Hints for Exercise 5

Below are some tips for working on Exercise 5.

Selecting date ranges

In the Problem 4 part 2, the aim is to select rows that belong to certain month. The key here is to understand that the data values in YR--MODAHRMN column are integer numbers using a format YYYYMMDDHHmm where YYYY is the year of the observation, MM is the month, DD is the day, HH is the hour, and mm is the minute.

Using these values it is possible to make simple mathematical queries such as finding the values starting from August:

august_values = data.ix[data['YR--MODAHRMN'] >= 201708010000]

Here, the value 201708010000 corresponds to the first day of August at 00:00 hour.