Advanced Indexing 1

Motivation

Although we typically deal with single-indexed datasets in most situations, it’s helpful to understand how to work effectively with MultiIndex DataFrames using advanced indexing methods. These MultiIndex DataFrames enable us to perform sophisticated data analysis and manipulation, especially when dealing with higher dimensional data.

MultiIndex DataFrames may seem slightly complicated to work with, but this is due to our infrequent interaction with them. Let’s begin with a quick refresher. A pandas MultiIndex DataFrame is a DataFrame that has a hierarchical index (aka MultiIndex), which means that there are multiple index levels on either the row or column axis. In simpler terms, it’s a DataFrame with multiple columns acting as a row identifier or multiple rows acting as a column identifier.