Given two dataframes df_1 and df_2, how to join them such that datetime column df_1 is in between start and end in dataframe df_2:
print df_1
timestamp A B
0 2016-05-14 10:54:33 0.020228 0.026572
1 2016-05-14 10:54:34 0.057780 0.175499
2 2016-05-14 10:54:35 0.098808 0.620986
3 2016-05-14 10:54:36 0.158789 1.014819
4 2016-05-14 10:54:39 0.038129 2.384590
print df_2
start end event
0 2016-05-14 10:54:31 2016-05-14 10:54:33 E1
1 2016-05-14 10:54:34 2016-05-14 10:54:37 E2
2 2016-05-14 10:54:38 2016-05-14 10:54:42 E3
Get corresponding event where df1.timestamp is between df_2.start and df2.end
timestamp A B event
0 2016-05-14 10:54:33 0.020228 0.026572 E1
1 2016-05-14 10:54:34 0.057780 0.175499 E2
2 2016-05-14 10:54:35 0.098808 0.620986 E2
3 2016-05-14 10:54:36 0.158789 1.014819 E2
4 2016-05-14 10:54:39 0.038129 2.384590 E3
One simple solution is create interval index from start and end setting closed = both then use get_loc to get the event i.e (Hope all the date times are in timestamps dtype )
df_2.index = pd.IntervalIndex.from_arrays(df_2['start'],df_2['end'],closed='both')
df_1['event'] = df_1['timestamp'].apply(lambda x : df_2.iloc[df_2.index.get_loc(x)]['event'])
Output :
timestamp A B event
0 2016-05-14 10:54:33 0.020228 0.026572 E1
1 2016-05-14 10:54:34 0.057780 0.175499 E2
2 2016-05-14 10:54:35 0.098808 0.620986 E2
3 2016-05-14 10:54:36 0.158789 1.014819 E2
4 2016-05-14 10:54:39 0.038129 2.384590 E3