It specifies the axis along which the means are computed. By default axis=0. This is consistent with the numpy.mean usage when axis is specified explicitly (in numpy.mean, axis==None by default, which computes the mean value over the flattened array) , in which axis=0 along the rows (namely, index in pandas), and axis=1 along the columns. For added clarity, one may choose to specify axis=’index’ (instead of axis=0) or axis=’columns’ (instead of axis=1).
+————+———+——–+
| | A | B |
+————+———+———
| 0 | 0.626386| 1.52325|—-axis=1—–>
+————+———+——–+
| |
| axis=0 |
↓ ↓
These answers do help explain this, but it still isn’t perfectly intuitive for a non-programmer (i.e. someone like me who is learning Python for the first time in context of data science coursework). I still find using the terms “along” or “for each” wrt to rows and columns to be confusing.
What makes more sense to me is to say it this way:
Axis 0 will act on all the ROWS in each COLUMN
Axis 1 will act on all the COLUMNS in each ROW
So a mean on axis 0 will be the mean of all the rows in each column, and a mean on axis 1 will be a mean of all the columns in each row.
Ultimately this is saying the same thing as @zhangxaochen and @Michael, but in a way that is easier for me to internalize.