How to calculate differences between consecutive rows in pandas data frame?

Question

I've got a data frame, df, with three columns: count_a, count_b and date; the counts are floats, and the dates are consecutive days in 2015.

I'm trying to figure out the difference between each day's counts in both the count_a and count_b columns — meaning, I'm trying to calculate the difference between each row and the preceding row for both of those columns. I've set the date as the index, but am having trouble figuring out how to do this; there were a couple of hints about using pd.Series and pd.DataFrame.diff but I haven't had any luck finding an applicable answer or set of instructions.

I'm a bit stuck, and would appreciate some guidance here.

Here's what my data frame looks like:

df=pd.Dataframe({'count_a': {Timestamp('2015-01-01 00:00:00'): 34175.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-02 00:00:00'): 72640.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-03 00:00:00'): 109354.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-04 00:00:00'): 144491.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-05 00:00:00'): 180355.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-06 00:00:00'): 214615.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-07 00:00:00'): 250096.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-08 00:00:00'): 287880.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-09 00:00:00'): 332528.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-10 00:00:00'): 381460.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-11 00:00:00'): 422981.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-12 00:00:00'): 463539.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-13 00:00:00'): 505395.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-14 00:00:00'): 549027.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-15 00:00:00'): 595377.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-16 00:00:00'): 649043.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-17 00:00:00'): 707727.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-18 00:00:00'): 761287.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-19 00:00:00'): 814372.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-20 00:00:00'): 867096.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-21 00:00:00'): 920838.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-22 00:00:00'): 983405.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-23 00:00:00'): 1067243.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-24 00:00:00'): 1164421.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-25 00:00:00'): 1252178.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-26 00:00:00'): 1341484.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-27 00:00:00'): 1427600.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-28 00:00:00'): 1511549.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-29 00:00:00'): 1594846.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-30 00:00:00'): 1694226.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-31 00:00:00'): 1806727.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-01 00:00:00'): 1899880.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-02 00:00:00'): 1987978.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-03 00:00:00'): 2080338.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-04 00:00:00'): 2175775.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-05 00:00:00'): 2279525.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-06 00:00:00'): 2403306.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-07 00:00:00'): 2545696.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-08 00:00:00'): 2672464.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-09 00:00:00'): 2794788.0},  'count_b': {Timestamp('2015-01-01 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-02 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-03 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-04 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-05 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-06 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-07 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-08 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-09 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-10 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-11 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-12 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-13 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-14 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-15 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-16 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-17 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-18 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-19 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-20 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-21 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-22 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-23 00:00:00'): nan,   Timestamp('2015-01-24 00:00:00'): 71.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-25 00:00:00'): 150.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-26 00:00:00'): 236.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-27 00:00:00'): 345.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-28 00:00:00'): 1239.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-29 00:00:00'): 2228.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-30 00:00:00'): 7094.0,   Timestamp('2015-01-31 00:00:00'): 16593.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-01 00:00:00'): 27190.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-02 00:00:00'): 37519.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-03 00:00:00'): 49003.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-04 00:00:00'): 63323.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-05 00:00:00'): 79846.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-06 00:00:00'): 101568.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-07 00:00:00'): 127120.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-08 00:00:00'): 149955.0,   Timestamp('2015-02-09 00:00:00'): 171440.0}}) 

Answer 1

diff should give the desired result:

>>> df.diff() count_a  count_b 2015-01-01      NaN      NaN 2015-01-02    38465      NaN 2015-01-03    36714      NaN 2015-01-04    35137      NaN 2015-01-05    35864      NaN .... 2015-02-07   142390    25552 2015-02-08   126768    22835 2015-02-09   122324    21485