Introduction to Python

Contributors: John Butler, Russell Poldrack

In this chapter we will give you an overview of the basic features of the Python programming language. This introduction won’t make you an ace programmer — only practice will do that. However, it will give you an introduction to some of the most important features of the language.

Why programming is hard to learn

Programming a computer is a skill, just like playing a musical instrument or speaking a second language. And just like those skills, it takes a lot of work to get good at it — the only way to acquire a skill is through practice. There is nothing special or magical about people who are experts, other than the quality and quantity of their experience! However, not all practice is equally effective. A large amount of psychological research has shown that practice needs to be deliberate, meaning that it focuses on developing the specific skills that one needs to perform the skill, at a level that is always pushing one’s ability.

If you have never programmed before, then it’s going to seem hard, just as it would seem hard for a native English speaker to start speaking Mandarin. However, just as a beginning guitarist needs to learn to play their scales, we will teach you how to perform the basics of programming, which you can then use to do more powerful things.

One of the most important aspects of computer programming is that you can try things to your heart’s content; the worst thing that can happen is that the program will crash. Trying new things and making mistakes is one of the keys to learning.

The hardest part of programming is figuring out why something didn’t work, which we call debugging. In programming, things are going to go wrong in ways that are often confusing and opaque. Every programmer has a story about spending hours trying to figure out why something didn’t work, only to realize that the problem was completely obvious in hindsight. The more practice you get, the better you will get at figuring out how to fix these errors. But there are a few strategies that can be helpful.

Use the web

In particular, you should take advantage of the fact that there are millions of people programming in Python around the world, so nearly any error message you see has already been seen by someone else. Whenever I experience an error that I don’t understand, the first thing that I do is to copy and paste the error message into a search engine. Often this will provide several pages discussing the problem and the ways that people have solved it.

Rubber duck debugging

The idea behind rubber duck debugging is to pretend that you are trying to explain what your code is doing to an inanimate object, like a rubber duck. Often, the process of explaning it aloud is enough to help you find the problem.

Getting access to Python

If you want to try out Python without having to install it on your own computer (or if you have a computer that doesn’t support it, such as a Chromebook), the best way to try it out is using a web platform that supports notebooks, which are documents that allow you to combine text and code; this book was actually written using such notebooks. Two good options are Google Colab and Kaggle Kernels. TBD: MAKE ALL CHAPTERS AVAILABLE ON BOTH

If you do want to install it on your own computer, we recommend installing the Anaconda software package, which will provide you with Python as well as many related packages.

Getting started with Python

When we work with Python, we can do this at the command line in a terminal or (as we will do) using a Jupyter notebook. Notebooks are composed of cells, each of which can contain either Python code or text.

Jupyter notebooks use a special kind of text known as Markdown, which allows formatting (such as headings or text styles like bold and italics). If you were to double-click on this cell in Jupyter, you would be able to edit the text. Once you are done editing, hit the Run button (the triangular arrow button above), or press Shift+Enter, and the text will be shown normally.

The following cell is a code cell, which we use for Python code. Code cells are denoted in Jupyter by shading in gray. In a code cell, we type Python commands. When we hit the Run button (the triangular arrow button above), or press Shift+Enter, our commands will run and a result will print out in an output cell.

One difference between a code cell and a Markdown cell is that the code cell has a number to its left surrounded by square brackets. If you type a command into the cell and then run it, the result will appear below, with the same number to its left.

In the simplest case, if we just type in a number, the cell will simply respond with that number. In the code cell below, we have typed the number 3. Click on the cell to edit or run the code again (Shift+Enter).

3

3

Let’s try something a bit more complicated:

3 + 4

7

Python spits out the answer to whatever you type in, as long as it can figure it out.

Now let’s try typing in a word:

hello

This would result in the following output:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NameError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
 in 
----> 1 hello

NameError: name 'hello' is not defined

What? Why did this happen? When Python encounters a letter or word, it assumes that it is referring to the name of a variable — think of X from high school algebra. We will return to variables in a little while, but if we want Python to print out the word hello then we need to contain it in quotation marks (single or double, it doesn’t matter), telling Python that it is a character string.

"hello"

'hello'

There are many types of variables in Python. You have already seen two examples: integers (like the number 3) and character strings (like the word “hello”). Another important one is real numbers, which are the most common kind of numbers that we will deal with in statistics, which span the entire number line including the spaces in between the integers. For example:

1 / 6

0.16666666666666666

By default, Python uses floating-point numbers, which provide a high level of precision. In many cases, however, you may want to round floating-point outputs to two or three decimal places, which can be done with the round() function.

round(1 / 6, 3)

0.167

Another kind of variable is known as a logical variable, because it is based on the idea from logic that a statement can be either True or False.

To determine whether a statement is true or not, we use logical operators. You are already familiar with some of these, like the greater-than (>) and less-than (<) operators.

1 < 3

True

2 > 4

False

Often we want to know whether two numbers are equal or not equal to one another. There are special operators in python to do this: == for equals, and != for not-equals:

3 == 3

True

4 != 4

False

One very important thing to know is that Python treats True the same as the number one, and False the same as the number zero. To see this, let’s test whether True is equal to the number one:

True == 1

True

This will become important later on, when we work with probabilities.

Variables

A variable is a symbol that stands for another value (just like “X” in algebra). We can create a variable by assigning a value to it using the = operator. If we then type the name of the variable, Python will print out its value — as long as that variable name is the last entry in the cell.

x = 4
x

4

The variable now stands for the value that it contains, so we can perform operations on it and get the same answer as if we used the value itself.

x + 3

7

x == 5

False

We can change the value of a variable by simply assigning a new value to it.

x = x + 1

x

5

Libraries

Although Python has many useful features, many of the features we will need are not contained in the primary Python library but instead come from open source libraries that have been developed by various members of the python community.

Two packages that we will use extensively are NumPy and Pandas. These libraries are part of the SciPy stack, a group of Python libraries used for scientific computing.

In Python, to work with a library, we first have to import it and specify how we are going to call on the functions of that library (functions will be explained in more detail below).

Here is how we will import NumPy:

import numpy as np

Now, when we call on a NumPy function, we will use the prefix ``np```. This will be made clearer below.

We also import pandas, specifying ``pd``` as the prefix:

import pandas as pd  ## RP: pd is more common abbreviation

After importing a library, you can now access all of its features using the specified prefix. If you want to learn more about a library’s features, you can find them using the help() function:

help(np.zeros)

Help on built-in function zeros in module numpy:

zeros(...)
    zeros(shape, dtype=float, order='C', *, like=None)

    Return a new array of given shape and type, filled with zeros.

    Parameters
    ----------
    shape : int or tuple of ints
        Shape of the new array, e.g., ``(2, 3)`` or ``2``.
    dtype : data-type, optional
        The desired data-type for the array, e.g., `numpy.int8`.  Default is
        `numpy.float64`.
    order : {'C', 'F'}, optional, default: 'C'
        Whether to store multi-dimensional data in row-major
        (C-style) or column-major (Fortran-style) order in
        memory.
    like : array_like, optional
        Reference object to allow the creation of arrays which are not
        NumPy arrays. If an array-like passed in as ``like`` supports
        the ``__array_function__`` protocol, the result will be defined
        by it. In this case, it ensures the creation of an array object
        compatible with that passed in via this argument.

        .. versionadded:: 1.20.0

    Returns
    -------
    out : ndarray
        Array of zeros with the given shape, dtype, and order.

    See Also
    --------
    zeros_like : Return an array of zeros with shape and type of input.
    empty : Return a new uninitialized array.
    ones : Return a new array setting values to one.
    full : Return a new array of given shape filled with value.

    Examples
    --------
    >>> np.zeros(5)
    array([ 0.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  0.])

    >>> np.zeros((5,), dtype=int)
    array([0, 0, 0, 0, 0])

    >>> np.zeros((2, 1))
    array([[ 0.],
           [ 0.]])

    >>> s = (2,2)
    >>> np.zeros(s)
    array([[ 0.,  0.],
           [ 0.,  0.]])

    >>> np.zeros((2,), dtype=[('x', 'i4'), ('y', 'i4')]) # custom dtype
    array([(0, 0), (0, 0)],
          dtype=[('x', '<i4'), ('y', '<i4')])

Functions

A function is an operator that takes some input and gives an output based on the input. For example, let’s say that we have a number, and we want to determine its absolute value. NumPy has a function called abs() that takes in a number and outputs its absolute value:

x = -3
np.abs(x)

3

Most functions take an input like the np.abs() function (which we call an argument), but some also have special keywords that can be used to change how the function works. For example, the np.random.normal() function generates random numbers from a normal distribution (which we will learn more about later). Have a look at the help page for this function by typing help(np.random.normal) in the console, which will cause a help page to appear below. The first section of the help page for the np.random.normal() function shows the following:

normal(...) method of numpy.random.mtrand.RandomState instance
normal(loc=0.0, scale=1.0, size=None)

Draw random samples from a normal (Gaussian) distribution.

The probability density function of the normal distribution, first
derived by De Moivre and 200 years later by both Gauss and Laplace
independently [2]_, is often called the bell curve because of
its characteristic shape (see the example below).

The normal distributions occurs often in nature.  For example, it
describes the commonly occurring distribution of samples influenced
by a large number of tiny, random disturbances, each with its own
unique distribution [2]_.

Parameters
----------
loc : float or array_like of floats
    Mean ("centre") of the distribution.
scale : float or array_like of floats
    Standard deviation (spread or "width") of the distribution. Must be
    non-negative.
size : int or tuple of ints, optional
    Output shape.  If the given shape is, e.g., ``(m, n, k)``, then
    ``m * n * k`` samples are drawn.  If size is ``None`` (default),
    a single value is returned if ``loc`` and ``scale`` are both scalars.
    Otherwise, ``np.broadcast(loc, scale).size`` samples are drawn.

Returns
-------
out : ndarray or scalar
    Drawn samples from the parameterized normal distribution.

You can also see some examples of how the function is used by looking further down in the help output. For example, you will find the text:

Draw samples from the distribution:

>>> mu, sigma = 0, 0.1 # mean and standard deviation
>>> s = np.random.normal(mu, sigma, 1000)

We can see from the help output (above) that the np.random.normal function has three arguments, loc or mean, scale or standard deviation, and size. These are shown to be equal to specific values.

normal(loc=0.0, scale=1.0, size=None)

This means that those values are the default settings, so that if you don’t do anything, then the function will return a single random number with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.

np.random.normal()

-0.3554835697799282

If we wanted to create random numbers with a different mean and standard deviation (say mean == 100 and standard deviation == 15), then we could simply set those values in the function call. Let’s say that we would like 5 random numbers from this distribution:

my_random_numbers = np.random.normal(100, 15, 5)
my_random_numbers

array([ 86.88998676, 103.2090729 ,  87.78256519,  92.55398966,
       122.4750079 ])

You will see that I set the variable to the name my_random_numbers. In general, it’s always good to be as descriptive as possible when creating variables; rather than calling them x or y, use names that describe the actual contents. This will make it much easier to understand what’s going on once things get more complicated.

Arrays

You may have noticed that the my_random_numbers created above wasn’t like the variables that we had seen before — it contained several values in it. We refer to this kind of variable as an array.

If you want to create your own new array, you can do that using the np.array() function:

my_array = np.array([4, 5, 6])
my_array

array([4, 5, 6])

This kind of array is also known as a vector. It is an array of numbers that only has a single dimension - and can be any number of elements long in that single dimension. It can be a row vector (like my_array above) or a column vector.

You can access the individual elements within a vector by using square brackets along with a number that refers to the location within the vector. These index values start at 0, a convention of many programming languages that can take a little getting used to.

Let’s say we want to see the value in the second place of the vector:

my_array[1]

5

You can also look at a range of positions, by putting the start and end+1 locations with a colon in between. For example, to see the values in second and third place:

my_array[1:3]

array([5, 6])

You can also change the values of specific locations using the same indexing:

my_array[2] = 7
my_array

array([4, 5, 7])

Math with vectors and matrices

You can apply mathematical operations to the elements of an array in the same way that you apply them to regular variables. Let’s say that we want to multiply each element in the array by the number 5:

my_array = np.array([4, 5, 6])
my_array_times_five = my_array * 5
my_array_times_five

array([20, 25, 30])

You can also apply mathematical operations on pairs of vectors. In this case, each matching element is used for the operation.

my_first_array = np.array([1, 2, 3])
my_second_array = np.array([10, 20, 20])
my_first_array + my_second_array

array([11, 22, 23])

We can also apply logical operations across vectors; again, this will return a vector with the operation applied to the pairs of values at each position.

array_a = np.array([1, 2, 3])
array_b = np.array([1, 2, 4])
array_a == array_b

array([ True,  True, False])

Most functions will work with vectors just as they would with a single number. For example, let’s say we wanted to obtain the trigonometric sine for each of a set of values. We could create a vector and pass it to the np.sin() function, which will return as many sine values as there are input values:

my_angle_values = np.array([0, 1, 2])
my_sin_values = np.sin(my_angle_values)
my_sin_values

array([0.        , 0.84147098, 0.90929743])

Dictionaries

There is another kind of variable in Python that is very useful, which is known as a dictionary. A dictionary is like a container that stores values that are associated with particular keys. A dictionary is created using squiggly brackets; each entry must include a key and a value (which can be any kind of variable, including another dictionary), separated by a color. For example, let’s say that we wanted to store the ages of three people:

ages = {'Lisa': 23, 'Angela': 25, 'Monique': 27}
ages

{'Lisa': 23, 'Angela': 25, 'Monique': 27}

To access the elements, we use the names of each field as an index

ages['Lisa']

23

Data Frames

Often in a dataset we will have a number of different variables that we want to work with. Instead of having a different named variable that stores each one, it is often useful to combine all of the separate variables into a single package, which is referred to as a data frame.

If you are familiar with a spreadsheet (say from Microsoft Excel) then you already have a basic understanding of a data frame. Let’s say that we have values of price and mileage for three different types of cars. We could start by creating a variable for each one, making sure that the three cars are in the same order for each of the variables:

car_model = ("Ford Fusion", "Hyundai Accent", "Toyota Corolla")
car_price = np.array([25000, 16000, 18000])
car_mileage = np.array([27, 36, 32])

We can then combine these into a single data frame, using the pd.DataFrame() function. I like to use “_df” in the names of data frames just to make clear that it’s a data frame, so we will call this one “cars_df”:

data = {'Price': car_price,
        'Mileage': car_mileage}
cars_df2 = pd.DataFrame(data, index=car_model)
cars_df2

	Price	Mileage
Ford Fusion	25000	27
Hyundai Accent	16000	36
Toyota Corolla	18000	32

Each of the columns in the data frame contains one of the variables, with the name that we gave it when we created the data frame. We can access each of those columns using the same [ ] indexing we use to access arrays, but we can use the column names we specified for the dataframe. For example, if we wanted to access the mileage variable, we would combine the name of the data frame with the name of the variable as follows:

cars_df2['Mileage']

Ford Fusion       27
Hyundai Accent    36
Toyota Corolla    32
Name: Mileage, dtype: int64

This is just like any other vector, in that we can refer to its individual values using square brackets as we did with regular vectors. For example, if we want the mileage value for the car in the second place:

cars_df2['Mileage'][1]

/tmp/ipykernel_116/2768627805.py:1: FutureWarning: Series.__getitem__ treating keys as positions is deprecated. In a future version, integer keys will always be treated as labels (consistent with DataFrame behavior). To access a value by position, use `ser.iloc[pos]`
  cars_df2['Mileage'][1]

36

Similarly, you can perform operations on the vector. For example, we might want to square all the values in the “Price” column:

np.square(cars_df2['Price'])

Ford Fusion       625000000
Hyundai Accent    256000000
Toyota Corolla    324000000
Name: Price, dtype: int64

Let’s say we don’t know the organisation of the dataframe, but we want to see the price of a Toyota Corolla. We can use filtering to obtain certain values from dataframe.

Specifing the index that corresponds to “Toyota Corolla” gives you all the values for that row of the dataframe. To do this, we need to use the .loc operator on the data frame. The first argument to the .loc operator refers to the rows in the data frame, whereas the second refers to the columns.

cars_df2.loc["Toyota Corolla"]

Price      18000
Mileage       32
Name: Toyota Corolla, dtype: int64

To obtain only the mileage, specify the mileage column.

cars_df2.loc[["Toyota Corolla"], ['Mileage']]

	Mileage
Toyota Corolla	32

We can also filter by some characteristics of the car.

cars_df2[(cars_df2['Mileage'] > 30) & (cars_df2['Price'] < 18000)]

	Price	Mileage
Hyundai Accent	16000	36

Dataframes are enormously powerful for manipulating (“wrangling”) large and complex datasets, which are often what we are dealing with in statistics. For further information on dataframes in pandas, see: https://towardsdatascience.com/my-python-pandas-cheat-sheet-746b11e44368

1.10 Working with data files

When we are doing statistics, we often need to load in the data that we will analyze. Those data will live in a file on one’s computer or on the internet. For this example, let’s use a file that is hosted on the internet, which contains the gross domestic product (GDP) values for a number of countries around the world. This file is stored as a comma-separated value (or CSV) file, meaning that the values for each of the variables in the dataset are separated by commas. There are three variables: the relative rank of the countries, the name of the country, and its GDP value. Here is what the first few lines of the file look like: We can load the file using the pd.read_csv() function:

data_url = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/psych10/psych10/master/notebooks/Session03-IntroToR/gdp.csv'
gdp_data = pd.read_csv(data_url)

A data frame, like every variable in Python is an object. Later in the book we will discuss object-oriented programming, but the important point for now is that objects can both store information and can do things. Each object has a set of methods, which we denote using a period. For example, the data frame has a method called .head() which will show us the top 5 rows of the data frame:

gdp_data.head()

	Rank	Country	GDP
0	1	Liechtenstein	141100
1	2	Qatar	104300
2	3	Luxembourg	81100
3	4	Bermuda	69900
4	5	Singapore	60500

If we want to see the list of all of the methods that are associated with a particular object, we can use the dir() function:

dir(gdp_data)

['Country',
 'GDP',
 'Rank',
 'T',
 '_AXIS_LEN',
 '_AXIS_ORDERS',
 '_AXIS_TO_AXIS_NUMBER',
 '_HANDLED_TYPES',
 '__abs__',
 '__add__',
 '__and__',
 '__annotations__',
 '__array__',
 '__array_priority__',
 '__array_ufunc__',
 '__arrow_c_stream__',
 '__bool__',
 '__class__',
 '__contains__',
 '__copy__',
 '__dataframe__',
 '__dataframe_consortium_standard__',
 '__deepcopy__',
 '__delattr__',
 '__delitem__',
 '__dict__',
 '__dir__',
 '__divmod__',
 '__doc__',
 '__eq__',
 '__finalize__',
 '__floordiv__',
 '__format__',
 '__ge__',
 '__getattr__',
 '__getattribute__',
 '__getitem__',
 '__getstate__',
 '__gt__',
 '__hash__',
 '__iadd__',
 '__iand__',
 '__ifloordiv__',
 '__imod__',
 '__imul__',
 '__init__',
 '__init_subclass__',
 '__invert__',
 '__ior__',
 '__ipow__',
 '__isub__',
 '__iter__',
 '__itruediv__',
 '__ixor__',
 '__le__',
 '__len__',
 '__lt__',
 '__matmul__',
 '__mod__',
 '__module__',
 '__mul__',
 '__ne__',
 '__neg__',
 '__new__',
 '__nonzero__',
 '__or__',
 '__pandas_priority__',
 '__pos__',
 '__pow__',
 '__radd__',
 '__rand__',
 '__rdivmod__',
 '__reduce__',
 '__reduce_ex__',
 '__repr__',
 '__rfloordiv__',
 '__rmatmul__',
 '__rmod__',
 '__rmul__',
 '__ror__',
 '__round__',
 '__rpow__',
 '__rsub__',
 '__rtruediv__',
 '__rxor__',
 '__setattr__',
 '__setitem__',
 '__setstate__',
 '__sizeof__',
 '__str__',
 '__sub__',
 '__subclasshook__',
 '__truediv__',
 '__weakref__',
 '__xor__',
 '_accessors',
 '_accum_func',
 '_agg_examples_doc',
 '_agg_see_also_doc',
 '_align_for_op',
 '_align_frame',
 '_align_series',
 '_append',
 '_arith_method',
 '_arith_method_with_reindex',
 '_as_manager',
 '_attrs',
 '_box_col_values',
 '_can_fast_transpose',
 '_check_inplace_and_allows_duplicate_labels',
 '_check_is_chained_assignment_possible',
 '_check_label_or_level_ambiguity',
 '_check_setitem_copy',
 '_clear_item_cache',
 '_clip_with_one_bound',
 '_clip_with_scalar',
 '_cmp_method',
 '_combine_frame',
 '_consolidate',
 '_consolidate_inplace',
 '_construct_axes_dict',
 '_construct_result',
 '_constructor',
 '_constructor_from_mgr',
 '_constructor_sliced',
 '_constructor_sliced_from_mgr',
 '_create_data_for_split_and_tight_to_dict',
 '_data',
 '_deprecate_downcast',
 '_dir_additions',
 '_dir_deletions',
 '_dispatch_frame_op',
 '_drop_axis',
 '_drop_labels_or_levels',
 '_ensure_valid_index',
 '_find_valid_index',
 '_flags',
 '_flex_arith_method',
 '_flex_cmp_method',
 '_from_arrays',
 '_from_mgr',
 '_get_agg_axis',
 '_get_axis',
 '_get_axis_name',
 '_get_axis_number',
 '_get_axis_resolvers',
 '_get_block_manager_axis',
 '_get_bool_data',
 '_get_cleaned_column_resolvers',
 '_get_column_array',
 '_get_index_resolvers',
 '_get_item_cache',
 '_get_label_or_level_values',
 '_get_numeric_data',
 '_get_value',
 '_get_values_for_csv',
 '_getitem_bool_array',
 '_getitem_multilevel',
 '_getitem_nocopy',
 '_getitem_slice',
 '_gotitem',
 '_hidden_attrs',
 '_indexed_same',
 '_info_axis',
 '_info_axis_name',
 '_info_axis_number',
 '_info_repr',
 '_init_mgr',
 '_inplace_method',
 '_internal_names',
 '_internal_names_set',
 '_is_copy',
 '_is_homogeneous_type',
 '_is_label_or_level_reference',
 '_is_label_reference',
 '_is_level_reference',
 '_is_mixed_type',
 '_is_view',
 '_is_view_after_cow_rules',
 '_iset_item',
 '_iset_item_mgr',
 '_iset_not_inplace',
 '_item_cache',
 '_iter_column_arrays',
 '_ixs',
 '_logical_func',
 '_logical_method',
 '_maybe_align_series_as_frame',
 '_maybe_cache_changed',
 '_maybe_update_cacher',
 '_metadata',
 '_mgr',
 '_min_count_stat_function',
 '_needs_reindex_multi',
 '_pad_or_backfill',
 '_protect_consolidate',
 '_reduce',
 '_reduce_axis1',
 '_reindex_axes',
 '_reindex_multi',
 '_reindex_with_indexers',
 '_rename',
 '_replace_columnwise',
 '_repr_data_resource_',
 '_repr_fits_horizontal_',
 '_repr_fits_vertical_',
 '_repr_html_',
 '_repr_latex_',
 '_reset_cache',
 '_reset_cacher',
 '_sanitize_column',
 '_series',
 '_set_axis',
 '_set_axis_name',
 '_set_axis_nocheck',
 '_set_is_copy',
 '_set_item',
 '_set_item_frame_value',
 '_set_item_mgr',
 '_set_value',
 '_setitem_array',
 '_setitem_frame',
 '_setitem_slice',
 '_shift_with_freq',
 '_should_reindex_frame_op',
 '_slice',
 '_sliced_from_mgr',
 '_stat_function',
 '_stat_function_ddof',
 '_take_with_is_copy',
 '_to_dict_of_blocks',
 '_to_latex_via_styler',
 '_typ',
 '_update_inplace',
 '_validate_dtype',
 '_values',
 '_where',
 'abs',
 'add',
 'add_prefix',
 'add_suffix',
 'agg',
 'aggregate',
 'align',
 'all',
 'any',
 'apply',
 'applymap',
 'asfreq',
 'asof',
 'assign',
 'astype',
 'at',
 'at_time',
 'attrs',
 'axes',
 'backfill',
 'between_time',
 'bfill',
 'bool',
 'boxplot',
 'clip',
 'columns',
 'combine',
 'combine_first',
 'compare',
 'convert_dtypes',
 'copy',
 'corr',
 'corrwith',
 'count',
 'cov',
 'cummax',
 'cummin',
 'cumprod',
 'cumsum',
 'describe',
 'diff',
 'div',
 'divide',
 'dot',
 'drop',
 'drop_duplicates',
 'droplevel',
 'dropna',
 'dtypes',
 'duplicated',
 'empty',
 'eq',
 'equals',
 'eval',
 'ewm',
 'expanding',
 'explode',
 'ffill',
 'fillna',
 'filter',
 'first',
 'first_valid_index',
 'flags',
 'floordiv',
 'from_dict',
 'from_records',
 'ge',
 'get',
 'groupby',
 'gt',
 'head',
 'hist',
 'iat',
 'idxmax',
 'idxmin',
 'iloc',
 'index',
 'infer_objects',
 'info',
 'insert',
 'interpolate',
 'isetitem',
 'isin',
 'isna',
 'isnull',
 'items',
 'iterrows',
 'itertuples',
 'join',
 'keys',
 'kurt',
 'kurtosis',
 'last',
 'last_valid_index',
 'le',
 'loc',
 'lt',
 'map',
 'mask',
 'max',
 'mean',
 'median',
 'melt',
 'memory_usage',
 'merge',
 'min',
 'mod',
 'mode',
 'mul',
 'multiply',
 'ndim',
 'ne',
 'nlargest',
 'notna',
 'notnull',
 'nsmallest',
 'nunique',
 'pad',
 'pct_change',
 'pipe',
 'pivot',
 'pivot_table',
 'plot',
 'pop',
 'pow',
 'prod',
 'product',
 'quantile',
 'query',
 'radd',
 'rank',
 'rdiv',
 'reindex',
 'reindex_like',
 'rename',
 'rename_axis',
 'reorder_levels',
 'replace',
 'resample',
 'reset_index',
 'rfloordiv',
 'rmod',
 'rmul',
 'rolling',
 'round',
 'rpow',
 'rsub',
 'rtruediv',
 'sample',
 'select_dtypes',
 'sem',
 'set_axis',
 'set_flags',
 'set_index',
 'shape',
 'shift',
 'size',
 'skew',
 'sort_index',
 'sort_values',
 'squeeze',
 'stack',
 'std',
 'style',
 'sub',
 'subtract',
 'sum',
 'swapaxes',
 'swaplevel',
 'tail',
 'take',
 'to_clipboard',
 'to_csv',
 'to_dict',
 'to_excel',
 'to_feather',
 'to_gbq',
 'to_hdf',
 'to_html',
 'to_json',
 'to_latex',
 'to_markdown',
 'to_numpy',
 'to_orc',
 'to_parquet',
 'to_period',
 'to_pickle',
 'to_records',
 'to_sql',
 'to_stata',
 'to_string',
 'to_timestamp',
 'to_xarray',
 'to_xml',
 'transform',
 'transpose',
 'truediv',
 'truncate',
 'tz_convert',
 'tz_localize',
 'unstack',
 'update',
 'value_counts',
 'values',
 'var',
 'where',
 'xs']

This shows a long list of methods; you will learn more about many of these as we progress through the course.