Lengthening a DataFrame based on stacking columns within it in Pandas

Question

I am looking for a function that achieves the following. It is best shown in an example. Consider:

pd.DataFrame([ [1, 2, 3 ], [4, 5, np.nan ]], columns=[\'x\', \         


        

Answer 1

Here's one based on NumPy, as you were looking for performance -

def gather_columns(df):
    col_mask = [i.startswith('y') for i in df.columns]
    ally_vals = df.iloc[:,col_mask].values
    y_valid_mask = ~np.isnan(ally_vals)

    reps = np.count_nonzero(y_valid_mask, axis=1)
    x_vals = np.repeat(df.x.values, reps)
    y_vals = ally_vals[y_valid_mask]
    return pd.DataFrame({'x':x_vals, 'y':y_vals})

Sample run -

In [78]: df #(added more cols for variety)
Out[78]: 
   x  y1   y2   y5   y7
0  1   2  3.0  NaN  NaN
1  4   5  NaN  6.0  7.0

In [79]: gather_columns(df)
Out[79]: 
   x    y
0  1  2.0
1  1  3.0
2  4  5.0
3  4  6.0
4  4  7.0

If the y columns are always starting from the second column onwards until the end, we can simply slice the dataframe and hence get further performance boost, like so -

def gather_columns_v2(df):
    ally_vals = df.iloc[:,1:].values
    y_valid_mask = ~np.isnan(ally_vals)

    reps = np.count_nonzero(y_valid_mask, axis=1)
    x_vals = np.repeat(df.x.values, reps)
    y_vals = ally_vals[y_valid_mask]
    return pd.DataFrame({'x':x_vals, 'y':y_vals})