What are the differences between Pandas and NumPy+SciPy in Python?

python numpy scipy pandas
user1462733 picture user1462733 · Jun 18, 2012 · Viewed 130.6k times · Source

They both seem exceedingly similar and I'm curious as to which package would be more beneficial for financial data analysis.

Answer

Wes McKinney picture Wes McKinney · Jun 18, 2012

pandas provides high level data manipulation tools built on top of NumPy. NumPy by itself is a fairly low-level tool, similar to MATLAB. pandas on the other hand provides rich time series functionality, data alignment, NA-friendly statistics, groupby, merge and join methods, and lots of other conveniences. It has become very popular in recent years in financial applications. I will have a chapter dedicated to financial data analysis using pandas in my upcoming book.

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