Interview question: change the name of a column in a pandas dataframe

Pandas is one quintessential library that a person who is studying Python will need to become familiar with. Pandas is a fast, powerful, flexible and easy to use open source and data analysis manipulation tool, built on top of the Python programming language. The purpose of this library is to create series and dataframes, and then to process the data within those data structures. It is important therefore to be familiar with the functions in that library because they will be necessary building blocks in creating a program, specifically in machine learning projects.

One question that may come up during an interview is to change the name of a column in a dataframe. The function that will need to be used is the rename function, which can be found here in the pandas literature:- https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.rename.html

An example of how I renamed a column in a recent machine learning project that I worked on was to change the name of a column in the automobiles dataset from ‘num-of-cylinders’ to ‘numofcylinders’.

The first thing that I did was to used the columns function to see what the column names were.

I then used the rename function to change the name of the column in question.