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I was happy to see "Hierarchical columns" on the features wish list. My app uses a R data frame like structure (table of heterogeneous columns with possible mis

I was happy to see "Hierarchical columns" on the features wish list. My app uses a R data frame like structure (table of heterogeneous columns with possible missing data). One "cute" thing I implemented was hierarchical columns. Super useful for what I'm doing, but hard to expose to other languages. The plan is to flatten the columns to 'parent.child' strings when using python. I'm not quite at the point where I'll be wrapping this into python. When I do I'll take a close look at pandas. Any other recommendations? I took a quick look at pytables, and pandas looks better for my app.

wesm 15y ago
To be honest I haven't really broached the hierarchical columns issue inside pandas. If someone can look and suggest an implementation strategy that doesn't interfere with the rest of the API I would be all for it. If you have heterogeneous columns with possibly missing data basically pandas is the only game in town (did you see my diagram?? :) ). It's possible to get a numpy MaskedArray with structured dtype to function like you want but it's relatively tricky to do.