Displaying Dataset Description

Displaying the Dataset Description

To retrieve the summary description of a DataFrame object, we can use the following method:

df.info()

This is a useful method for quickly getting an overview of the data in a DataFrame including information about the data type, number of records in each column, and number of missing values.

Sample Return Output:

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 10000 entries, 0 to 9999
Data columns (total 7 columns):
column_1      10000 non-null int64
column_2      10000 non-null object
column_3      10000 non-null float64
column_4      10000 non-null int64
column_5      10000 non-null object
column_6      10000 non-null float64
column_7      10000 non-null int64
dtypes: float64(2), int64(3), object(2)
memory usage: 547.0+ KB

Interpreting the Output

This output provides some basic information about a pandas DataFrame, including:

The class of the DataFrame (pandas.core.frame.DataFrame)
The range of the index (in this case, RangeIndex: 10000 entries, 0 to 9999)
The total number of columns in the DataFrame (7 in this case)
A list of the column names, along with their data types and the number of non-null values (column_1 is an integer with 10000 non-null values, column_2 is an object with 10000 non-null values, etc.)
The data types of each column (float64, int64, or object)
The total memory usage of the DataFrame (547.0+ KB in this case)

Getting the Dimension of the Dataset

To get the dimension (or shape) of the dataset:

df.shape

This returns the number of features in the dataset and the records:

([# of features], [# of records])