtype: float64
In [18]:
gb.mag.mean().nlargest(10)
Out[18]:
country
South Napa Earthquake          6.020000
Bouvet Island region           5.750000
South Georgia Island region    5.450000
Barbados                       5.400000
New Mexico                     5.300000
Easter Island region           5.162500
Malawi                         5.100000
Drake Passage                  5.033333
North Korea                    5.000000
Saint Lucia                    5.000000
Name: mag, dtype: float64
In [19]:
gb.mag.std().nlargest(10)
Out[19]:
country
Barbados                              1.555635
Bouvet Island region                  1.484924
Puerto Rico                           0.957601
Off the coast of Ecuador              0.848528
Palau region                          0.777817
East of the South Sandwich Islands    0.606495
Southern East Pacific Rise            0.604508
South Indian Ocean                    0.602194
Prince Edward Islands region          0.595259
Panama                                0.591322
Name: mag, dtype: float64

We can also apply multiple functions at once:

In [20]:
gb.mag.aggregate([np.min, np.max, np.mean]).head()
Out[20]:
amin amax mean
country
4.1 6.9 4.582544
Afghanistan 4.1 5.6 4.410656
Alaska 4.1 7.9 4.515025
Albania 4.1 5.0 4.391667
Algeria 4.1 5.5 4.583333
In [21]:
gb.mag.aggregate([np.min, np.max, np.mean]).nlargest(10, 'mean').plot(kind='bar')
Out[21]:

Transformation

The key difference between aggregation and transformation is that aggregation returns a smaller object than the original, indexed by the group keys, while transformation returns an object with the same index (and same size) as the original object. Groupby + transformation is used when applying an operation that requires information about the whole group.

In this example, we standardize the earthquakes in each country so that the distribution has zero mean and unit variance. We do this by first defining a function called standardize and then passing it to the transform method.

I admit that I don't know why you would want to do this. transform makes more sense to me in the context of time grouping operation. See below for another example.

In [22]:
def standardize(x):
    return (x - x.mean())/x.std()

mag_standardized_by_country = gb.mag.transform(standardize)
mag_standardized_by_country.head()
Out[22]:
id
usc000mqlp   -0.915774
usc000mqln   -0.675696
usc000mqls   -0.282385
usc000mf1x   -0.684915
usc000mqlm   -0.666807
Name: mag, dtype: float64

Time Grouping

We already saw how pandas has a strong built-in understanding of time. This capability is even more powerful in the context of groupby. With datasets indexed by a pandas DateTimeIndex, we can easily group and resample the data using common time units.

To get started, let's load the timeseries data we already explored in past lessons.

In [23]:
import urllib
import pandas as pd

header_url = 'ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/uscrn/products/daily01/HEADERS.txt'
with urllib.request.urlopen(header_url) as response:
    data = response.read().decode('utf-8')
lines = data.split('\n')
headers = lines[1].split(' ')

ftp_base = 'ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/uscrn/products/daily01/'
dframes = []
for year in range(2016, 2019):
    data_url = f'{year}/CRND0103-{year}-NY_Millbrook_3_W.txt'               
    df = pd.read_csv(ftp_base + data_url, parse_dates=[1],
                     names=headers, header=None, sep='\s+',
                     na_values=[-9999.0, -99.0])
    dframes.append(df)

df = pd.concat(dframes)
df = df.set_index('LST_DATE')
In [24]:
df.head()
Out[24]:
WBANNO CRX_VN LONGITUDE LATITUDE T_DAILY_MAX T_DAILY_MIN T_DAILY_MEAN T_DAILY_AVG P_DAILY_CALC SOLARAD_DAILY ... SOIL_MOISTURE_10_DAILY SOIL_MOISTURE_20_DAILY SOIL_MOISTURE_50_DAILY SOIL_MOISTURE_100_DAILY SOIL_TEMP_5_DAILY SOIL_TEMP_10_DAILY SOIL_TEMP_20_DAILY SOIL_TEMP_50_DAILY SOIL_TEMP_100_DAILY
LST_DATE
2016-01-01 64756 2.422 -73.74 41.79 3.4 -0.5 1.5 1.3 0.0 1.69 ... 0.233 0.204 0.155 0.147 4.2 4.4 5.1 6.0 7.6 NaN
2016-01-02 64756 2.422 -73.74 41.79 2.9 -3.6 -0.4 -0.3 0.0 6.25 ... 0.227 0.199 0.152 0.144 2.8 3.1 4.2 5.7 7.4 NaN
2016-01-03 64756 2.422 -73.74 41.79 5.1 -1.8 1.6 1.1 0.0 5.69 ... 0.223 0.196 0.151 0.141 2.6 2.8 3.8 5.2 7.2 NaN
2016-01-04 64756 2.422 -73.74 41.79 0.5 -14.4 -6.9 -7.5 0.0 9.17 ... 0.220 0.194 0.148 0.139 1.7 2.1 3.4 4.9 6.9 NaN
2016-01-05 64756 2.422 -73.74 41.79 -5.2 -15.5 -10.3 -11.7 0.0 9.34 ... 0.213 0.191 0.148 0.138 0.4 0.9 2.4 4.3 6.6 NaN

5 rows × 28 columns

This timeseries has daily resolution, and the daily plots are somewhat noisy.

In [25]:
df.T_DAILY_MEAN.plot()
Out[25]:

A common way to analyze such data in climate science is to create a "climatology," which contains the average values in each month or day of the year. We can do this easily with groupby. Recall that df.index is a pandas DateTimeIndex object.

In [26]:
monthly_climatology = df.groupby(df.index.month).mean()
monthly_climatology
Out[26]:
WBANNO CRX_VN LONGITUDE LATITUDE T_DAILY_MAX T_DAILY_MIN T_DAILY_MEAN T_DAILY_AVG P_DAILY_CALC SOLARAD_DAILY ... SOIL_MOISTURE_10_DAILY SOIL_MOISTURE_20_DAILY SOIL_MOISTURE_50_DAILY SOIL_MOISTURE_100_DAILY SOIL_TEMP_5_DAILY SOIL_TEMP_10_DAILY SOIL_TEMP_20_DAILY SOIL_TEMP_50_DAILY SOIL_TEMP_100_DAILY
LST_DATE
1 64756 2.488667 -73.74 41.79 2.924731 -7.120430 -2.100000 -1.905376 2.480645 5.811613 ... 0.240292 0.199547 0.150376 0.162533 0.168817 0.232258 0.788172 1.749462 3.394624 NaN
2 64756 2.487882 -73.74 41.79 6.431765 -5.015294 0.712941 1.022353 4.080000 8.495176 ... 0.244286 0.203089 0.154306 0.165506 1.217647 1.183529 1.280000 1.602353 2.460000 NaN
3 64756 2.488667 -73.74 41.79 7.953763 -3.035484 2.455914 2.643011 2.786022 13.210645 ... 0.224202 0.190742 0.153140 0.161763 3.469892 3.407527 3.379570 3.472043 3.792473 NaN
4 64756 2.488667 -73.74 41.79 14.793333 1.816667 8.302222 8.574444 2.400000 15.295222 ... 0.208600 0.183911 0.150022 0.159989 9.402222 9.138889 8.438889 7.600000 6.633333 NaN
5 64756 2.488667 -73.74 41.79 21.235484 8.460215 14.850538 15.121505 3.016129 17.287849 ... 0.198925 0.175452 0.146032 0.157710 16.889247 16.691398 15.569892 14.193548 12.344086 NaN
6 64756 2.488667 -73.74 41.79 25.627778 11.837778 18.733333 19.026667 3.053333 21.912111 ... 0.132856 0.127044 0.128311 0.154978 22.372222 22.198889 20.916667 19.417778 17.452222 NaN
7 64756 2.488667 -73.74 41.79 28.568817 15.536559 22.054839 22.012903 3.867742 21.569140 ... 0.100871 0.084957 0.112538 0.153278 25.453763 25.408602 24.141935 22.725806 20.994624 NaN
8 64756 2.488667 -73.74 41.79 27.473118 15.351613 21.410753 21.378495 4.476344 18.492688 ... 0.150946 0.121290 0.125409 0.162650 24.784946 24.897849 24.117204 23.311828 22.278495 NaN
9 64756 2.488667 -73.74 41.79 24.084444 12.032222 18.057778 17.866667 3.728889 13.625000 ... 0.131144 0.113678 0.117722 0.156965 21.060000 21.218889 20.947778 20.823333 20.717778 NaN
10 64756 2.533688 -73.74 41.79 19.548000 6.704000 13.124000 13.149333 3.408000 9.659733 ... 0.127653 0.087333 0.103053 0.141000 15.598667 15.749333 15.986667 16.608000 17.434667 NaN
11 64756 2.522000 -73.74 41.79 10.986667 -1.536667 4.721667 4.858333 2.481667 6.991500 ... 0.197867 0.159883 0.140783 0.150367 7.018333 7.100000 7.860000 9.181667 11.268333 NaN
12 64756 2.522000 -73.74 41.79 2.845161 -6.472581 -1.819355 -1.677419 2.454839 4.752903 ... 0.225093 0.186726 0.154403 0.171903 1.732258 1.845161 2.622581 3.914516 6.038710 NaN

12 rows × 27 columns

Each row in this new dataframe respresents the average values for the months (1=January, 2=February, etc.)

We can apply more customized aggregations, as with any groupby operation. Below we keep the mean of the mean, max of the max, and min of the min for the temperature measurements.

In [27]:
monthly_T_climatology = df.groupby(df.index.month).aggregate({'T_DAILY_MEAN': 'mean',
                                                              'T_DAILY_MAX': 'max',
                                                              'T_DAILY_MIN': 'min'})
monthly_T_climatology.head()
Out[27]:
T_DAILY_MEAN T_DAILY_MAX T_DAILY_MIN
LST_DATE
1 -2.100000 16.9 -26.0
2 0.712941 24.9 -24.7
3 2.455914 26.8 -16.5
4 8.302222 30.6 -11.3
5 14.850538 33.4 -1.6
In [28]:
monthly_T_climatology.plot(marker='o')
Out[28]:

If we want to do it on a finer scale, we can group by day of year.

In [29]:
daily_T_climatology = df.groupby(df.index.dayofyear).aggregate({'T_DAILY_MEAN': 'mean',
                                                            'T_DAILY_MAX': 'max',
                                                            'T_DAILY_MIN': 'min'})
daily_T_climatology.plot(marker='.')
Out[29]:

Calculating anomalies

A common mode of analysis in climate science is to remove the climatology from a signal to focus only on the "anomaly" values. This can be accomplished with transformation.

In [30]:
def standardize(x):
    return (x - x.mean())/x.std()

anomaly = df.groupby(df.index.month).transform(standardize)
anomaly.plot(y='T_DAILY_MEAN')
/Users/rpa/miniconda3/envs/geo_scipy/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/core/ops.py:692: RuntimeWarning: invalid value encountered in double_scalars
  lambda x: op(x, rvalues))
Out[30]:

Resampling

Another common operation is to change the resolution of a dataset by resampling in time. Pandas exposes this through the resample function. The resample periods are specified using pandas offset index syntax.

Below we resample the dataset by taking the mean over each month.

In [31]:
df.resample('M').mean().plot(y='T_DAILY_MEAN', marker='o')
Out[31]:

Just like with groupby, we can apply any aggregation function to our resample operation.

In [32]:
df.resample('M').max().plot(y='T_DAILY_MAX', marker='o')
Out[32]:

Rolling Operations

The final category of operations applies to "rolling windows". (See rolling documentation.) We specify a function to apply over a moving window along the index. We specify the size of the window and, optionally, the weights. We also use the keyword centered to tell pandas whether to center the operation around the midpoint of the window.

In [33]:
df.rolling(30, center=True).T_DAILY_MEAN.mean().plot()
df.rolling(30, center=True, win_type='triang').T_DAILY_MEAN.mean().plot()
Out[33]: