Pandas: Find index of the row with second highest value

Question

I am trying to get the index of the row with the second highest value after doing groupby but I am not getting the right result

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Answer 1

Since 'Value' is already sorted you can use nth:

In [11]: g = df.groupby("Mt", as_index=False)

In [12]: g.nth(-2)
Out[12]:
   Mt Sp  Value  count
0  s1  a      1      3
3  s2  d      4     10

Otherwise I'd first sort by Value, df = df.sort_values("Value").

If you want the last (if there are fewer than two in a given group), you could grab that too

In [21]: g = df.groupby("Mt")

In [22]: res = g.nth(-1)

In [23]: res.update(g.nth(-2))

In [24]: res
Out[24]:
   Sp  Value  count
Mt
s1  a      1      3
s2  d      4     10
s3  f      6      6

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A related function is tail (to get the last two elements):

In [31]: g.tail(2)
Out[31]:
   Mt Sp  Value  count
0  s1  a      1      3
1  s1  b      2      2
3  s2  d      4     10
4  s2  e      5     10
5  s3  f      6      6

Answer 2

OK I got the answer except for one thing. This code seems to work

df.iloc[df.groupby(['Mt'])['Value'].apply(lambda x: (x!=max(x)).order(ascending=False).head(1).index[0])]

The only thing I dont understand right now that even with a group of one row only that row is being returned. I was thinking that may be x!=max(x) check would exclude that row.