GroupBy pandas DataFrame and select most common value

Question

I have a data frame with three string columns. I know that the only one value in the 3rd column is valid for every combination of the first two. To clean the data I have to

Answer 1

A little late to the game here, but I was running into some performance issues with HYRY's solution, so I had to come up with another one.

It works by finding the frequency of each key-value, and then, for each key, only keeping the value that appears with it most often.

There's also an additional solution that supports multiple modes.

On a scale test that's representative of the data I'm working with, this reduced runtime from 37.4s to 0.5s!

Here's the code for the solution, some example usage, and the scale test:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import random
import time

test_input = pd.DataFrame(columns=[ 'key',          'value'],
                          data=  [[ 1,              'A'    ],
                                  [ 1,              'B'    ],
                                  [ 1,              'B'    ],
                                  [ 1,              np.nan ],
                                  [ 2,              np.nan ],
                                  [ 3,              'C'    ],
                                  [ 3,              'C'    ],
                                  [ 3,              'D'    ],
                                  [ 3,              'D'    ]])

def mode(df, key_cols, value_col, count_col):
    '''                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
    Pandas does not provide a `mode` aggregation function                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
    for its `GroupBy` objects. This function is meant to fill                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
    that gap, though the semantics are not exactly the same.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

    The input is a DataFrame with the columns `key_cols`                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
    that you would like to group on, and the column                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
    `value_col` for which you would like to obtain the mode.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

    The output is a DataFrame with a record per group that has at least one mode                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
    (null values are not counted). The `key_cols` are included as columns, `value_col`                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
    contains a mode (ties are broken arbitrarily and deterministically) for each                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
    group, and `count_col` indicates how many times each mode appeared in its group.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
    '''
    return df.groupby(key_cols + [value_col]).size() \
             .to_frame(count_col).reset_index() \
             .sort_values(count_col, ascending=False) \
             .drop_duplicates(subset=key_cols)

def modes(df, key_cols, value_col, count_col):
    '''                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
    Pandas does not provide a `mode` aggregation function                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
    for its `GroupBy` objects. This function is meant to fill                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
    that gap, though the semantics are not exactly the same.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

    The input is a DataFrame with the columns `key_cols`                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
    that you would like to group on, and the column                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
    `value_col` for which you would like to obtain the modes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

    The output is a DataFrame with a record per group that has at least                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
    one mode (null values are not counted). The `key_cols` are included as                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
    columns, `value_col` contains lists indicating the modes for each group,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
    and `count_col` indicates how many times each mode appeared in its group.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
    '''
    return df.groupby(key_cols + [value_col]).size() \
             .to_frame(count_col).reset_index() \
             .groupby(key_cols + [count_col])[value_col].unique() \
             .to_frame().reset_index() \
             .sort_values(count_col, ascending=False) \
             .drop_duplicates(subset=key_cols)

print test_input
print mode(test_input, ['key'], 'value', 'count')
print modes(test_input, ['key'], 'value', 'count')

scale_test_data = [[random.randint(1, 100000),
                    str(random.randint(123456789001, 123456789100))] for i in range(1000000)]
scale_test_input = pd.DataFrame(columns=['key', 'value'],
                                data=scale_test_data)

start = time.time()
mode(scale_test_input, ['key'], 'value', 'count')
print time.time() - start

start = time.time()
modes(scale_test_input, ['key'], 'value', 'count')
print time.time() - start

start = time.time()
scale_test_input.groupby(['key']).agg(lambda x: x.value_counts().index[0])
print time.time() - start

Running this code will print something like:

   key value
0    1     A
1    1     B
2    1     B
3    1   NaN
4    2   NaN
5    3     C
6    3     C
7    3     D
8    3     D
   key value  count
1    1     B      2
2    3     C      2
   key  count   value
1    1      2     [B]
2    3      2  [C, D]
0.489614009857
9.19386196136
37.4375009537

Hope this helps!