Exercise 3.1: Mastering .loc for Pandas data frames

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Pandas can be a bit frustrating during your first experiences with it. In this and the next few exercises, we will do our first practice with it. Stick with it! The more and more you use it, the more distant the memory of life without it will become.

We will work with a data set from Kleinteich and Gorb, Sci. Rep., 4, 5355, 2014, and was featured in the New York Times. They measured several properties about the tongue strikes of horned frogs. Let’s take a look at the data set, which is in the file ~/git/data/frog_tongue_adhesion.csv.

!head -20 data/frog_tongue_adhesion.csv

# These data are from the paper,
#   Kleinteich and Gorb, Sci. Rep., 4, 5225, 2014.
# It was featured in the New York Times.
#    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/science/a-frog-thats-a-living-breathing-pac-man.html
#
# The authors included the data in their supplemental information.
#
# Importantly, the ID refers to the identifites of the frogs they tested.
#   I:   adult, 63 mm snout-vent-length (SVL) and 63.1 g body weight,
#        Ceratophrys cranwelli crossed with Ceratophrys cornuta
#   II:  adult, 70 mm SVL and 72.7 g body weight,
#        Ceratophrys cranwelli crossed with Ceratophrys cornuta
#   III: juvenile, 28 mm SVL and 12.7 g body weight, Ceratophrys cranwelli
#   IV:  juvenile, 31 mm SVL and 12.7 g body weight, Ceratophrys cranwelli
date,ID,trial number,impact force (mN),impact time (ms),impact force / body weight,adhesive force (mN),time frog pulls on target (ms),adhesive force / body weight,adhesive impulse (N-s),total contact area (mm2),contact area without mucus (mm2),contact area with mucus / contact area without mucus,contact pressure (Pa),adhesive strength (Pa)
2013_02_26,I,3,1205,46,1.95,-785,884,1.27,-0.290,387,70,0.82,3117,-2030
2013_02_26,I,4,2527,44,4.08,-983,248,1.59,-0.181,101,94,0.07,24923,-9695
2013_03_01,I,1,1745,34,2.82,-850,211,1.37,-0.157,83,79,0.05,21020,-10239
2013_03_01,I,2,1556,41,2.51,-455,1025,0.74,-0.170,330,158,0.52,4718,-1381
2013_03_01,I,3,493,36,0.80,-974,499,1.57,-0.423,245,216,0.12,2012,-3975

The first lines all begin with # signs, signifying that they are comments and not data. They do give important information, though, such as the meaning of the ID data. The ID refers to which specific frog was tested.

Immediately after the comments, we have a row of comma-separated headers. This row sets the number of columns in this data set and labels the meaning of the columns. So, we see that the first column is the date of the experiment, the second column is the ID of the frog, the third is the trial number, and so on.

After this row, each row represents a single experiment where the frog struck the target. So, these data are already in tidy format.

a) Load in the data set into a data frame. Be sure to use the appropriate value for the comment keyword argument of pd.read_csv().

b) Extract the impact time of all impacts that had an adhesive strength of magnitude greater than 2000 Pa. Note: The data in the 'adhesive strength (Pa)' column is all negative. This is because the adhesive force is defined to be negative in the measurement. Without changing the data in the data frame, how can you check that the magnitude (the absolute value) is greater than 2000?

c) Extract the impact force and adhesive force for all of Frog II’s strikes.

d) Extract the adhesive force and the time the frog pulls on the target for juvenile frogs (Frogs III and IV). Hint: We saw the & operator for Boolean indexing across more than one column. The | operator signifies OR, and works analogously. For technical reasons that we can discuss if you like, the Python operators and and or will not work for Boolean indexing of data frames. You could also approach this using the isin() method of a Pandas Series.

Solution

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import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

To read in the data frame, we use the comment='#' kwarg.

df = pd.read_csv('data/frog_tongue_adhesion.csv', comment='#')

# Take a look
df.head()

	date	ID	trial number	impact force (mN)	impact time (ms)	impact force / body weight	adhesive force (mN)	time frog pulls on target (ms)	adhesive force / body weight	adhesive impulse (N-s)	total contact area (mm2)	contact area without mucus (mm2)	contact area with mucus / contact area without mucus	contact pressure (Pa)	adhesive strength (Pa)
0	2013_02_26	I	3	1205	46	1.95	-785	884	1.27	-0.290	387	70	0.82	3117	-2030
1	2013_02_26	I	4	2527	44	4.08	-983	248	1.59	-0.181	101	94	0.07	24923	-9695
2	2013_03_01	I	1	1745	34	2.82	-850	211	1.37	-0.157	83	79	0.05	21020	-10239
3	2013_03_01	I	2	1556	41	2.51	-455	1025	0.74	-0.170	330	158	0.52	4718	-1381
4	2013_03_01	I	3	493	36	0.80	-974	499	1.57	-0.423	245	216	0.12	2012	-3975

b) To extract the entries with strong adhesive strength, we need to use the np.abs() function to esure that the absolute value of the adhesive strength is above 2000.

df.loc[np.abs(df['adhesive strength (Pa)']) > 2000, 'impact time (ms)']

0      46
1      44
2      34
4      36
7      46
8      50
11     48
13     31
14     38
17     60
19     40
23     59
24     33
25     43
27     31
29     42
31     57
33     21
35     29
37     31
38     15
39     42
42    105
44     29
45     16
47     31
49     32
50     30
51     16
52     27
53     30
54     35
55     39
57     34
59     34
60     26
61     20
62     55
65     33
66     74
67     26
68     27
69     33
71      6
73     31
74     34
75     38
78     33
Name: impact time (ms), dtype: int64

# c) Impact force and adhesive force for Frog II
df.loc[df['ID']=='II', ['impact force (mN)', 'adhesive force (mN)']]

	impact force (mN)	adhesive force (mN)
20	1612	-655
21	605	-292
22	327	-246
23	946	-245
24	541	-553
25	1539	-664
26	529	-261
27	628	-691
28	1453	-92
29	297	-566
30	703	-223
31	269	-512
32	751	-227
33	245	-573
34	1182	-522
35	515	-599
36	435	-364
37	383	-469
38	457	-844
39	730	-648

# d) Adhesive force and time frog pulls for frogs III and IV
df.loc[
    df["ID"].isin(["III", "IV"]),
    ["adhesive force (mN)", "time frog pulls on target (ms)"],
]

	adhesive force (mN)	time frog pulls on target (ms)
40	-94	683
41	-163	245
42	-172	619
43	-225	1823
44	-301	918
45	-93	1351
46	-131	1790
47	-289	1006
48	-104	883
49	-229	1218
50	-259	910
51	-231	550
52	-267	2081
53	-178	376
54	-123	289
55	-151	607
56	-127	2932
57	-372	680
58	-236	685
59	-390	1308
60	-456	462
61	-193	250
62	-236	743
63	-225	844
64	-217	728
65	-161	472
66	-139	959
67	-264	844
68	-342	1515
69	-231	279
70	-209	1427
71	-292	2874
72	-339	4251
73	-371	626
74	-331	1254
75	-302	986
76	-216	1627
77	-163	2021
78	-367	1366
79	-218	1269

Computing environment

%load_ext watermark
%watermark -v -p numpy,pandas,jupyterlab

Python implementation: CPython
Python version       : 3.9.12
IPython version      : 8.3.0

numpy     : 1.21.5
pandas    : 1.4.2
jupyterlab: 3.3.2