Shuffle DataFrame rows

I have the following DataFrame:

    Col1  Col2  Col3  Type
0      1     2     3     1
1      4     5     6     1
...
20     7     8     9     2
21    10    11    12     2
...
45    13    14    15     3
46    16    17    18     3
...

The DataFrame is read from a csv file. All rows which have Type 1 are on top, followed by the rows with Type 2, followed by the rows with Type 3, etc.

I would like to shuffle the order of the DataFrame's rows, so that all Type's are mixed. A possible result could be:

    Col1  Col2  Col3  Type
0      7     8     9     2
1     13    14    15     3
...
20     1     2     3     1
21    10    11    12     2
...
45     4     5     6     1
46    16    17    18     3
...

How can I achieve this?

The idiomatic way to do this with Pandas is to use the .sample method of your dataframe to sample all rows without replacement:

df.sample(frac=1)

The frac keyword argument specifies the fraction of rows to return in the random sample, so frac=1 means return all rows (in random order).

Note: If you wish to shuffle your dataframe in-place and reset the index, you could do e.g.

df = df.sample(frac=1).reset_index(drop=True)

Here, specifying drop=True prevents .reset_index from creating a column containing the old index entries.

Follow-up note: Although it may not look like the above operation is in-place, python/pandas is smart enough not to do another malloc for the shuffled object. That is, even though the reference object has changed (by which I mean id(df_old) is not the same as id(df_new)), the underlying C object is still the same. To show that this is indeed the case, you could run a simple memory profiler:

$ python3 -m memory_profiler .\test.py
Filename: .\test.py

Line #    Mem usage    Increment   Line Contents
================================================
     5     68.5 MiB     68.5 MiB   @profile
     6                             def shuffle():
     7    847.8 MiB    779.3 MiB       df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(100, 1000000))
     8    847.9 MiB      0.1 MiB       df = df.sample(frac=1).reset_index(drop=True)

You can simply use sklearn for this

from sklearn.utils import shuffle
df = shuffle(df)

You can shuffle the rows of a dataframe by indexing with a shuffled index. For this, you can eg use np.random.permutation (but np.random.choice is also a possibility):

In [12]: df = pd.read_csv(StringIO(s), sep="\s+")

In [13]: df
Out[13]: 
    Col1  Col2  Col3  Type
0      1     2     3     1
1      4     5     6     1
20     7     8     9     2
21    10    11    12     2
45    13    14    15     3
46    16    17    18     3

In [14]: df.iloc[np.random.permutation(len(df))]
Out[14]: 
    Col1  Col2  Col3  Type
46    16    17    18     3
45    13    14    15     3
20     7     8     9     2
0      1     2     3     1
1      4     5     6     1
21    10    11    12     2

If you want to keep the index numbered from 1, 2, .., n as in your example, you can simply reset the index: df_shuffled.reset_index(drop=True)

TL;DR: np.random.shuffle(ndarray) can do the job.
So, in your case

np.random.shuffle(DataFrame.values)

DataFrame, under the hood, uses NumPy ndarray as data holder. (You can check from DataFrame source code)

So if you use np.random.shuffle(), it would shuffles the array along the first axis of a multi-dimensional array. But index of the DataFrame remains unshuffled.

Though, there are some points to consider.

• function returns none. In case you want to keep a copy of the original object, you have to do so before you pass to the function.
• sklearn.utils.shuffle(), as user tj89 suggested, can designate random_state along with another option to control output. You may want that for dev purpose.
• sklearn.utils.shuffle() is faster. But WILL SHUFFLE the axis info(index, column) of the DataFrame along with the ndarray it contains.

Benchmark result

between sklearn.utils.shuffle() and np.random.shuffle().

ndarray

nd = sklearn.utils.shuffle(nd)

0.10793248389381915 sec. 8x faster

np.random.shuffle(nd)

0.8897626010002568 sec

DataFrame

df = sklearn.utils.shuffle(df)

0.3183923360193148 sec. 3x faster

np.random.shuffle(df.values)

0.9357550159329548 sec

Conclusion: If it is okay to axis info(index, column) to be shuffled along with ndarray, use sklearn.utils.shuffle(). Otherwise, use np.random.shuffle()

used code

import timeit
setup = '''
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import sklearn
nd = np.random.random((1000, 100))
df = pd.DataFrame(nd)
'''

timeit.timeit('nd = sklearn.utils.shuffle(nd)', setup=setup, number=1000)
timeit.timeit('np.random.shuffle(nd)', setup=setup, number=1000)
timeit.timeit('df = sklearn.utils.shuffle(df)', setup=setup, number=1000)
timeit.timeit('np.random.shuffle(df.values)', setup=setup, number=1000)

pythonbenchmarking

What is also useful, if you use it for Machine_learning and want to seperate always the same data, you could use:

df.sample(n=len(df), random_state=42)

this makes sure, that you keep your random choice always replicatable