Working with groupby in pandas: From Zero to Hero.

What is aggregation?

One of the important Tools in data science is to know how to aggregate data, Aggregation techniques enable the programmer (or the data scientist) to understand more about the data he's working on.

But what is aggregation exactly? Aggregation is to group the data observations into distinct groups (or categories) and then we can apply some statistical functions on those groups like mean, median, standard deviation, sum, product, count, minimum, maximum and many other cool functions.

After reading this post, we'll be able to work with any kind of dataset and apply complex groupby operations. In this post we will work on the pokemon data (The anime of pokemon and its video games). we don't need to worry! we will explain each detail of this data before moving to the code.

To download the dataset, click this link. it is a link from github that contains the raw data of the pokemon dataset. we can notice that the format of data is similar to the format of a csv file

We can read the dataset directly from the provided github link. Here is our starting block of code:

import pandas as pd
path='https://gist.githubusercontent.com/armgilles/194bcff35001e7eb53a2a8b441e8b2c6/raw/92200bc0a673d5ce2110aaad4544ed6c4010f687/pokemon.csv'
pokemon_data = pd.read_csv(path, index_col = '#')

This our post summary:

1. Dataset review and understanding.
2. Code steps
3. Step 1
4. Step 2
5. Step 3
6. Step 4

Dataset review and understanding

Pokemon is an anime which the main character always wants to collect pokemon monsters and we need to help him to know more about those pokemons.

So, our data is definitely about pokemon monsters, each observation of pokemon data represents a pokemon(a certain monster).

Every pokemon has a set of attributes like Attack, Defense, HP and Monster Type.

Our dataset contains a set of 11 columns (excluding the name of the pokemon):

• Type 1 : the type of a pokemon, the pokemon can have type like Grass, Fire or any other attribute.
• Type 2 : the same as the first attribute, but with different types.
• Total : the total sum of the following numerical attributes.
• Attack : this column describes the attack points of a monster.
• Defense : this column describes the defense points of a monster.
• HP : this column describes the health points of a monster.
• Sp. ATK : this column describes the special attack points of a monster.
• Sp. DEF : this column describes the special defense points of a monster.
• Speed : this column describes the speed points of a monster.
• Generation : this column describes the generation category, it is ranked from 1 to 6.
• Legendary : this column describes whether the monster has a legendary class or not, it is represented by boolean a value (True or False).

Now, after we read the dataset, we need to move on the next steps of learning groupby operations. But before that we need to make a few lines of codes.

del pokemon_data['Name']

The code above deleted the Name column, because we don't need a string information in our data. groupby operations need just categorical or numerical information.

Code steps

From zero to hero.

In this section, we will introduce our learning steps of groupby operations. each step will state a statistical question, and we will show the code that will provide the output to that question.

this is our final working dataset:

Step 1

Apply a groupby operation with a mean function.

• Question : what is the mean Total attribute for each pokemon Generation attribute?

• Answer : First, you need to group the data into a Generation group, and then apply the mean on the Total.

• Code:
  

pokemon_data[['Total', 'Generation']].groupby('Generation').mean()

Output:

This can be done with the sum() function, the min() functions and many other statistical functions.

Try this block of code, to try out different aggregate functions:

pokemon_data[['Total', 'Generation']].groupby('Generation').size() #aggregate by counting the values
pokemon_data[['Total', 'Generation']].groupby('Generation').min() #aggregate by minimum
pokemon_data[['Total', 'Generation']].groupby('Generation').max() #aggregate by maximum
pokemon_data[['Total', 'Generation']].groupby('Generation').std() #aggregate by standard deviation
pokemon_data[['Total', 'Generation']].groupby('Generation').sum() #aggregate by sum
pokemon_data[['Total', 'Generation']].groupby('Generation').prod() #aggregate by production

Step 2

Multiple aggregate functions in a single groupby

• Question : Now, what is the mean and standard deviation of Speed attribute for each generation ?

• Answer : we can aggregate multiple functions in a single output using the agg() function.

• Code : There are 2 versions of code that can result the same output, the second one is a simplified version :

1. Code 1 :

pokemon_data.groupby("Generation").agg(
   average_speed = pd.NamedAgg("Speed","mean"), # here we apply the mean
   std_speed = pd.NamedAgg("Speed", "std"), # here we apply the standard deviation
)

1. Code 2 :

pokemon_data.groupby("Generation").agg(
average_speed=("Speed","mean"), # applying the mean
std_speed = ("Speed", "std"), # applying the standard deviation
)

• Output :

Step 3:

Group by multiple columns.

• Question : what is the maximum Attack attribute for each Generation attribute? and we want to know which Legendary attribute has the maximum Attack for each Generation.

• Answer : we can do that by goruping by Generation and Legendary at the same time.

• Code :
  

pokemon_data.groupby(['Generation', 'Legendary']).agg(
maximum_attack = ('Attack', 'max')
)

• Output :

Step 4:

Sorting group results. (Multiple column case)

• Question : What are the types (Type 1 to be specific) of pokemon that have the maximum Attack attributes for each Generation column? the results need to be sorted, so that the maximum value for each Generation and type will be spotted easily.

• Answer : Code and output will explain.

• Code :
  

pokemon_data.groupby(['Generation', 'Legendary']).agg(
maximum_attack = ('Attack', 'max')
).sort_values(by = 'maximum_attack', ascending = False)

• Output : The output is specified with Generation 1 attribute.

Step 5:

use groupbies with filtering:

This step won't be in question/Answer format.
We can filter our data by Type 1 for example:

pokemon_data[pokemon_data['Type 1'] == 'Water'].head()
# or
pokemon_data.loc[ pokemon_data['Type 1'] == 'Water' , ['Attack']]

Now we need to use a grouby operation with a filter:

grouped = pokemon_data.groupby('Type 1')
grouped.filter(lambda x: x['Attack'].mean() > 100)

This code displays only the Dragon type, because the mean attack of all dragon pokemons is above 100.