GroupBy pandas DataFrame and select most common value

Solution 1:

You can use value_counts() to get a count series, and get the first row:

import pandas as pd

source = pd.DataFrame({'Country' : ['USA', 'USA', 'Russia','USA'], 
                  'City' : ['New-York', 'New-York', 'Sankt-Petersburg', 'New-York'],
                  'Short name' : ['NY','New','Spb','NY']})

source.groupby(['Country','City']).agg(lambda x:x.value_counts().index[0])

In case you are wondering about performing other agg functions in the .agg() try this.

# Let's add a new col,  account
source['account'] = [1,2,3,3]

source.groupby(['Country','City']).agg(mod  = ('Short name', \
                                        lambda x: x.value_counts().index[0]),
                                        avg = ('account', 'mean') \
                                      )

Solution 2:

Pandas >= 0.16

pd.Series.mode is available!

Use groupby, GroupBy.agg, and apply the pd.Series.mode function to each group:

source.groupby(['Country','City'])['Short name'].agg(pd.Series.mode)

Country  City            
Russia   Sankt-Petersburg    Spb
USA      New-York             NY
Name: Short name, dtype: object

If this is needed as a DataFrame, use

source.groupby(['Country','City'])['Short name'].agg(pd.Series.mode).to_frame()

                         Short name
Country City                       
Russia  Sankt-Petersburg        Spb
USA     New-York                 NY

The useful thing about Series.mode is that it always returns a Series, making it very compatible with agg and apply, especially when reconstructing the groupby output. It is also faster.

# Accepted answer.
%timeit source.groupby(['Country','City']).agg(lambda x:x.value_counts().index[0])
# Proposed in this post.
%timeit source.groupby(['Country','City'])['Short name'].agg(pd.Series.mode)

5.56 ms ± 343 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)
2.76 ms ± 387 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)

Dealing with Multiple Modes

Series.mode also does a good job when there are multiple modes:

source2 = source.append(
    pd.Series({'Country': 'USA', 'City': 'New-York', 'Short name': 'New'}),
    ignore_index=True)

# Now `source2` has two modes for the 
# ("USA", "New-York") group, they are "NY" and "New".
source2

  Country              City Short name
0     USA          New-York         NY
1     USA          New-York        New
2  Russia  Sankt-Petersburg        Spb
3     USA          New-York         NY
4     USA          New-York        New

source2.groupby(['Country','City'])['Short name'].agg(pd.Series.mode)

Country  City            
Russia   Sankt-Petersburg          Spb
USA      New-York            [NY, New]
Name: Short name, dtype: object

Or, if you want a separate row for each mode, you can use GroupBy.apply:

source2.groupby(['Country','City'])['Short name'].apply(pd.Series.mode)

Country  City               
Russia   Sankt-Petersburg  0    Spb
USA      New-York          0     NY
                           1    New
Name: Short name, dtype: object

If you don't care which mode is returned as long as it's either one of them, then you will need a lambda that calls mode and extracts the first result.

source2.groupby(['Country','City'])['Short name'].agg(
    lambda x: pd.Series.mode(x)[0])

Country  City            
Russia   Sankt-Petersburg    Spb
USA      New-York             NY
Name: Short name, dtype: object

Alternatives to (not) consider

You can also use statistics.mode from python, but...

source.groupby(['Country','City'])['Short name'].apply(statistics.mode)

Country  City            
Russia   Sankt-Petersburg    Spb
USA      New-York             NY
Name: Short name, dtype: object

...it does not work well when having to deal with multiple modes; a StatisticsError is raised. This is mentioned in the docs:

If data is empty, or if there is not exactly one most common value, StatisticsError is raised.

But you can see for yourself...

statistics.mode([1, 2])
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
# StatisticsError                           Traceback (most recent call last)
# ...
# StatisticsError: no unique mode; found 2 equally common values

Solution 3:

For agg, the lambba function gets a Series, which does not have a 'Short name' attribute.

stats.mode returns a tuple of two arrays, so you have to take the first element of the first array in this tuple.

With these two simple changements:

source.groupby(['Country','City']).agg(lambda x: stats.mode(x)[0][0])

returns

                         Short name
Country City                       
Russia  Sankt-Petersburg        Spb
USA     New-York                 NY

Solution 4:

A little late to the game here, but I was running into some performance issues with HYRY's solution, so I had to come up with another one.

It works by finding the frequency of each key-value, and then, for each key, only keeping the value that appears with it most often.

There's also an additional solution that supports multiple modes.

On a scale test that's representative of the data I'm working with, this reduced runtime from 37.4s to 0.5s!

Here's the code for the solution, some example usage, and the scale test:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import random
import time

test_input = pd.DataFrame(columns=[ 'key',          'value'],
                          data=  [[ 1,              'A'    ],
                                  [ 1,              'B'    ],
                                  [ 1,              'B'    ],
                                  [ 1,              np.nan ],
                                  [ 2,              np.nan ],
                                  [ 3,              'C'    ],
                                  [ 3,              'C'    ],
                                  [ 3,              'D'    ],
                                  [ 3,              'D'    ]])

def mode(df, key_cols, value_col, count_col):
    '''                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
    Pandas does not provide a `mode` aggregation function                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
    for its `GroupBy` objects. This function is meant to fill                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
    that gap, though the semantics are not exactly the same.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

    The input is a DataFrame with the columns `key_cols`                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
    that you would like to group on, and the column                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
    `value_col` for which you would like to obtain the mode.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

    The output is a DataFrame with a record per group that has at least one mode                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
    (null values are not counted). The `key_cols` are included as columns, `value_col`                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
    contains a mode (ties are broken arbitrarily and deterministically) for each                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
    group, and `count_col` indicates how many times each mode appeared in its group.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
    '''
    return df.groupby(key_cols + [value_col]).size() \
             .to_frame(count_col).reset_index() \
             .sort_values(count_col, ascending=False) \
             .drop_duplicates(subset=key_cols)

def modes(df, key_cols, value_col, count_col):
    '''                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
    Pandas does not provide a `mode` aggregation function                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
    for its `GroupBy` objects. This function is meant to fill                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
    that gap, though the semantics are not exactly the same.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

    The input is a DataFrame with the columns `key_cols`                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
    that you would like to group on, and the column                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
    `value_col` for which you would like to obtain the modes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

    The output is a DataFrame with a record per group that has at least                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
    one mode (null values are not counted). The `key_cols` are included as                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
    columns, `value_col` contains lists indicating the modes for each group,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
    and `count_col` indicates how many times each mode appeared in its group.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
    '''
    return df.groupby(key_cols + [value_col]).size() \
             .to_frame(count_col).reset_index() \
             .groupby(key_cols + [count_col])[value_col].unique() \
             .to_frame().reset_index() \
             .sort_values(count_col, ascending=False) \
             .drop_duplicates(subset=key_cols)

print test_input
print mode(test_input, ['key'], 'value', 'count')
print modes(test_input, ['key'], 'value', 'count')

scale_test_data = [[random.randint(1, 100000),
                    str(random.randint(123456789001, 123456789100))] for i in range(1000000)]
scale_test_input = pd.DataFrame(columns=['key', 'value'],
                                data=scale_test_data)

start = time.time()
mode(scale_test_input, ['key'], 'value', 'count')
print time.time() - start

start = time.time()
modes(scale_test_input, ['key'], 'value', 'count')
print time.time() - start

start = time.time()
scale_test_input.groupby(['key']).agg(lambda x: x.value_counts().index[0])
print time.time() - start

Running this code will print something like:

   key value
0    1     A
1    1     B
2    1     B
3    1   NaN
4    2   NaN
5    3     C
6    3     C
7    3     D
8    3     D
   key value  count
1    1     B      2
2    3     C      2
   key  count   value
1    1      2     [B]
2    3      2  [C, D]
0.489614009857
9.19386196136
37.4375009537

Hope this helps!