What is the point of .ix indexing for pandas Series

Question

For the Series object (let\'s call it s), pandas offers three types of addressing.

s.iloc[] -- for integer position addressing;

s.loc[] -- for index label addres

Answer 1

Note: As of Pandas v0.20, .ix indexer is deprecated in favour of .iloc / .loc.

For a Series, .ix is equivalent of [], the getitem syntax. .ix/.loc support multi-axis indexing, which for a Series does not matter (only has 1 axis), and hence is there for compatibility.

e.g.

DataFrame(...).ix[row_indexer,column_indexer]
Series(...).ix[row_indexer]

.ix itself is an 'older' method that tries to figure out what you want when presented with label or positional (integer) indexing. This is why .loc/.iloc were introduced in 0.11 to provide indexing choice by the user.