Change order of pandas.MultiIndex

Question

My DataFrame has the following MultiIndex:

 MultiIndex(levels=[[False, True], [False, True], [False, True], [False, True], [False, True], [False, True], [False, True], [False, True], [False, True]],
               labels=[[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1], [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1], [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1], [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0], [0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1], [0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1], [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0], [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], [0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1]],
               names=['M016105', 'M743110', 'N237000', 'N239000', 'N241000', 'P010014', 'Z050001', 'Z050002', 'Z050005'])

The HTML rendering looks like this:

The list of labels in the header (names) has automatically been sorted alphabetically. However, I would like to determine the order in which they are displayed by passing a list. How can this be done?

I assume that just assigning a different list to names breaks the data as the table values are not automatically ordered differently.

Answer 1

Use DataFrame.reorder_levels:

df = pd.DataFrame({
        'A':list('abcdef'),
         'B':[4,5,4,5,5,4],
         'C':[7,8,9,4,2,3],
         'D':[1,3,5,7,1,0],
         'E':[5,3,6,9,2,4],
         'F':list('aaabbb')
}).set_index(['A','B','C','D'])


df = df.reorder_levels(['B','C','A','D']).sort_index()
print (df)
         E  F
B C A D      
4 3 f 0  4  b
  7 a 1  5  a
  9 c 5  6  a
5 2 e 1  2  b
  4 d 7  9  b
  8 b 3  3  a