Do I need to import NumPy before importing pandas or can I use pandas by itself?

Question

I know pandas is built on NumPy, and my class examples also always include import NumPy first. I'm just not sure if this is a required step or a "just in case" type situation.

Answer 1

It's not necessary to import numpy before importing pandas. numpy is implicitly imported by and internally used within the pandas module. For example:

In [1]: import pandas as pd

In [2]: s = pd.Series(range(10))

In [3]: s
Out[3]: 
0    0
1    1
2    2
3    3
4    4
5    5
6    6
7    7
8    8
9    9
dtype: int64

In [4]: s.mean()
Out[4]: np.float64(4.5)

The reason that it is often imported along with pandas is that you often will create an array using numpy which is then passed to pandas.