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Exercise

Using .melt() to reshape government data

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) often provides data series in an easy-to-read format - it has a separate column for each month, and each year is a different row. Unfortunately, this wide format makes it difficult to plot this information over time. In this exercise, you will reshape a table of US unemployment rate data from the BLS into a form you can plot using .melt(). You will need to add a date column to the table and sort by it to plot the data correctly.

The unemployment rate data has been loaded for you in a table called ur_wide. You are encouraged to view the table in the IPython shell before beginning the exercise.

Instructions

100 XP
  • Use .melt() to unpivot all of the columns of ur_wide except year and ensure that the columns with the months and values are named month and unempl_rate, respectively. Save the result as ur_tall.
  • Add a column to ur_tall named date which combines the year and month columns as year-month format into a larger string, and converts it to a date data type.
  • Sort ur_tall by date and save as ur_sorted.
  • Using ur_sorted, plot unempl_rate on the y-axis and date on the x-axis.