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Using Timedelta and Period to create DateTime based indexes in Pandas

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Real life data often consists of date and time-based records. From weather data to measuring some other metrics in big organizations they often rely on associating the observed data with some timestamp for evaluating the performance over time.

We have already discussed how to manipulate date and time in pandas, now let’s see the concepts of Timestamp, Periods and indexes created using these.

Using Timestamps :
Timestamp is the pandas equivalent of Python’s Datetime and is interchangeable with it in most cases. It denotes a specific point in time. Let’s see how to create Timestamp.




# importing pandas as pd
import pandas as pd
  
# Creating the timestamp
ts = pd.Timestamp('02-06-2018')
  
# Print the timestamp
print(ts)


Output :

Timestamps alone is not very useful, until we create an index out of it. The index that we create using the Timestamps are of DatetimeIndex type.




# importing pandas as pd
import pandas as pd
  
# Let's create a dataframe
df = pd.DataFrame({'City':['Lisbon', 'Parague', 'Macao', 'Venice'],
                    'Event':['Music', 'Poetry', 'Theatre', 'Comedy'],
                    'Cost':[10000, 5000, 15000, 2000]})
  
  
# Let's create an index using Timestamps
index_ = [pd.Timestamp('01-06-2018'), pd.Timestamp('04-06-2018'),
          pd.Timestamp('07-06-2018'), pd.Timestamp('10-06-2018')]
  
# Let's set the index of the dataframe
df.index = index_
  
# Let's visualize the dataframe
print(df)


Output :

Now we will see the type of dataframe index which is made up of individual timestamps.




# Check the type
print(type(df.index))


Output :

As we can clearly see in the output, the type of the index of our dataframe is ‘DatetimeIndex’.
 
Using Periods : Unlike Timestamp which represents a point in time, Periods represents a period of time. It could be a month, day, year, hour etc.. Let’s see how to create Periods in Pandas.




# importing pandas as pd
import pandas as pd
  
# Let's create the Period
# We have created a period
# of a month
pr = pd.Period('06-2018')
  
# Let's print the period
print(pr)


Output :

The ‘M’ in the output represents month.

Period objects alone is not very useful until it is used as an Index in a Dataframe or a Series. An index made up of Periods are called PeriodIndex.




# importing pandas as pd
import pandas as pd
  
# Let's create a dataframe
df = pd.DataFrame({'City':['Lisbon', 'Parague', 'Macao', 'Venice'],
                    'Event':['Music', 'Poetry', 'Theatre', 'Comedy'],
                    'Cost':[10000, 5000, 15000, 2000]})
  
  
# Let's create an index using Periods
index_ = [pd.Period('02-2018'), pd.Period('04-2018'),
          pd.Period('06-2018'), pd.Period('10-2018')]
  
# Let's set the index of the dataframe
df.index = index_
  
# Let's visualize the dataframe
print(df)


Output :

Now we will see the type of our dataframe index which is made up of individual Periods.




# Check the type
print(type(df.index))


Output :

As we can see in the output, the index created using periods are called PeriodIndex.



Last Updated : 05 Feb, 2019
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