Included in the Pandas open-source library are DataFrames, which are two-dimensional array-like data tables in which each column contains values of one variable and each row contains one set of values from each column. Data stored in a DataFrame can be of numeric, factor, or character types. Pandas DataFrames are also thought of as a dictionary or collection of series objects.
Data scientists and programmers familiar with the R programming language for statistical computing know that DataFrames are a way of storing data in grids that are easily overviewed. This means that Pandas is chiefly used for machine learning in the form of DataFrames.
![DataFrames. DataFrames.](/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/glossary/data-science/pandas/img-1.png)
Pandas allows for importing and exporting tabular data in various formats, such as CSV or JSON files.
![Importing and exporting tabular data. Importing and exporting tabular data.](/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/glossary/data-science/pandas/img-2.png)
Pandas also allows for various data manipulation operations and for data cleaning features, including selecting a subset, creating derived columns, sorting, joining, filling, replacing, summary statistics, and plotting.
![Data manipulation: sorting.](/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/glossary/data-science/pandas/img-3.png)
![Data manipulation: joining.](/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/glossary/data-science/pandas/img-4.png)
![Data manipulation: summary statistics and plotting.](/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/glossary/data-science/pandas/img-5.png)
According to organizers of the Python Package Index—a repository of software for the Python programming language—Pandas is well suited for working with several kinds of data, including:
- Tabular data with heterogeneously-typed columns, as in an SQL table or Excel spreadsheet
- Ordered and unordered (not necessarily fixed-frequency) time series data
- Arbitrary matrix data (homogeneously typed or heterogeneous) with row and column labels
Any other form of observational/statistical data sets. The data actually need not be labeled at all to be placed into a pandas data structure.