What's the difference between pandas ACF and statsmodel ACF?

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I'm calculating the Autocorrelation Function for a stock's returns. To do so I tested two functions, the autocorr function built into Pandas, and the acf function supplied by statsmodels.tsa. This is done in the following MWE:

import pandas as pd
from pandas_datareader import data
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import datetime
from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta
from statsmodels.tsa.stattools import acf, pacf

ticker = 'AAPL'
time_ago = datetime.datetime.today().date() - relativedelta(months = 6)

ticker_data = data.get_data_yahoo(ticker, time_ago)['Adj Close'].pct_change().dropna()
ticker_data_len = len(ticker_data)

ticker_data_acf_1 =  acf(ticker_data)[1:32]
ticker_data_acf_2 = [ticker_data.autocorr(i) for i in range(1,32)]

test_df = pd.DataFrame([ticker_data_acf_1, ticker_data_acf_2]).T
test_df.columns = ['Pandas Autocorr', 'Statsmodels Autocorr']
test_df.index += 1
test_df.plot(kind='bar')

What I noticed was the values they predicted weren't identical:

enter image description here

What accounts for this difference, and which values should be used?

statsmodels pandas python
3 Answers

In the following example, Pandas autocorr() function gives the expected results but statmodels acf() function does not.

Consider the following series:

import pandas as pd
s = pd.Series(range(10))

We expect that there is perfect correlation between this series and any of its lagged series, and this is actually what we get with autocorr() function

[ s.autocorr(lag=i) for i in range(10) ]
# [0.9999999999999999, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.9999999999999999, 1.0, 1.0, 0.9999999999999999, nan]

But using acf() we get a different result:

from statsmodels.tsa.stattools import acf
acf(s)
# [ 1.          0.7         0.41212121  0.14848485 -0.07878788 
#  -0.25757576 -0.37575758 -0.42121212 -0.38181818 -0.24545455]

If we try acf with adjusted=True the result is even more unexpected because for some lags the result is less than -1 (note that correlation has to be in [-1, 1])

acf(s, adjusted=True)  # 'unbiased' is deprecated and 'adjusted' should be used instead
# [ 1.          0.77777778  0.51515152  0.21212121 -0.13131313 
#  -0.51515152 -0.93939394 -1.4040404  -1.90909091 -2.45454545]
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