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pythonpandas
Monica Heddneck
Monica Heddneck

Reputation: 3125

What's the purpose of Series instead of lists in Pandas and Python?

Why doesn't Pandas build DataFrames directly from lists? Why was such a thing as a series created in the first place?

Or: If the data in a DataFrame is actually stored in memory as a collection of Series, why not just use a collection of lists?

Yet another way to ask the same question: what's the purpose of Series over lists?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 952

Answers (1)

choldgraf
choldgraf

Reputation: 3689

This isn't going to be a very complete answer, but hopefully is an intuitive "general" answer.

Pandas doesn't use a list as the "core" unit that makes up a DataFrame because Series objects make assumptions that lists do not. A list in python makes very little assumptions about what is inside, it could be pretty much anything, which makes it great as a core component of python.

However, if you want to build a more specialized package that gives you extra functionality liked Pandas, then you want to create your own "core" data object and start building extra functionality on top of that. Compared with lists, you can do a lot more with a custom Series object (as witnessed by pulling a single column from a DataFrame and seeing what methods are available to the output).

Upvotes: 2

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