Apply function to pandas DataFrame that can return multiple rows

I am trying to transform DataFrame, such that some of the rows will be replicated a given number of times. For example:

df = pd.DataFrame({'class': ['A', 'B', 'C'], 'count':[1,0,2]})

  class  count
0     A      1
1     B      0
2     C      2

should be transformed to:

  class 
0     A   
1     C   
2     C 

This is the reverse of aggregation with count function. Is there an easy way to achieve it in pandas (without using for loops or list comprehensions)?

One possibility might be to allow DataFrame.applymap function return multiple rows (akin apply method of GroupBy). However, I do not think it is possible in pandas now.

You could use groupby:

def f(group):
    row = group.irow(0)
    return DataFrame({'class': [row['class']] * row['count']})
df.groupby('class', group_keys=False).apply(f)

so you get

In [25]: df.groupby('class', group_keys=False).apply(f)
Out[25]: 
  class
0     A
0     C
1     C

You can fix the index of the result however you like

I know this is an old question, but I was having trouble getting Wes' answer to work for multiple columns in the dataframe so I made his code a bit more generic. Thought I'd share in case anyone else stumbles on this question with the same problem.

You just basically specify what column has the counts in it in and you get an expanded dataframe in return.

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({'class 1': ['A','B','C','A'],
                   'class 2': [ 1,  2,  3,  1], 
                   'count':   [ 3,  3,  3,  1]})
print df,"\n"

def f(group, *args):
    row = group.irow(0)
    Dict = {}
    row_dict = row.to_dict()
    for item in row_dict: Dict[item] = [row[item]] * row[args[0]]
    return pd.DataFrame(Dict)

def ExpandRows(df,WeightsColumnName):
    df_expand = df.groupby(df.columns.tolist(), group_keys=False).apply(f,WeightsColumnName).reset_index(drop=True)
    return df_expand


df_expanded = ExpandRows(df,'count')
print df_expanded

Returns:

  class 1  class 2  count
0       A        1      3
1       B        2      3
2       C        3      3
3       A        1      1 

  class 1  class 2  count
0       A        1      1
1       A        1      3
2       A        1      3
3       A        1      3
4       B        2      3
5       B        2      3
6       B        2      3
7       C        3      3
8       C        3      3
9       C        3      3

With regards to speed, my base df is 10 columns by ~6k rows and when expanded is ~100,000 rows takes ~7 seconds. I'm not sure in this case if grouping is necessary or wise since it's taking all the columns to group form, but hey whatever only 7 seconds.

There is even a simpler and significantly more efficient solution. I had to make similar modification for a table of about 3.5M rows, and the previous suggested solutions were extremely slow.

A better way is to use numpy's repeat procedure for generating a new index in which each row index is repeated multiple times according to its given count, and use iloc to select rows of the original table according to this index:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

df = pd.DataFrame({'class': ['A', 'B', 'C'], 'count': [1, 0, 2]})
spread_ixs = np.repeat(range(len(df)), df['count'])
spread_ixs 

array([0, 2, 2])

df.iloc[spread_ixs, :].drop(columns='count').reset_index(drop=True)

  class
0     A
1     C
2     C