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pythonpandasdataframesum

Pandas: sum DataFrame rows for given columns


I have the following DataFrame:

In [1]:
df = pd.DataFrame({'a': [1, 2, 3],
                   'b': [2, 3, 4],
                   'c': ['dd', 'ee', 'ff'],
                   'd': [5, 9, 1]})

df
Out [1]:
   a  b   c  d
0  1  2  dd  5
1  2  3  ee  9
2  3  4  ff  1

I would like to add a column 'e' which is the sum of columns 'a', 'b' and 'd'.

Going across forums, I thought something like this would work:

df['e'] = df[['a', 'b', 'd']].map(sum)

But it didn't.

I would like to know the appropriate operation with the list of columns ['a', 'b', 'd'] and df as inputs.


Solution

  • You can just sum and set axis=1 to sum the rows, which will ignore non-numeric columns; from pandas 2.0+ you also need to specify numeric_only=True.

    In [91]:
    
    df = pd.DataFrame({'a': [1,2,3], 'b': [2,3,4], 'c':['dd','ee','ff'], 'd':[5,9,1]})
    df['e'] = df.sum(axis=1, numeric_only=True)
    df
    Out[91]:
       a  b   c  d   e
    0  1  2  dd  5   8
    1  2  3  ee  9  14
    2  3  4  ff  1   8
    

    If you want to just sum specific columns then you can create a list of the columns and remove the ones you are not interested in:

    In [98]:
    
    col_list= list(df)
    col_list.remove('d')
    col_list
    Out[98]:
    ['a', 'b', 'c']
    In [99]:
    
    df['e'] = df[col_list].sum(axis=1)
    df
    Out[99]:
       a  b   c  d  e
    0  1  2  dd  5  3
    1  2  3  ee  9  5
    2  3  4  ff  1  7
    

    sum docs