Creating an element-wise minimum Series from two other Series in Python Pandas

Question

I am having trouble finding a way to do an efficient element-wise minimum of two Series objects in pandas. For example I can add two Series easily enough:

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Answer 1

The most straightforward way I can see is to make them into a DataFrame and then take the row-wise min:

>>> print pandas.concat([s1, s2], axis=1).min(axis=1)
1    1
2    1
3    1
4    1
dtype: float64

Answer 2

This method will do the job:

import pandas as pd


def elementwise_min(x, y):
    x[x > y] = y
    return x


a = pd.Series([1, 2, 3])
b = pd.Series([0, 2, 4])
elementwise_min(a, b)