Interfacing with the pandas package

The astropy_timeseries package is not the only package to provide functionality related to time series. Another notable package is pandas, which provides a pandas.DataFrame class. The main benefits of astropy_timeseries in the context of astronomical research are the following:

• The time column is a Time object that supports very high precision representation of times, and makes it easy to convert between different time scales and formats (e.g. ISO 8601 timestamps, Julian Dates, and so on).
• The data columns can include Quantity objects with units
• The BinnedTimeSeries class includes variable width time bins
• There are built-in readers for common time series file formats, as well as the ability to define custom readers/writers.

Nevertheless, there are cases where using pandas DataFrame objects might make sense, so we provide methods to easily convert to/from DataFrame objects.

Let’s consider a simple example starting from a DataFrame:

>>> import pandas
>>> import numpy as np
>>> df = pandas.DataFrame()
>>> df['a'] = [1, 2, 3]
>>> times = np.array(['2015-07-04', '2015-07-05', '2015-07-06'], dtype=np.datetime64)
>>> df.set_index(pandas.DatetimeIndex(times), inplace=True)
>>> df
    a
2015-07-04  1
2015-07-05  2
2015-07-06  3

We can convert this to an astropy TimeSeries using from_pandas():

>>> from astropy_timeseries import TimeSeries
>>> ts = TimeSeries.from_pandas(df)
>>> ts
<TimeSeries length=3>
             time               a
            object            int64
----------------------------- -----
2015-07-04T00:00:00.000000000     1
2015-07-05T00:00:00.000000000     2
2015-07-06T00:00:00.000000000     3

Converting to DataFrame can also easily be done with to_pandas():

>>> ts['b'] = [1.2, 3.4, 5.4]
>>> df_new = ts.to_pandas()
>>> df_new
            a    b
2015-07-04  1  1.2
2015-07-05  2  3.4
2015-07-06  3  5.4