Pandas get topmost n records within each group
PythonPandasGreatest N-per-GroupWindow FunctionsTop NPython Problem Overview
Suppose I have pandas DataFrame like this:
df = pd.DataFrame({'id':[1,1,1,2,2,2,2,3,4],'value':[1,2,3,1,2,3,4,1,1]})
which looks like:
id value
0 1 1
1 1 2
2 1 3
3 2 1
4 2 2
5 2 3
6 2 4
7 3 1
8 4 1
I want to get a new DataFrame with top 2 records for each id, like this:
id value
0 1 1
1 1 2
3 2 1
4 2 2
7 3 1
8 4 1
I can do it with numbering records within group after groupby:
dfN = df.groupby('id').apply(lambda x:x['value'].reset_index()).reset_index()
which looks like:
id level_1 index value
0 1 0 0 1
1 1 1 1 2
2 1 2 2 3
3 2 0 3 1
4 2 1 4 2
5 2 2 5 3
6 2 3 6 4
7 3 0 7 1
8 4 0 8 1
then for the desired output:
dfN[dfN['level_1'] <= 1][['id', 'value']]
Output:
id value
0 1 1
1 1 2
3 2 1
4 2 2
7 3 1
8 4 1
But is there more effective/elegant approach to do this? And also is there more elegant approach to number records within each group (like SQL window function row_number()).
Python Solutions
Solution 1 - Python
Did you try
df.groupby('id').head(2)
Output generated:
id value
id
1 0 1 1
1 1 2
2 3 2 1
4 2 2
3 7 3 1
4 8 4 1
(Keep in mind that you might need to order/sort before, depending on your data)
EDIT: As mentioned by the questioner, use
df.groupby('id').head(2).reset_index(drop=True)
to remove the MultiIndex and flatten the results:
id value
0 1 1
1 1 2
2 2 1
3 2 2
4 3 1
5 4 1
Solution 2 - Python
Since 0.14.1, you can now do nlargest and nsmallest on a groupby object:
In [23]: df.groupby('id')['value'].nlargest(2)
Out[23]:
id
1 2 3
1 2
2 6 4
5 3
3 7 1
4 8 1
dtype: int64
There's a slight weirdness that you get the original index in there as well, but this might be really useful depending on what your original index was.
If you're not interested in it, you can do .reset_index(level=1, drop=True) to get rid of it altogether.
(Note: From 0.17.1 you'll be able to do this on a DataFrameGroupBy too but for now it only works with Series and SeriesGroupBy.)
Solution 3 - Python
Sometimes sorting the whole data ahead is very time consuming. We can groupby first and doing topk for each group:
g = df.groupby(['id']).apply(lambda x: x.nlargest(topk,['value'])).reset_index(drop=True)
Solution 4 - Python
df.groupby('id').apply(lambda x : x.sort_values(by = 'value', ascending = False).head(2).reset_index(drop = True))
- Here sort values ascending false gives similar to nlargest and True gives similar to nsmallest.
- The value inside the head is the same as the value we give inside nlargest to get the number of values to display for each group.
- reset_index is optional and not necessary.
Solution 5 - Python
This works for duplicated values
If you have duplicated values in top-n values, and want only unique values, you can do like this:
import pandas as pd
ifile = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bhishanpdl/Shared/master/data/twitter_employee.tsv"
df = pd.read_csv(ifile,delimiter='\t')
print(df.query("department == 'Audit'")[['id','first_name','last_name','department','salary']])
id first_name last_name department salary
24 12 Shandler Bing Audit 110000
25 14 Jason Tom Audit 100000
26 16 Celine Anston Audit 100000
27 15 Michale Jackson Audit 70000
If we do not remove duplicates, for the audit department we get top 3 salaries as 110k,100k and 100k.
If we want to have not-duplicated salaries per each department, we can do this:
(df.groupby('department')['salary']
.apply(lambda ser: ser.drop_duplicates().nlargest(3))
.droplevel(level=1)
.sort_index()
.reset_index()
)
This gives
department salary
0 Audit 110000
1 Audit 100000
2 Audit 70000
3 Management 250000
4 Management 200000
5 Management 150000
6 Sales 220000
7 Sales 200000
8 Sales 150000