Highlighting nlargest values of columns in a pandas df

Question

I have highlighted in yellow max values of my df with the following code:

def highlight_max(s):
    is_max = s == s.max()
    return ['background-color: yellow' if v else '' for v in is_max]

pivot_p.style.apply(highlight_max)

But now I want to highlight the 5 largest values of each column. I have tried the following code, but it's not working:

def highlight_large(s):
    is_large = s == s.nlargest(5)
    return ['background-color: yellow' if v else '' for v in is_large]

pivot_p.style.apply(highlight_large)

Error:

ValueError: ('Can only compare identically-labeled Series objects', 'occurred at index %_0')

Answer 1

You can try:

def highlight_max(s):
    is_large = s.nlargest(5).values
    return ['background-color: yellow' if v in is_large else '' for v in s]

Full example:

# Import modules
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

# Create example dataframe
pivot_p = pd.DataFrame({"a": np.random.randint(0,15,20),
                  "b": np.random.random(20)})

def highlight_max(s):
    # Get 5 largest values of the column
    is_large = s.nlargest(5).values
    # Apply style is the current value is among the 5 biggest values
    return ['background-color: yellow' if v in is_large else '' for v in s]

pivot_p.style.apply(highlight_max)

Output: