Pandas Patterns
Pandas patterns covering vectorization, method chaining, memory optimization, chunked processing, categorical dtypes, and performance best practices.
- Difficulty
- intermediate
- Read time
- 1 min read
- Version
- v1.0.0
- Confidence
- established
- Last updated
Quick Reference
Pandas: Vectorize operations (avoid loops and apply). Method chaining for readability. Use .loc/.iloc not chained indexing. Categorical dtype for low-cardinality strings. Downcast numerics (int64 to int32). Chunked read_csv for large files. Filter early in pipelines. query() for readable conditions. to_parquet for efficient storage.
Use When
- Python data analysis
- DataFrame operations
- Data cleaning/transformation
- CSV/Excel processing
Skip When
- Real-time streaming data
- Distributed computing (use Spark)
- GPU processing (use cuDF)
Pandas Patterns
Pandas patterns covering vectorization, method chaining, memory optimization, chunked processing, categorical dtypes, and performance best practices.