Calculating difference between two rows in Python / Pandas

Question

In python, how can I reference previous row and calculate something against it? Specifically, I am working with dataframes in pandas - I have a da

Answer 1

I think you want to do something like this:

In [26]: data
Out[26]: 
           Date   Close  Adj Close
251  2011-01-03  147.48     143.25
250  2011-01-04  147.64     143.41
249  2011-01-05  147.05     142.83
248  2011-01-06  148.66     144.40
247  2011-01-07  147.93     143.69

In [27]: data.set_index('Date').diff()
Out[27]: 
            Close  Adj Close
Date                        
2011-01-03    NaN        NaN
2011-01-04   0.16       0.16
2011-01-05  -0.59      -0.58
2011-01-06   1.61       1.57
2011-01-07  -0.73      -0.71

Answer 2

To calculate difference of one column. Here is what you can do.

df=
      A      B
0     10     56
1     45     48
2     26     48
3     32     65

We want to compute row difference in A only and want to consider the rows which are less than 15.

df['A_dif'] = df['A'].diff()
df=
          A      B      A_dif
    0     10     56      Nan
    1     45     48      35
    2     26     48      19
    3     32     65      6
df = df[df['A_dif']<15]

df=
          A      B      A_dif
    0     10     56      Nan
    3     32     65      6

Answer 3

I don't know pandas, and I'm pretty sure it has something specific for this; however, I'll give you the pure-Python solution, that might be of some help even if you need to use pandas:

import csv
import urllib

# This basically retrieves the CSV files and loads it in a list, converting
# All numeric values to floats
url='http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=IBM&a=00&b=1&c=2011&d=11&e=31&f=2011&g=d&ignore=.csv'
reader = csv.reader(urllib.urlopen(url), delimiter=',')
# We sort the output list so the records are ordered by date
cleaned = sorted([[r[0]] + map(float, r[1:]) for r in list(reader)[1:]])

for i, row in enumerate(cleaned):  # enumerate() yields two-tuples: (<id>, <item>)
    # The try..except here is to skip the IndexError for line 0
    try:
        # This will calculate difference of each numeric field with the same field
        # in the row before this one
        print row[0], [(row[j] - cleaned[i-1][j]) for j in range(1, 7)]
    except IndexError:
        pass