Develop Reference

Get subset of rows where any column contains a particular value

I have a very large data file (foo.sas7bdat) that I would like to filter rows from without loading the whole data file into memory. For example, I can print the first 20 rows of the dataset without loading the entire file into memory by doing the following:
import pandas
import itertools
with pandas.read_sas('foo.sas7bdat') as f:
for row in itertools.islice(f,20):
print(row)
However, I am unclear on how to only print (or preferably place in a new file) only rows that have any column that contain the number 123.1. How can I do this?

Pandas has the ability to pull dataframes one chunk at a time. Following the trail of read_sas() documentation to "chunksize" I came across this:
http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/io.html#iterating-through-files-chunk-by-chunk
for chunk in pd.read_sas('foo.sas7bdat', interator=True, chunksize=100000):
print(chunk)
This would get chunks of 100,000 lines.
As for the other problem you would need a query. However I don't know the constraints of the problem. If you make a Dataframe with all the columns then you still might overflow your memory space so an efficient way would be to collect the indexes and put those in a set, then sort those and use .iloc to get those entries if you wanted to put those into a Dataframe.
You may need to use tools that take this into account. Dask is a good alternative for use on clusters.

HDFStore get column names

I have some problems with pandas' HDFStore being far to slow and unfortunately I'm unable to put together a satisfying solution from other questions here.
Situation
I have a big DataFrame, containing mostly floats and sometimes integer columns which goes through multiple processing steps (renaming, removing bad entries, aggregating by 30min). Each row has a timestamp associated to it. I would like to save some middle steps to a HDF file, so that the user can do a single step iteratively without starting from scratch each time.
Additionally the user should be able to plot certain column from these saves in order to select bad data. Therefore I would like to retrieve only the column names without reading the data in the HDFStore.
Concretely the user should get a list of all columns of all dataframes stored in the HDF then they should select which columns they would like to see whereafter I use matplotlib to present them the corresponding data.
Data
shape == (5730000, 339) does not seem large at all, that's why I'm confused... (Might get far more rows over time, columns should stay fixed)
In the first step I append iteratively rows and columns (that runs okay), but once that's done I always process the entire DataFrame at once, only grouping or removing data.
My approach
I do all manipulations in memory since pandas seems to be rather fast and I/O is slower (HDF is on different physical server, I think)
I use datetime index and automatically selected float or integer columns
I save the steps with hdf.put('/name', df, format='fixed') since hdf.put('/name'.format(grp), df, format='table', data_columns=True) seemed to be far too slow.
I use e.g. df.groupby(df.index).first() and df.groupby(pd.Grouper(freq='30Min')).agg(agg_dict) to process the data, where agg_dict is a dictonary with one function per column. This is incredibly slow as well.
For plotting, I have to read-in the entire dataframe and then get the columns: hdfstore.get('/name').columns
Question
How can I retrieve all columns without reading any data from the HDFStore?
What would be the most efficient way of storing my data? Is HDF the right option? Table or fixed?
Does it matter in term of efficiency if the index is a datetime index? Does there exists a more efficient format in general (e.g. all columns the same, fixed dtype?)
Is there a faster way to aggregate instead of groupby (df.groupby(pd.Grouper(freq='30Min')).agg(agg_dict))
similar questions
How to access single columns using .select
I see that I can use this to retrieve only certain columns but only after I know the column names, I think.
Thank you for any advice!

You may simply load 0 rows of the DataFrame by specifying same start and stop attributes. And leave all internal index/column processing for pandas itself:
idx = pd.MultiIndex.from_product([('A', 'B'), range(2)], names=('Alpha', 'Int'))
df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(len(idx), 3), index=idx, columns=('I', 'II', 'III'))
df
>>> I II III
>>> Alpha Int
>>> A 0 -0.472412 0.436486 0.354592
>>> 1 -0.095776 -0.598585 -0.847514
>>> B 0 0.107897 1.236039 -0.196927
>>> 1 -0.154014 0.821511 0.092220
Following works both for fixed an table formats:
with pd.HDFStore('test.h5') as store:
store.put('df', df, format='f')
meta = store.select('df', start=1, stop=1)
meta
meta.index
meta.columns
>>> I II III
>>> Alpha Int
>>>
>>> MultiIndex(levels=[[], []],
>>> codes=[[], []],
>>> names=['Alpha', 'Int'])
>>>
>>> Index(['I', 'II', 'III'], dtype='object')
As for others question:
As long as your data is mostly homogeneous (almost float columns as you mentioned) and you are able to store it in single file without need to distribute data across machines - HDF is the first thing to try.
If you need to append/delete/query data - you must use table format. If you only need to write once and read many - fixed will improve performance.
As for datetime index, i think here we may use same idea as in 1 clause. If u are able to convert all data into single type it should increase your performance.
Nothing else that proposed in comment to your question comes to mind.

For a HDFStore hdf and a key (from hdf.keys()) you can get the column names with:
# Table stored with hdf.put(..., format='table')
columns = hdf.get_node('{}/table'.format(key)).description._v_names
# Table stored with hdf.put(..., format='fixed')
columns = list(hdf.get_node('{}/axis0'.format(key)).read().astype(str))
note that hdf.get(key).columns works as well, but it reads all the data into memory, while the approach above only reads the column names.
Full working example:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import pandas as pd
data = pd.DataFrame({'a': [1,1,1,2,3,4,5], 'b': [2,3,4,1,3,2,1]})
with pd.HDFStore(path='store.h5', mode='a') as hdf:
hdf.put('/DATA/fixed_store', data, format='fixed')
hdf.put('/DATA/table_store', data, format='table', data_columns=True)
for key in hdf.keys():
try:
# column names of table store
print(hdf.get_node('{}/table'.format(key)).description._v_names)
except AttributeError:
try:
# column names of fixed store
print(list(hdf.get_node('{}/axis0'.format(key)).read().astype(str)))
except AttributeError:
# e.g. a dataset created by h5py instead of pandas.
print('unknown node in HDF.')

Columns without reading any data:
store.get_storer('df').ncols # substitute 'df' with your key
# you can also access nrows and other useful fields
From the docs (fixed format, table format): (important points in bold)
[fixed] These types of stores are not appendable once written (though you can simply remove them and rewrite). Nor are they queryable; they must be retrieved in their entirety. They also do not support dataframes with non-unique column names. The fixed format stores offer very fast writing and slightly faster reading than table stores.
[table] Conceptually a table is shaped very much like a DataFrame, with rows and columns. A table may be appended to in the same or other sessions. In addition, delete and query type operations are supported.
You may try to use epochms (or epochns) (milliseconds or nanoseconds since epoch) in place of datetimes. This way, you are just dealing with integer indices.
You may have a look at this answer if what you need is grouping by on large data.
An advice: if you have 4 questions to ask, it may be better to ask 4 separate questions on SO. This way, you'll get a higher number of (higher quality) answers, since each one is easier to tackle. And each will deal with a specific topic, making it easier to search for people that are looking for specific answers.

Pandas - Appending 'table' format to HDF5Store with different dtypes: invalid combinate of [values_axes]

I recently started trying to use HDF5 format in python pandas to store data but encountered a problem where cant find a workaround for. Before i worked with CSV files and i had no trouble in regards to appending new data.
This is what i try:
store = pd.HDFStore('cdw.h5')
frame.to_hdf('cdw.h5','cdw/data_cleaned', format='table',append=True, data_columns=True,dropna=False)
And it throws:
ValueError: invalid combinate of [values_axes] on appending data [name->Ordereingangsdatum,cname->Ordereingangsdatum,dtype->float64,kind->float,shape->(1, 176345)] vs current table [name->Ordereingangsdatum,cname->Ordereingangsdatum,dtype->bytes128,kind->string,shape->None]
I get that it tells me i want to append different data type for a column but what buffles me is that i have wrote the same CSV file before with some other CSV Files from a Dataframe to that HDF5 file.
I'm doing analysis in the forwarding industry and the data there is very inconsistent - more often than not there are missing values or mixed dtypes in columns or other 'data dirt'.
Im looking for a way to append data to HDF5 file no matter what is inside the column as long as the column names are the same.
It would be beautiful to enforce appending data in HDF store independant of datatypes or another simple solution for my problem. The goal is to have an automation later on for the analysis therefore id not like to change datatypes everytime i have a missing value in a column of the total 62 columns i have.
Another question in my question is:
My file access for read_hdf consumes more time than my read_csv i have around 1.5 million rows with 62 columns. Is this because i have no SSD drive? Because i have read that the file access for read_hdf should be faster.
I question myself if I rather should stick with CSV files or with HDF5?
Help would be greatly appreciated.

Okay for anyone having the same issue with appending data where the dtype is not always secured to be the same: I finally found a solution. First convert every column to object with li = list(frame)
frame[li] = frame[li].astype(object)
frame.info() then try the method df.to_hdf(key,value, append=True) and wait for its error message. The error message TypeError: Cannot serialize the column [not_one_datatype] because its data contents are [mixed] object dtype will tell the columns it still doesnt like. Converting those columns to float worked for me! After that the error convert the mentioned column with df['not_one_datatype'].astype(float) only use integer if you are sure that a float will never occur in this column otherwise append method will bug again.
I decided to work parallel with CSV and HDF5 Files. If i get a problem with HDF5 where i have no workaround for i will simply change to CSV - this is what i can recommend personally.
Update: Okay it seems that the creators of this format have not thought about the reality when considering the HDF API: HDF5 min_itemsize error: ValueError: Trying to store a string with len [##] in [y] column but this column has a limit of [##]! occurs when trying to append data to an already existing file if some column happens to be longer than the initial write to HDF file.
Now the joke here is that the creators of this API expecting me to know the max column length of each possible data in a column at the first write? really? Another inconsistency is that df.to_hdf(append=True) do not have the parameter min_itemsize={'column1':1000}. This format is at best suited for storing self created data only but definately not for data where the dtypes and length of the entries in each column are NOT set in stone. The only solution left when you want to append data from pandas dataframes independent of the stubborn HDF5 API in Python is to insert in every dataframe before appending a row with very long strings except for the numeric columns. Just to be sure that you will always be able to append the data no matter how possible long it will get.
When doing this write process will take ages and slurp gigantic sizes of disc drive for saving the huge HDF5 file.
CSV definately wins against HDF5 in terms of performance, integration and especially usability.

Read Directory of Timeseries CSV data efficiently with Dask DataFrame and Pandas

I have a directory of timeseries data stored as CSV files, one file per day. How do I load and process it efficiently with Dask DataFrame?
Disclaimer: I maintain Dask. This question occurs often enough in other channels that I decided to add a question here on StackOverflow to which I can point people in the future.

Simple Solution
If you just want to get something quickly then simple use of dask.dataframe.read_csv using a globstring for the path should suffice:
import dask.dataframe as dd
df = dd.read_csv('2000-*.csv')
Keyword arguments
The dask.dataframe.read_csv function supports most of the pandas.read_csv keyword arguments, so you might want to tweak things a bit.
df = dd.read_csv('2000-*.csv', parse_dates=['timestamp'])
Set the index
Many operations like groupbys, joins, index lookup, etc. can be more efficient if the target column is the index. For example if the timestamp column is made to be the index then you can quickly look up the values for a particular range easily, or you can join efficiently with another dataframe along time. The savings here can easily be 10x.
The naive way to do this is to use the set_index method
df2 = df.set_index('timestamp')
However if you know that your new index column is sorted then you can make this much faster by passing the sorted=True keyword argument
df2 = df.set_index('timestamp', sorted=True)
Divisions
In the above case we still pass through the data once to find good breakpoints. However if your data is already nicely segmented (such as one file per day) then you can give these division values to set_index to avoid this initial pass (which can be costly for a large amount of CSV data.
import pandas as pd
divisions = tuple(pd.date_range(start='2000', end='2001', freq='1D'))
df2 = df.set_index('timestamp', sorted=True, divisions=divisions)
This solution correctly and cheaply sets the timestamp column as the index (allowing for efficient computations in the future).
Convert to another format
CSV is a pervasive and convenient format. However it is also very slow. Other formats like Parquet may be of interest to you. They can easily be 10x to 100x faster.

Pandas Dataframe: Lack of Memory- What's the better way here?

f = pd.read_hdf('Sensor_Data.h5','f')
pieces = [f[x: x + 360] for x in xrange(504649)]
df = pd.concat(pieces)
Morning all. I have a file with 500,000+ rows of data. I want to take 360 row slices from this, and move it down by 1 row each time. (So I will end up with a LOT of data. )
As expected, I tried the above code and got a memory error. I'm assuming there's a better way of doing this?
EDIT: To add some context, this is a .h5 file, and I'm using pandas dataframe to try and slice it this way. I'm trying to create an array of data to feed into a deep neural network using caffenet, though the format it will be in at this point will be unclear...
The code works for small amounts of data. Just not for larger ones. To be clearer of what I'm trying to do:import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(10,6)); df
[displays a 6 x 10 table of random numbers]
Now:
pieces = [df[x: x + 4] for x in xrange(7)]
f = pd.concat(pieces)
f
Diplays a new table similar to the previous one, but expanded. It now has rows 0,1,2,3,1,2,3,4,2,3,4,5,3,4,5,6...
Now "pieces" is not a dataframe object itself, but a 'list' for some reason. Is there also a simple way to turn all of these separate datasets (0,1,2,3),(1,2,3,4) and so on, into dataframe object themselves? (Instead of concatenating them together into one dataframe?
I hope this makes sense.

Consider using h5py. From the website: "For example, you can slice into multi-terabyte datasets stored on disk, as if they were real NumPy arrays".

So you have a couple of questions there. First the easiest: pieces is a list because you've created it using a list comprehension, it should be a list of dataframe objects. If you want to use them as separate data frame objects you could just index into the list (i.e. pieces[0] etc).
But you still have this problem that you are trying to create a huge data frame. Without seeing the rest of how you would use the code I'd suggest not create half a million slices of your df but instead looping over you original data frame and calling whatever function you need on a single slice of the data frame:
for x in xrange(504649):
result = my_func(df[x:x+360])
that way each slice is released after its used. And hopefully the result is much smaller than the frame.
You could also similarly as above write all our slices to separate cvs files and read them in as you need.