Slicing time series intelligently

DataFrame selection and slicing was covered previously. When the DataFrame has a DatetimeIndex, even more opportunities arise for selection and slicing.

In this recipe, we will use partial date matching to select and slice a DataFrame with a DatetimeIndex.

How to do it…

1. Read in the Denver crimes dataset from the hdf5 file crimes.h5, and output the column data types and the first few rows. The hdf5 file format allows efficient storage of large amounts of data and is different from a CSV text file:

   >>> crime = pd.read_hdf('data/crime.h5', 'crime')
   >>> crime.dtypes
   OFFENSE_TYPE_ID              category
   OFFENSE_CATEGORY_ID          category
   REPORTED_DATE          datetime64[ns]
   GEO_LON                       float64
   GEO_LAT                       float64
   NEIGHBORHOOD_ID              category
   IS_CRIME                        int64
   IS_TRAFFIC                      int64
   dtype...