Calculating difference between two rows in Python / Pandas

Question

In python, how can I reference previous row and calculate something against it? Specifically, I am working with dataframes in pandas - I have a data frame full of stock price information that looks like this:

           Date   Close  Adj Close
251  2011-01-03  147.48     143.25
250  2011-01-04  147.64     143.41
249  2011-01-05  147.05     142.83
248  2011-01-06  148.66     144.40
247  2011-01-07  147.93     143.69

Here is how I created this dataframe:

import pandas

url = 'http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=IBM&a=00&b=1&c=2011&d=11&e=31&f=2011&g=d&ignore=.csv'
data = data = pandas.read_csv(url)

## now I sorted the data frame ascending by date 
data = data.sort(columns='Date')

Starting with row number 2, or in this case, I guess it's 250 (PS - is that the index?), I want to calculate the difference between 2011-01-03 and 2011-01-04, for every entry in this dataframe. I believe the appropriate way is to write a function that takes the current row, then figures out the previous row, and calculates the difference between them, the use the pandas apply function to update the dataframe with the value.

Is that the right approach? If so, should I be using the index to determine the difference? (note - I'm still in python beginner mode, so index may not be the right term, nor even the correct way to implement this)

Answer 1

I think you want to do something like this:

In [26]: data
Out[26]: 
           Date   Close  Adj Close
251  2011-01-03  147.48     143.25
250  2011-01-04  147.64     143.41
249  2011-01-05  147.05     142.83
248  2011-01-06  148.66     144.40
247  2011-01-07  147.93     143.69

In [27]: data.set_index('Date').diff()
Out[27]: 
            Close  Adj Close
Date                        
2011-01-03    NaN        NaN
2011-01-04   0.16       0.16
2011-01-05  -0.59      -0.58
2011-01-06   1.61       1.57
2011-01-07  -0.73      -0.71