Using pivot_table to change the unit of analysis of a DataFrame

We could have used the pandas pivot_table function instead of groupby in the previous recipe. pivot_table can be used to generate summary statistics by the values of a categorical variable, just as we did with groupby. The pivot_table function can also return a DataFrame, as we will see in this recipe.

Getting ready

We will work with the COVID-19 case daily data and the Brazil land temperature data again. The temperature data has one row per month per weather station.

How to do it...

Let’s create a DataFrame from the COVID-19 data that has the total number of cases and deaths for each day across all countries:

1. We start by loading the COVID-19 and temperature data again:

   import pandas as pd
   coviddaily = pd.read_csv("data/coviddaily.csv", parse_dates=["casedate"])
   ltbrazil = pd.read_csv("data/ltbrazil.csv")
   

2. Now, we are ready to call the...