Difference between map, applymap and apply methods in Pandas

Question

Can you tell me when to use these vectorization methods with basic examples?

I see that map is a Series method whereas the rest are

Answer 1

Probably simplest explanation the difference between apply and applymap:

apply takes the whole column as a parameter and then assign the result to this column

applymap takes the separate cell value as a parameter and assign the result back to this cell.

NB If apply returns the single value you will have this value instead of the column after assigning and eventually will have just a row instead of matrix.

Answer 2

FOMO:

The following example shows apply and applymap applied to a DataFrame.

map function is something you do apply on Series only. You cannot apply map on DataFrame.

The thing to remember is that apply can do anything applymap can, but apply has eXtra options.

The X factor options are: axis and result_type where result_type only works when axis=1 (for columns).

df = DataFrame(1, columns=list('abc'),
                  index=list('1234'))
print(df)

f = lambda x: np.log(x)
print(df.applymap(f)) # apply to the whole dataframe
print(np.log(df)) # applied to the whole dataframe
print(df.applymap(np.sum)) # reducing can be applied for rows only

# apply can take different options (vs. applymap cannot)
print(df.apply(f)) # same as applymap
print(df.apply(sum, axis=1))  # reducing example
print(df.apply(np.log, axis=1)) # cannot reduce
print(df.apply(lambda x: [1, 2, 3], axis=1, result_type='expand')) # expand result

As a sidenote, Series map function, should not be confused with the Python map function.

The first one is applied on Series, to map the values, and the second one to every item of an iterable.

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Lastly don't confuse the dataframe apply method with groupby apply method.

Answer 3

Quick Summary

• DataFrame.apply operates on entire rows or columns at a time.

• DataFrame.applymap, Series.apply, and Series.map operate on one element at time.

Series.apply and Series.map are similar and often interchangeable. Some of their slight differences are discussed in osa's answer below.

Answer 4

Straight from Wes McKinney's Python for Data Analysis book, pg. 132 (I highly recommended this book):

Another frequent operation is applying a function on 1D arrays to each column or row. DataFrame’s apply method does exactly this:

In [116]: frame = DataFrame(np.random.randn(4, 3), columns=list('bde'), index=['Utah', 'Ohio', 'Texas', 'Oregon'])

In [117]: frame
Out[117]: 
               b         d         e
Utah   -0.029638  1.081563  1.280300
Ohio    0.647747  0.831136 -1.549481
Texas   0.513416 -0.884417  0.195343
Oregon -0.485454 -0.477388 -0.309548

In [118]: f = lambda x: x.max() - x.min()

In [119]: frame.apply(f)
Out[119]: 
b    1.133201
d    1.965980
e    2.829781
dtype: float64

Many of the most common array statistics (like sum and mean) are DataFrame methods, so using apply is not necessary.

Element-wise Python functions can be used, too. Suppose you wanted to compute a formatted string from each floating point value in frame. You can do this with applymap:

In [120]: format = lambda x: '%.2f' % x

In [121]: frame.applymap(format)
Out[121]: 
            b      d      e
Utah    -0.03   1.08   1.28
Ohio     0.65   0.83  -1.55
Texas    0.51  -0.88   0.20
Oregon  -0.49  -0.48  -0.31

The reason for the name applymap is that Series has a map method for applying an element-wise function:

In [122]: frame['e'].map(format)
Out[122]: 
Utah       1.28
Ohio      -1.55
Texas      0.20
Oregon    -0.31
Name: e, dtype: object

Summing up, apply works on a row / column basis of a DataFrame, applymap works element-wise on a DataFrame, and map works element-wise on a Series.