Contents

Selecting values from an array

import numpy as np

We use arrays all the time, in data science.

my_array = np.array([10, 11, 12])

One of the most common tasks we have to do on arrays, is to select values.

We do this with array slicing.

We do array slicing when we follow the array variable name with [ (open square brackets), followed by something to specify which elements we want, followed by ] (close square brackets).

For example:

my_array[0]

10

The example is an example of the simplest case is when we want a single element from a one-dimensional array. In that case the thing between the [ and the ] is the index of the value that we want.

The index of the first value is 0, the index of the second value is 2, and so on.

my_array[0]

10

We start by loading data from a Comma Separated Value file (CSV file).

This is summary data that Andrew Rosen downloaded from https://www.ratemyprofessors.com for an analysis he reported in a 2018 paper. The data file here is from the supplementary material; it has the average rating across academic discipline for all professors in a particular discipline who have more than 20 ratings.

See the dataset page for more detail.

If you are running on your laptop, you should download the rate_my_course.csv file to the same directory as this notebook.

Don’t worry about the code next cell. It loads the data we need from a data file. We will come on the machinery to do this very soon.

# This code we have not covered yet.  We will cover it soon.
# It loads the data file, and makes some arrays.

# Load the library for reading data files.
import pandas as pd
# Safe settings for Pandas. We'll come on to this later.
pd.set_option('mode.chained_assignment', 'raise')
# Read the file.
courses = pd.read_csv('rate_my_course.csv')
# Sort the courses by number of rated teachers, most first.
courses_by_n = courses.sort_values(
    'Number of Professors', ascending=False)
# Select the top eight easiest courses.
big_courses = courses_by_n.head(8)
big_courses
Discipline Number of Professors Clarity Helpfulness Overall Quality Easiness
0 English 23343 3.756147 3.821866 3.791364 3.162754
1 Mathematics 22394 3.487379 3.641526 3.566867 3.063322
2 Biology 11774 3.608331 3.701530 3.657641 2.710459
3 Psychology 11179 3.909520 3.887536 3.900949 3.316210
4 History 11145 3.788818 3.753642 3.773746 3.053803
5 Chemistry 7346 3.387174 3.538980 3.465485 2.652054
6 Communications 6940 3.867349 3.878602 3.875019 3.379829
7 Business 6120 3.640327 3.680503 3.663332 3.172033 
# Again - don't worry about this code - we will cover it later.
# Put the columns into arrays
disciplines = np.array(big_courses['Discipline'])
easiness = np.array(big_courses['Easiness'])
quality = np.array(big_courses['Overall Quality'])

We now have the names of the disciplines with the largest number of professors.

disciplines

array(['English', 'Mathematics', 'Biology', 'Psychology', 'History',
       'Chemistry', 'Communications', 'Business'], dtype=object)

Here we get the first value. This value is at index 0.

# Get the first value (at index position 0)
disciplines[0]

'English'

Notice that this is another way of writing:

disciplines.item(0)

'English'

# Get the second value (at index position 1)
disciplines[1]

'Mathematics'

# Get the third value (at index position 2)
disciplines[2]

'Biology'

At first this will take some time to get used to, that the first value is at index position 0. There are good reasons for this, and many programming languages have this convention, but it does a while to get this habit of mind.

Square brackets and indexing

Notice too that we use square brackets for indexing.

We have seen square brackets before, when we create lists. For example, we can create a list with my_list = [1, 2, 3]. (We usually then create an array with something like my_array = np.array(my_list). This is a different use of square brackets. When we create a list, the square brackets tell Python that the elements between the brackets should be the elements of the list. This use is called a list literal expression. The square brackets follow an equal sign, or some other operator, or start the line.

When we use square brackets for indexing, the square brackets always follow an expression that returns an array. For example, consider this line:

disciplines[2]

'Biology'

disciplines is an expression that returns an array. Therefore the open square brackets follows this expression, and therefore, Python can tell that this use of square brackets means select an element or elements from the array.

So we have seen different uses of square brackets:

  • Creating a list (a list literal); (often uses in making arrays).

  • Indexing into an array.

Python can tell which of these two we mean, from the context.

Indexing with negative numbers

If we know how many elements the array has, then we can get the last element by using the number of elements, minus one (why?).

Here the number of elements is:

len(disciplines)

8

So, the last element of the array is at index position 7:

disciplines[7]

'Business'

In fact, there is a short cut for getting elements at the end of the array, and that is to use an offset with a minus in front. The number is then the offset from one past the last item. For example, here is another way to get the last element:

disciplines[-1]

'Business'

The last but one element:

disciplines[-2]

'Communications'

Index with slices

Sometimes we want more than one element from the array. For example, we might want the first 4 elements from the array. We can get these using an array slice. It looks like this:

# All the elements from offset zero up to (not including) 4
disciplines[0:4]

array(['English', 'Mathematics', 'Biology', 'Psychology'], dtype=object)

# All the elements from offset 4 up to (not including) 8
disciplines[5:11]

array(['Chemistry', 'Communications', 'Business'], dtype=object)

You can omit the first number, if you mean to start at offset 0:

disciplines[:4]

array(['English', 'Mathematics', 'Biology', 'Psychology'], dtype=object)

You can omit the last number if you mean to end at the last element of the array:

disciplines[4:]

array(['History', 'Chemistry', 'Communications', 'Business'], dtype=object)

Another way of indexing into arrays

The methods of indexing above work just as well for lists as they do for arrays.

There are other, particularly useful forms of indexing that only work for arrays. We will cover these later - but the most important of these is the ability to index arrays with Boolean arrays.