Compute mean value of rows that has the same column value in Pandas

Question

I'm trying to combine three pandas DataFrames together

One of them (called major) has a column category where each row has a unique label :

major_df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randint(0, 100, size=(3, 2)), columns=list("AB"))
major_df["category"] = pd.Series(["cat_A", "cat_B", "cat_C"])

    A   B category
0  90  17    cat_A
1  36  81    cat_B
2  90  67    cat_C

Two other dfs (called minor) contains multiple rows and have their own unique column names. Each df has a column category where each row has a value that is present in the major df category column :

minor_dfs = {}
for k, cols in zip(("1st", "2nd"), ("CD", "EF")):
    minor_dfs[k] = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randint(0, 100, size=(8, 2)), columns=list(cols))
    minor_dfs[k]["category"] = np.random.choice(["cat_A", "cat_B", "cat_C"], 8)

Here is an example of one of those minor dfs. The only difference between both is that first minor df has the columns C and D, where the second has columns E and F.

    C   D category
0  71  44    cat_C
1   5  88    cat_C
2   8  78    cat_C
3  31  27    cat_C
4  42  48    cat_B
5  18  18    cat_B
6  84  23    cat_A
7  94  23    cat_A

---

So, my goal is to compute the mean of the values in minor dfs based on the category column, so that at the end, I have the following dfs :

           C      D
cat_A  89.00  23.00
cat_B  30.00  33.00
cat_C  28.75  59.25

where each column contains the mean of the values that are in each category.

---

For that, I made the following code, where we create empty DataFrames with the column values of the minor dfs and indices from the different values of categories. I then fill this DataFrame using a for loop where I iterate over every value of the index.

copy_dfs = {}
for k, min_df in minor_dfs.items():
    # Get columns from minor df
    # Get index from category of major df
    col_names = min_df.columns.values
    ind_values = major_df.category.values

    # Create a df with columns and indices and set values to np.nan
    copy_df = pd.DataFrame(np.nan, index=ind_values, columns=col_names)
    copy_df = copy_df.drop("category", axis=1)

    # For each category in the index of the dataframe
    for maj_category in copy_df.index:
        # Select rows in minor df where category is the same as major df category
        minor_rows = min_df[min_df.category == maj_category]
        minor_rows = minor_rows.drop("category", axis=1)
        # Compute the mean values (by column) of the rows that were selected
        # Add the mean values into copy_df, where the index corresponds to major df category
        copy_df.loc[maj_category] = minor_rows.mean()

    # Store into dict
    copy_dfs[k] = copy_df

Yet, I think that this code could be optimized using vectorized operations, especially in the part where I iterate for each row. So I was wondering if there was an easier and clever way to accomplish what I'm trying to do ?

Answer 1

This?

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_excel('test.xlsx')
df1 = df.groupby(['category']).mean()
print(df)
print(df1)

output:

    C   D category
0  71  44    cat_C
1   5  88    cat_C
2   8  78    cat_C
3  31  27    cat_C
4  42  48    cat_B
5  18  18    cat_B
6  84  23    cat_A
7  94  23    cat_A


              C      D
category
cat_A     89.00  23.00
cat_B     30.00  33.00
cat_C     28.75  59.25