Missing values

Data Manipulation with pandas

Maggie Matsui

Senior Content Developer at DataCamp

What's a missing value?

Name	Breed	Color	Height (cm)	Weight (kg)	Date of Birth
Bella	Labrador	Brown	56	25	2013-07-01
Charlie	Poodle	Black	43	23	2016-09-16
Lucy	Chow Chow	Brown	46	22	2014-08-25
Cooper	Schnauzer	Gray	49	17	2011-12-11
Max	Labrador	Black	59	29	2017-01-20
Stella	Chihuahua	Tan	18	2	2015-04-20
Bernie	St. Bernard	White	77	74	2018-02-27

What's a missing value?

Name	Breed	Color	Height (cm)	Weight (kg)	Date of Birth
Bella	Labrador	Brown	56	?	2013-07-01
Charlie	Poodle	Black	43	23	2016-09-16
Lucy	Chow Chow	Brown	46	22	2014-08-25
Cooper	Schnauzer	Gray	49	?	2011-12-11
Max	Labrador	Black	59	29	2017-01-20
Stella	Chihuahua	Tan	18	2	2015-04-20
Bernie	St. Bernard	White	77	74	2018-02-27

Missing values in pandas DataFrames

print(dogs)

      name        breed  color  height_cm  weight_kg date_of_birth
0    Bella     Labrador  Brown         56        NaN    2013-07-01
1  Charlie       Poodle  Black         43       24.0    2016-09-16
2     Lucy    Chow Chow  Brown         46       24.0    2014-08-25
3   Cooper    Schnauzer   Gray         49        NaN    2011-12-11
4      Max     Labrador  Black         59       29.0    2017-01-20
5   Stella    Chihuahua    Tan         18        2.0    2015-04-20
6   Bernie  St. Bernard  White         77       74.0    2018-02-27

Detecting missing values

dogs.isna()

    name  breed  color  height_cm  weight_kg  date_of_birth
0  False  False  False      False       True          False
1  False  False  False      False      False          False
2  False  False  False      False      False          False
3  False  False  False      False       True          False
4  False  False  False      False      False          False
5  False  False  False      False      False          False
6  False  False  False      False      False          False

Detecting any missing values

dogs.isna().any()

name             False
breed            False
color            False
height_cm        False
weight_kg         True
date_of_birth    False
dtype: bool

Counting missing values

dogs.isna().sum()

name             0
breed            0
color            0
height_cm        0
weight_kg        2
date_of_birth    0
dtype: int64

Plotting missing values

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

dogs.isna().sum().plot(kind="bar")
plt.show()

A bar plot counting the number of missing values in each column of the dogs dataset. All bars are at zero, except weight, which has two missing values.

Removing missing values

dogs.dropna()

      name        breed  color  height_cm  weight_kg date_of_birth
1  Charlie       Poodle  Black         43       24.0    2016-09-16
2     Lucy    Chow Chow  Brown         46       24.0    2014-08-25
4      Max     Labrador  Black         59       29.0    2017-01-20
5   Stella    Chihuahua    Tan         18        2.0    2015-04-20
6   Bernie  St. Bernard  White         77       74.0    2018-02-27

Replacing missing values

dogs.fillna(0)

      name        breed  color  height_cm  weight_kg date_of_birth
0    Bella     Labrador  Brown         56        0.0    2013-07-01
1  Charlie       Poodle  Black         43       24.0    2016-09-16
2     Lucy    Chow Chow  Brown         46       24.0    2014-08-25
3   Cooper    Schnauzer   Gray         49        0.0    2011-12-11
4      Max     Labrador  Black         59       29.0    2017-01-20
5   Stella    Chihuahua    Tan         18        2.0    2015-04-20
6   Bernie  St. Bernard  White         77       74.0    2018-02-27

Let's practice!

Data Manipulation with pandas