“Large data” work flows using pandas

Question

I have tried to puzzle out an answer to this question for many months while learning pandas. I use SAS for my day-to-day work and it is great for it\'s out-of-core support.

Answer 1

One trick I found helpful for large data use cases is to reduce the volume of the data by reducing float precision to 32-bit. It's not applicable in all cases, but in many applications 64-bit precision is overkill and the 2x memory savings are worth it. To make an obvious point even more obvious:

>>> df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(int(1e8), 5))
>>> df.info()

RangeIndex: 100000000 entries, 0 to 99999999
Data columns (total 5 columns):
...
dtypes: float64(5)
memory usage: 3.7 GB

>>> df.astype(np.float32).info()

RangeIndex: 100000000 entries, 0 to 99999999
Data columns (total 5 columns):
...
dtypes: float32(5)
memory usage: 1.9 GB