Adventures in Machine Learning

Master Data Manipulation in Pandas with These Simple Methods

Dropping Rows Based on Conditions in Pandas DataFrame

Dropping rows based on condition in Pandas DataFrame has become a common task for many data analysis and manipulation projects. With the help of Pandas, a popular data manipulation library in Python, users can easily filter and remove rows based on certain conditions.

This article discusses two methods for dropping rows based on conditions and provides an example DataFrame to illustrate the concepts.

1. Drop Rows Based on One Condition

The first method for dropping rows based on condition involves dropping rows that meet one specified condition.

In Pandas, users can use the drop function to remove rows based on a single condition.

To illustrate this method, consider the following example DataFrame:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({
    'name': ['John', 'Bob', 'Alice', 'Sam'],
    'age': [25, 30, 28, 22],
    'gender': ['M', 'M', 'F', 'M']
})

print(df)

This will create and display the following table:

    name  age gender
0   John   25      M
1    Bob   30      M
2  Alice   28      F
3    Sam   22      M

Suppose the user wants to drop rows where the age of the individual is less than 25. To accomplish this, they can use the loc function, as follows:

df.drop(
df.loc[
df['age'] < 25].index, inplace=True)

print(df)

The output will be the following table:

    name  age gender
1    Bob   30      M
2  Alice   28      F

In this method, df['age'] < 25 filters the DataFrame based on the condition of age being less than 25. df.loc[df['age'] < 25].index returns the index of all the rows where the condition is true, and df.drop() removes the rows by index.

Finally, inplace=True updates the DataFrame with the new result after removing the rows.

2. Drop Rows Based on Multiple Conditions

The second method for dropping rows based on condition involves dropping rows that meet multiple specified conditions.

In this method, users can drop rows based on multiple conditions using the & operator for AND and the | operator for OR. To illustrate this method, consider a different example DataFrame:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({
    'name': ['John', 'Bob', 'Alice', 'Sam'],
    'age': [25, 30, 28, 22],
    'gender': ['M', 'M', 'F', 'M'],
    'city': ['New York', 'Los Angeles', 'New York', 'Chicago']
})

print(df)

This will create and display the following table:

    name  age gender         city
0   John   25      M     New York
1    Bob   30      M  Los Angeles
2  Alice   28      F     New York
3    Sam   22      M      Chicago

Suppose the user wants to remove all rows where the individual's age is less than or equal to 25 and they live in New York City. One way to achieve this is to use the query function with logical operators (& and |), as follows:

df = 
df.query('age > 25 | city != "New York"')

print(df)

The output will be the following table:

    name  age gender         city
1    Bob   30      M  Los Angeles

This method uses query to filter based on age being greater than 25 using age > 25 and city not equal to New York using city != "New York". The result is a new DataFrame with the required conditions.

Example DataFrame

When analyzing data in Pandas, the first step is often to read in the data. In this example, the user will generate a small sample dataset using Pandas' DataFrame function:

import pandas as pd
data = {
    'name': ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Charlie', 'David', 'Emily'],
    'score': [63, 79, 92, 85, 95],
    'gender': ['F', 'M', 'M', 'M', 'F'],
    'major': ['Biology', 'Mathematics', 'Computer Science', 'History', 'English'],
    'grad_year': [2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2021]
}

df = pd.DataFrame(data)

print(df)

This will create and display the following table:

      name  score gender             major  grad_year
0    Alice     63      F           Biology       2019
1      Bob     79      M       Mathematics       2020
2  Charlie     92      M  Computer Science       2021
3    David     85      M           History       2022
4    Emily     95      F           English       2021

Viewing the DataFrame

After creating a DataFrame, it is essential to view the data to ensure it was properly read in and to get a sense of the data's structure. There are several ways to view a Pandas DataFrame.

In Jupyter Notebook, users can call the DataFrame by itself in a cell to display the entire DataFrame, as follows:

df

This will display the full table:

      name  score gender             major  grad_year
0    Alice     63      F           Biology       2019
1      Bob     79      M       Mathematics       2020
2  Charlie     92      M  Computer Science       2021
3    David     85      M           History       2022
4    Emily     95      F           English       2021

Users can also use the head function to view the first few rows of the DataFrame:

df.head()

This will display the first five rows of the table:

      name  score gender             major  grad_year
0    Alice     63      F           Biology       2019
1      Bob     79      M       Mathematics       2020
2  Charlie     92      M  Computer Science       2021
3    David     85      M           History       2022
4    Emily     95      F           English       2021

Using tail is a similar function that displays the last few rows:

df.tail()

This will display the last five rows of the table:

      name  score gender             major  grad_year
0    Alice     63      F           Biology       2019
1      Bob     79      M       Mathematics       2020
2  Charlie     92      M  Computer Science       2021
3    David     85      M           History       2022
4    Emily     95      F           English       2021

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are two methods for dropping rows based on conditions in Pandas: dropping rows based on one condition and based on multiple conditions. These methods provide powerful filtering and data manipulation capabilities that users can use to trim their datasets and pursue exploratory data analysis.

Additionally, it is important to properly view the loaded DataFrame to get a sense of the data's contents. By following these practices, users can effectively wrangle and analyze their data.

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