round a single column in pandas

Question

Is there a way to round a single column in pandas without affecting the rest of the dataframe?

>>> print(df)
  item  value1  value2
0    a    1.12     1.3
1    a    1.50     2.5
2    a    0.10     0.0
3    b    3.30    -1.0
4    b    4.80    -1.0

I have tried the following:

>>> df.value1.apply(np.round)
0    1
1    2
2    0
3    3
4    5
5    5

What is the correct way to make data look like this:

  item  value1  value2
0    a       1     1.3
1    a       2     2.5
2    a       0     0.0
3    b       3    -1.0
4    b       5    -1.0
5    c       5     5.0

Answer 1

You are very close. You applied the round to the series of values given by df.value1. The return type is thus a Series. You need to assign that series back to the dataframe (or another dataframe with the same Index).

Also, there is a pandas.Series.round method which is basically a short hand for pandas.Series.apply(np.round).

>>> df.value1 = df.value1.round()
>>> print df
  item  value1  value2
0    a       1     1.3
1    a       2     2.5
2    a       0     0.0
3    b       3    -1.0
4    b       5    -1.0