Frequency Counts of Unique Items in a Series

Python
, ,
#1

In this thread, you’ll learn different methods and techniques of counting frequency or the number of occurrences of unique items in a series. There are several methods to achieve this task, let’s go over a few of them:

1. Using a Python dictionary:

  • This technique involves creating a dictionary and looping through all items in the series and using get(item, default) method, we’d be updating the counts.
  • get(item, default) method allows you to retrieve values associated with keys in the dictionary; item is the key to which the value you want to find, and default is the value to return if the key is not found.

2. Using "value_counts()" Pandas method:

  • The value_counts() method returns a series containing counts of unique values in a sequence of values.
  • sort = True sorts the results according to the values in descending order.

3. Using "np.unique()" method:

  • The np.unique() method returns unique values from a sequence of values.
  • When return_counts is set to True in the np.unique() function, it not only returns the unique values in an array or list but also the count of each unique value.

Note: The np.unique() returns separate lists for the unique items and their counts. Therefore, we map the items to their respective counts using the zip() function.

4. Using Counter class:

  • Counter class is located in the collections module.
  • Counter class is a built-in Python class that can be used to count the frequency of elements in a list or a sequence. You can simply pass the series to the Counter class and get the frequency counts.

5. Using "groupby()" method:

  • The groupby() method in pandas is used to group rows of a DataFrame or Series object based on one or more columns or indexes.
  • After grouping, we can apply various statistical functions or other operations on each group to aggregate or transform the data.
  • The count() aggregate function is applied in the example below after grouping the data.
Keeping Frequent Values and Replacing Others in a Series