Extracting an element of a list in a pandas column

Question

I have a DataFrame that contains a list on each column as shown in the example below with only two columns.

    Gamma   Beta
0   [1.4652917656926299, 0.93269352         


        

Answer 1

Itertuples would be pretty slow. You could speed this up with the following:

for column_name in df_params.columns:
    df_params[column_name] = [i[0] for i in df_params[column_name]]

Answer 2

You can use the str accessor for lists, e.g.:

df_params['Gamma'].str[0]

This should work for all columns:

df_params.apply(lambda col: col.str[0])