Explorer · Context Digital

What are Dataframes?

If you're new to the concept, think of a dataframe like a supercharged spreadsheet within your code. It organises data into rows and columns, making it easy to manipulate, analyse, and extract insights. Explorer provides a rich API for working with dataframes, allowing you to perform tasks like:

Importing data from various sources (CSV, databases, etc.)
Cleaning and preparing data for analysis
Performing calculations and transformations
Summarising and aggregating data
Visualising data with libraries like Kino

Why Explorer?

Explorer is built on top of Polars, a blazing-fast dataframe library written in Rust. This foundation gives Explorer incredible speed and efficiency, making it ideal for handling even large datasets.

Here are a few reasons why Elixir developers choose Explorer:

Performance: Leverage the speed of Rust for efficient data manipulation.
Ease of use: Enjoy an intuitive API inspired by the tidyverse, but if you've used other dataframe libraries like Pandas, you'll find many familiar concepts.
Integration: Seamlessly integrate with other Elixir libraries and tools.
Lazy evaluation: Optimise performance by only computing operations when needed.

What you'll learn

In this guide, we'll take you on a journey through the core features of Explorer. You'll learn how to:

Set up your environment and get started with Livebook.
Import data from various sources.
Clean and prepare your data.
Explore and visualise your data.
Transform your data for analysis.
Export your results.

By the end of this guide, you'll be equipped to tackle a wide range of data manipulation tasks with confidence using Explorer.

If you're experienced with Elixir and dataframes in general, and just want to get going fast, you may wish to visit the quick guide on the offical Explorer documentation website: Ten minutes to Explorer.

Ready to unlock the power of dataframes in Elixir? Let's get started!