What is the use of head () methods in Pandas series?

The head() method in the pandas series is used to retrieve the topmost rows from a series object. By default, it will display 5 rows of series data, and we can customize the number of rows other than 5 rows.

This method takes an integer value as a parameter to return a series with those many rows, suppose if you give integer n as a parameter to the head method like head(n) then it will return a pandas series with n number of elements. And those elements are the first n number of elements of our pandas series object.

Example

# importing required packages
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

# creating pandas Series object
series = pd.Series(np.random.rand(20))

print(series)

print('
The Resultant series from head() method:')
# Displaying top row from series data
print(series.head())

Explanation

In this example, we have created a pandas series object ‘series’ with all randomly generated values by using the NumPy package.

Here we define an integer value 20 to the “np.random.rand” method to get 20 random values as a parameter to our pandas.series function. Hence the total number of elements present in this series object is 20 and index labels are positional index values that are automatically generated by the pandas series function.

Output

0   0.109458
1   0.199291
2   0.007854
3   0.205035
4   0.546315
5   0.442926
6   0.897214
7   0.950229
8   0.494563
9   0.843451
10  0.582327
11  0.257302
12  0.915850
13  0.364164
14  0.388809
15  0.918468
16  0.598981
17  0.631225
18  0.555009
19  0.684256
dtype: float64

The Resultant series from head() method:
0  0.109458
1  0.199291
2  0.007854
3  0.205035
4  0.546315
dtype: float64

The above output block has two outputs one is the actual pandas series object ‘series’ and the second is an output of top elements from the series object (series) which are displayed by the head() method.

Example

import pandas as pd

# creating dates
date = pd.date_range("2021-01-01", periods=15, freq="M")

# creating pandas Series with date index
S_obj = pd.Series(date, index=date.month_name())

print(S_obj)

print('
The Resultant series from head() method:')
# Displaying top row from series data
print(S_obj.head(1))

Explanation

In the first example, we have seen the default output of the head method, it retrieves 5 elements from the series object by default. And we can get the desired number of output elements from the head method by sending an integer parameter to the head function.

Output

January   2021-01-31
February  2021-02-28
March     2021-03-31
April     2021-04-30
May       2021-05-31
June      2021-06-30
July      2021-07-31
August    2021-08-31
September 2021-09-30
October   2021-10-31
November  2021-11-30
December  2021-12-31
January   2022-01-31
February  2022-02-28
March     2022-03-31
dtype: datetime64[ns]

The Resultant series from head() method:
January  2021-01-31
dtype: datetime64[ns]

In this example, we have sent an integer value 1 to the head method as a parameter. And we can see the result in the above output block it returns an element which is the topmost element from our series object.

Gireesha Devara

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Updated on: 18-Nov-2021

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