Working with missing data

In this section, we will discuss missing (also referred to as NA) values in pandas.

See the cookbook for some advanced strategies.

Values considered “missing”

As data comes in many shapes and forms, pandas aims to be flexible with regard to handling missing data. While NaN is the default missing value marker for reasons of computational speed and convenience, we need to be able to easily detect this value with data of different types: floating point, integer, boolean, and general object. In many cases, however, the Python None will arise and we wish to also consider that “missing” or “not available” or “NA”.

In [1]: df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(5, 3), index=['a', 'c', 'e', 'f', 'h'],
   ...:                   columns=['one', 'two', 'three'])
   ...: 

In [2]: df['four'] = 'bar'

In [3]: df['five'] = df['one'] > 0

In [4]: df
Out[4]: 
        one       two     three four   five
a  0.469112 -0.282863 -1.509059  bar   True
c -1.135632  1.212112 -0.173215  bar  False
e  0.119209 -1.044236 -0.861849  bar   True
f -2.104569 -0.494929  1.071804  bar  False
h  0.721555 -0.706771 -1.039575  bar   True

In [5]: df2 = df.reindex(['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h'])

In [6]: df2
Out[6]: 
        one       two     three four   five
a  0.469112 -0.282863 -1.509059  bar   True
b       NaN       NaN       NaN  NaN    NaN
c -1.135632  1.212112 -0.173215  bar  False
d       NaN       NaN       NaN  NaN    NaN
e  0.119209 -1.044236 -0.861849  bar   True
f -2.104569 -0.494929  1.071804  bar  False
g       NaN       NaN       NaN  NaN    NaN
h  0.721555 -0.706771 -1.039575  bar   True

To make detecting missing values easier (and across different array dtypes), pandas provides the isna() and notna() functions, which are also methods on Series and DataFrame objects:

In [7]: df2['one']
Out[7]: 
a    0.469112
b         NaN
c   -1.135632
d         NaN
e    0.119209
f   -2.104569
g         NaN
h    0.721555
Name: one, dtype: float64

In [8]: pd.isna(df2['one'])