Replicating nlargest with sort_values

The previous two recipes work similarly by sorting values in slightly different manners. Finding the top n values of a column of data is equivalent to sorting the entire column in descending order and taking the first n values. pandas has many operations that are capable of doing this in a variety of ways.

In this recipe, we will replicate the Selecting the smallest of the largest recipe with the .sort_values method and explore the differences between the two.

How to do it…

1. Let's recreate the result from the final step of the Selecting the smallest of the largest recipe:

   >>> movie = pd.read_csv("data/movie.csv")
   >>> (
   ...     movie[["movie_title", "imdb_score", "budget"]]
   ...     .nlargest(100, "imdb_score")
   ...     .nsmallest(5, "budget")
   ... )
                  movie_title  imdb_score    budget
   4804        Butterfly Girl   ...