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Numpy is memory efficient. Pandas has a better performance when a number of rows is 500K or more. Numpy has a better performance when number of rows is 50K or less. Indexing of the pandas series is very slow as compared to numpy arrays.
NumPy and SciPy both are very important libraries in Python. They have a wide range of functions and contrasting operations. NumPy is short for Numerical Python while SciPy is an abbreviation of Scientific Python. Both are modules of Python and are used to perform various operations with the data.
The essential difference is the presence of the index: while the Numpy Array has an implicitly defined integer index used to access the values, the Pandas Series has an explicitly defined index associated with the values.
Pandas is an abbreviation for Python Data Analysis Library. It is an open-source library specially designed for data analysis and data manipulation in Python. Pandas is built on the top of the NumPy package and hence it fundamentally relies on NumPy.
pandas provides high level data manipulation tools built on top of NumPy. NumPy by itself is a fairly low-level tool, similar to MATLAB. pandas on the other hand provides rich time series functionality, data alignment, NA-friendly statistics, groupby, merge and join methods, and lots of other conveniences. It has become very popular in recent years in financial applications. I will have a chapter dedicated to financial data analysis using pandas in my upcoming book.
Numpy is required by pandas (and by virtually all numerical tools for Python). Scipy is not strictly required for pandas but is listed as an "optional dependency". I wouldn't say that pandas is an alternative to Numpy and/or Scipy. Rather, it's an extra tool that provides a more streamlined way of working with numerical and tabular data in Python. You can use pandas data structures but freely draw on Numpy and Scipy functions to manipulate them.
Pandas offer a great way to manipulate tables, as you can make binning easy (binning a dataframe in pandas in Python) and calculate statistics. Other thing that is great in pandas is the Panel class that you can join series of layers with different properties and combine it using groupby function.
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