Reindex sublevel in pandas multiindexed dataframe

Question

I'm trying to reindex a dataframe's multiindex at one sublevel. The df in question looks like this:

test = pd.DataFrame({
  'day':[1,3,5],
  'position':['A', 'B', 'A'],
  'value':[20, 45, 3] 
})
test.set_index(['day', 'position'])

>>                  value
  day   position
   1      A          20
   3      B          45
   5      A          3

And my goal is to reindex the day level to transform the dataframe into the following:

>>>
              value
day position    
 1    A       20.0
 2    A       20.0
 3    A       20.0
 4    A       20.0
 5    A       3.0
 1    B       0.0
 2    B       0.0
 3    B       45.0
 4    B       45.0
 5    B       45.0

So essentially I need to reindex day to days 1 through 5 for every position group and then forwardfill and fillna with 0.

Answer 1

Use:

• first reshape by unstack
• add mising days by reindex
• forward fill by ffill
• replace first NaNs by fillna
• reshape by by stack
• sort_index for expected output

---

df = (test.set_index(['day', 'position'])
          .unstack()
          .reindex(range(1,6))
          .ffill()
          .fillna(0)
          .stack()
          .sort_index(level=[1,0]))
print (df)
              value
day position       
1   A          20.0
2   A          20.0
3   A          20.0
4   A          20.0
5   A           3.0
1   B           0.0
2   B           0.0
3   B          45.0
4   B          45.0
5   B          45.0