4 Comparison with R / R libraries

Since pandas aims to provide a lot of the data manipulation and analysis functionality that people use R for, this page was started to provide a more detailed look at the R language and its many third party libraries as they relate to pandas. In comparisons with R and CRAN libraries, we care about the following things:

Functionality / flexibility: what can/cannot be done with each tool

Performance: how fast are operations. Hard numbers/benchmarks are preferable

Ease-of-use: Is one tool easier/harder to use (you may have to be the judge of this, given side-by-side code comparisons)

This page is also here to offer a bit of a translation guide for users of these R packages.

For transfer of DataFrame objects from pandas to R, one option is to use HDF5 files, see External Compatibility for an example.

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