Big Data
Importing
Packages
Importing
Data
Averages
Histograms I
Histograms II
Checkpoint #1
Statistics
Summary
Importing Packages
Instead of writing our own code to deal with large data sets, we will use what we refer to as a Python package. Packages are collections of code someone else has already written to perform complicated tasks that you can then use so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel! There are many packages available to serve all sorts of applications and needs.
It’s not super important for you to understand the details of how package importing works, but we’ll show you what it looks like. Since there are so many packages, we have to tell Python which ones, if any, we want to make available to ourselves while working on our program. Therefore, importing a package just tells Python that we want to use that particular package in our code. Here, we’re importing a package called Pandas. Pandas contains many functions that aid in loading data and performing analysis. We could, of course, spend a lot of time re-writing complicated functions that give the same end-result, but why re-invent the wheel when one simple line of code can import all of these functions for us to use!