Python numpy or pandas equivalent of the R function sweep()

Question

What is numpy or pandas equivalent of the R function sweep()?

To elaborate: in R lets say we have a coefficient vector (say be

Answer 1

Pandas has an apply method too, apply being what R's sweep uses under the hood. (Note that the MARGIN argument is "equivalent" to the axis argument in many pandas functions, except that it takes values 0 and 1 rather than 1 and 2).

In [11]: np.random.seed = 1

In [12]: beta = pd.Series(np.random.randn(5))

In [13]: data = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(20, 5))

You can use an apply with a function which is called against each row:

In [14]: data.apply(lambda row: row * beta, axis=1)

Note: that axis=0 would apply against each column, this is the default as data is stored column-wise and so column-wise operations are more efficient.

However, in this case it's easy to make significantly faster (and more readable) to vectorize, simply by multiplying row-wise:

In [21]: data.apply(lambda row: row * beta, axis=1).head()
Out[21]:
          0         1         2         3         4
0 -0.024827 -1.465294 -0.416155 -0.369182 -0.649587
1  0.026433  0.355915 -0.672302  0.225446 -0.520374
2  0.042254 -1.223200 -0.545957  0.103864 -0.372855
3  0.086367  0.218539 -1.033671  0.218388 -0.598549
4  0.203071 -3.402876  0.192504 -0.147548 -0.726001

In [22]: data.mul(beta, axis=1).head()  # just show first few rows with head
Out[22]:
          0         1         2         3         4
0 -0.024827 -1.465294 -0.416155 -0.369182 -0.649587
1  0.026433  0.355915 -0.672302  0.225446 -0.520374
2  0.042254 -1.223200 -0.545957  0.103864 -0.372855
3  0.086367  0.218539 -1.033671  0.218388 -0.598549
4  0.203071 -3.402876  0.192504 -0.147548 -0.726001

Note: this is slightly more robust / allows more control than using *.

You can do the same in numpy (ie data.values here), either multiplying directly, this will be faster as it doesn't worry about data-alignment, or using vectorize rather than apply.