How to group dataframe rows into list in pandas groupby

Question

I have a pandas data frame df like:

a b
A 1
A 2
B 5
B 5
B 4
C 6

I want to group by the first column and get second col

Answer 1

Use any of the following groupby and agg recipes.

# Setup
df = pd.DataFrame({
  'a': ['A', 'A', 'B', 'B', 'B', 'C'],
  'b': [1, 2, 5, 5, 4, 6],
  'c': ['x', 'y', 'z', 'x', 'y', 'z']
})
df

   a  b  c
0  A  1  x
1  A  2  y
2  B  5  z
3  B  5  x
4  B  4  y
5  C  6  z

To aggregate multiple columns as lists, use any of the following:

df.groupby('a').agg(list)
df.groupby('a').agg(pd.Series.tolist)

           b          c
a                      
A     [1, 2]     [x, y]
B  [5, 5, 4]  [z, x, y]
C        [6]        [z]

To group-listify a single column only, convert the groupby to a SeriesGroupBy object, then call SeriesGroupBy.agg. Use,

df.groupby('a').agg({'b': list})  # 4.42 ms 
df.groupby('a')['b'].agg(list)    # 2.76 ms - faster

a
A       [1, 2]
B    [5, 5, 4]
C          [6]
Name: b, dtype: object

Answer 2

The easiest way I have see no achieve most of the same thing at least for one column which is similar to Anamika's answer just with the tuple syntax for the aggregate function.

df.groupby('a').agg(b=('b','unique'), c=('c','unique'))

Answer 3

Here I have grouped elements with "|" as a separator

    import pandas as pd

    df = pd.read_csv('input.csv')

    df
    Out[1]:
      Area  Keywords
    0  A  1
    1  A  2
    2  B  5
    3  B  5
    4  B  4
    5  C  6

    df.dropna(inplace =  True)
    df['Area']=df['Area'].apply(lambda x:x.lower().strip())
    print df.columns
    df_op = df.groupby('Area').agg({"Keywords":lambda x : "|".join(x)})

    df_op.to_csv('output.csv')
    Out[2]:
    df_op
    Area  Keywords

    A       [1| 2]
    B    [5| 5| 4]
    C          [6]

Answer 4

A handy way to achieve this would be:

df.groupby('a').agg({'b':lambda x: list(x)})

Look into writing Custom Aggregations: https://www.kaggle.com/akshaysehgal/how-to-group-by-aggregate-using-py

Answer 5

If performance is important go down to numpy level:

import numpy as np

df = pd.DataFrame({'a': np.random.randint(0, 60, 600), 'b': [1, 2, 5, 5, 4, 6]*100})

def f(df):
         keys, values = df.sort_values('a').values.T
         ukeys, index = np.unique(keys, True)
         arrays = np.split(values, index[1:])
         df2 = pd.DataFrame({'a':ukeys, 'b':[list(a) for a in arrays]})
         return df2

Tests:

In [301]: %timeit f(df)
1000 loops, best of 3: 1.64 ms per loop

In [302]: %timeit df.groupby('a')['b'].apply(list)
100 loops, best of 3: 5.26 ms per loop

Answer 6

To solve this for several columns of a dataframe:

In [5]: df = pd.DataFrame( {'a':['A','A','B','B','B','C'], 'b':[1,2,5,5,4,6],'c'
   ...: :[3,3,3,4,4,4]})

In [6]: df
Out[6]: 
   a  b  c
0  A  1  3
1  A  2  3
2  B  5  3
3  B  5  4
4  B  4  4
5  C  6  4

In [7]: df.groupby('a').agg(lambda x: list(x))
Out[7]: 
           b          c
a                      
A     [1, 2]     [3, 3]
B  [5, 5, 4]  [3, 4, 4]
C        [6]        [4]

This answer was inspired from Anamika Modi's answer. Thank you!