pandas three-way joining multiple dataframes on columns

Question

I have 3 CSV files. Each has the first column as the (string) names of people, while all the other columns in each dataframe are attributes of that person.

How can

Answer 1

One does not need a multiindex to perform join operations. One just need to set correctly the index column on which to perform the join operations (which command df.set_index('Name') for example)

The join operation is by default performed on index. In your case, you just have to specify that the Name column corresponds to your index. Below is an example

A tutorial may be useful.

# Simple example where dataframes index are the name on which to perform
# the join operations
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
name = ['Sophia' ,'Emma' ,'Isabella' ,'Olivia' ,'Ava' ,'Emily' ,'Abigail' ,'Mia']
df1 = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(8, 3), columns=['A','B','C'], index=name)
df2 = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(8, 1), columns=['D'],         index=name)
df3 = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(8, 2), columns=['E','F'],     index=name)
df = df1.join(df2)
df = df.join(df3)

# If you have a 'Name' column that is not the index of your dataframe,
# one can set this column to be the index
# 1) Create a column 'Name' based on the previous index
df1['Name'] = df1.index
# 1) Select the index from column 'Name'
df1 = df1.set_index('Name')

# If indexes are different, one may have to play with parameter how
gf1 = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(8, 3), columns=['A','B','C'], index=range(8))
gf2 = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(8, 1), columns=['D'], index=range(2,10))
gf3 = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(8, 2), columns=['E','F'], index=range(4,12))

gf = gf1.join(gf2, how='outer')
gf = gf.join(gf3, how='outer')