Pandas convert dataframe to array of tuples

list(data_set.itertuples(index=False))

As of 17.1, the above will return a list of namedtuples.

If you want a list of ordinary tuples, pass name=None as an argument:

list(data_set.itertuples(index=False, name=None))

How about:

subset = data_set[['data_date', 'data_1', 'data_2']]
tuples = [tuple(x) for x in subset.to_numpy()]

for pandas < 0.24 use

tuples = [tuple(x) for x in subset.values]

Motivation
Many data sets are large enough that we need to concern ourselves with speed/efficiency. So I offer this solution in that spirit. It happens to also be succinct.

For the sake of comparison, let's drop the index column

df = data_set.drop('index', 1)

Solution
I'll propose the use of zip and map

list(zip(*map(df.get, df)))

[('2012-02-17', 24.75, 25.03),
 ('2012-02-16', 25.0, 25.07),
 ('2012-02-15', 24.99, 25.15),
 ('2012-02-14', 24.68, 25.05),
 ('2012-02-13', 24.62, 24.77),
 ('2012-02-10', 24.38, 24.61)]

It happens to also be flexible if we wanted to deal with a specific subset of columns. We'll assume the columns we've already displayed are the subset we want.

list(zip(*map(df.get, ['data_date', 'data_1', 'data_2'])))

[('2012-02-17', 24.75, 25.03),
 ('2012-02-16', 25.0, 25.07),
 ('2012-02-15', 24.99, 25.15),
 ('2012-02-14', 24.68, 25.05),
 ('2012-02-13', 24.62, 24.77),
 ('2012-02-10', 24.38, 24.61)]

What is Quicker?

Turn's out records is quickest followed by asymptotically converging zipmap and iter_tuples

I'll use a library simple_benchmarks that I got from this post

from simple_benchmark import BenchmarkBuilder
b = BenchmarkBuilder()

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

def tuple_comp(df): return [tuple(x) for x in df.to_numpy()]
def iter_namedtuples(df): return list(df.itertuples(index=False))
def iter_tuples(df): return list(df.itertuples(index=False, name=None))
def records(df): return df.to_records(index=False).tolist()
def zipmap(df): return list(zip(*map(df.get, df)))

funcs = [tuple_comp, iter_namedtuples, iter_tuples, records, zipmap]
for func in funcs:
    b.add_function()(func)

def creator(n):
    return pd.DataFrame({"A": random.randint(n, size=n), "B": random.randint(n, size=n)})

@b.add_arguments('Rows in DataFrame')
def argument_provider():
    for n in (10 ** (np.arange(4, 11) / 2)).astype(int):
        yield n, creator(n)

r = b.run()

Check the results

r.to_pandas_dataframe().pipe(lambda d: d.div(d.min(1), 0))

        tuple_comp  iter_namedtuples  iter_tuples   records    zipmap
100       2.905662          6.626308     3.450741  1.469471  1.000000
316       4.612692          4.814433     2.375874  1.096352  1.000000
1000      6.513121          4.106426     1.958293  1.000000  1.316303
3162      8.446138          4.082161     1.808339  1.000000  1.533605
10000     8.424483          3.621461     1.651831  1.000000  1.558592
31622     7.813803          3.386592     1.586483  1.000000  1.515478
100000    7.050572          3.162426     1.499977  1.000000  1.480131

r.plot()

A generic way:

[tuple(x) for x in data_set.to_records(index=False)]