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

You can do this using groupby to group on the column of interest and then apply list to every group:

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

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

In [2]: df.groupby('a')['b'].apply(list)
Out[2]: 
a
A       [1, 2]
B    [5, 5, 4]
C          [6]
Name: b, dtype: object

In [3]: df1 = df.groupby('a')['b'].apply(list).reset_index(name='new')
        df1
Out[3]: 
   a        new
0  A     [1, 2]
1  B  [5, 5, 4]
2  C        [6]

Answer 2

It is time to use agg instead of apply .

When

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

If you want multiple columns stack into list , result in pd.DataFrame

df.groupby('a')[['b', 'c']].agg(list)
# or 
df.groupby('a').agg(list)

If you want single column in list, result in ps.Series

df.groupby('a')['b'].agg(list)
#or
df.groupby('a')['b'].apply(list)

Note, result in pd.DataFrame is about 10x slower than result in ps.Series when you only aggregate single column, use it in multicolumns case .

Answer 3

Answer based on @EdChum's comment on his answer. Comment is this -

groupby is notoriously slow and memory hungry, what you could do is sort by column A, then find the idxmin and idxmax (probably store this in a dict) and use this to slice your dataframe would be faster I think 

Let's first create a dataframe with 500k categories in first column and total df shape 20 million as mentioned in question.

df = pd.DataFrame(columns=['a', 'b'])
df['a'] = (np.random.randint(low=0, high=500000, size=(20000000,))).astype(str)
df['b'] = list(range(20000000))
print(df.shape)
df.head()

# Sort data by first column 
df.sort_values(by=['a'], ascending=True, inplace=True)
df.reset_index(drop=True, inplace=True)

# Create a temp column
df['temp_idx'] = list(range(df.shape[0]))

# Take all values of b in a separate list
all_values_b = list(df.b.values)
print(len(all_values_b))

# For each category in column a, find min and max indexes
gp_df = df.groupby(['a']).agg({'temp_idx': [np.min, np.max]})
gp_df.reset_index(inplace=True)
gp_df.columns = ['a', 'temp_idx_min', 'temp_idx_max']

# Now create final list_b column, using min and max indexes for each category of a and filtering list of b. 
gp_df['list_b'] = gp_df[['temp_idx_min', 'temp_idx_max']].apply(lambda x: all_values_b[x[0]:x[1]+1], axis=1)

print(gp_df.shape)
gp_df.head()

This above code takes 2 minutes for 20 million rows and 500k categories in first column.

Answer 4

If looking for a unique list while grouping multiple columns this could probably help:

df.groupby('a').agg(lambda x: list(set(x))).reset_index()

Answer 5

As you were saying the groupby method of a pd.DataFrame object can do the job.

Example

 L = ['A','A','B','B','B','C']
 N = [1,2,5,5,4,6]

 import pandas as pd
 df = pd.DataFrame(zip(L,N),columns = list('LN'))


 groups = df.groupby(df.L)

 groups.groups
      {'A': [0, 1], 'B': [2, 3, 4], 'C': [5]}

which gives and index-wise description of the groups.

To get elements of single groups, you can do, for instance

 groups.get_group('A')

     L  N
  0  A  1
  1  A  2

  groups.get_group('B')

     L  N
  2  B  5
  3  B  5
  4  B  4

Answer 6

Let us using df.groupby with list and Series constructor

pd.Series({x : y.b.tolist() for x , y in df.groupby('a')})
Out[664]: 
A       [1, 2]
B    [5, 5, 4]
C          [6]
dtype: object