pandas DataFrame: replace nan values with average of columns

Question

You can simply use DataFrame.fillna to fill the nan's directly:

In [27]: df 
Out[27]: 
          A         B         C
0 -0.166919  0.979728 -0.632955
1 -0.297953 -0.912674 -1.365463
2 -0.120211 -0.540679 -0.680481
3       NaN -2.027325  1.533582
4       NaN       NaN  0.461821
5 -0.788073       NaN       NaN
6 -0.916080 -0.612343       NaN
7 -0.887858  1.033826       NaN
8  1.948430  1.025011 -2.982224
9  0.019698 -0.795876 -0.046431

In [28]: df.mean()
Out[28]: 
A   -0.151121
B   -0.231291
C   -0.530307
dtype: float64

In [29]: df.fillna(df.mean())
Out[29]: 
          A         B         C
0 -0.166919  0.979728 -0.632955
1 -0.297953 -0.912674 -1.365463
2 -0.120211 -0.540679 -0.680481
3 -0.151121 -2.027325  1.533582
4 -0.151121 -0.231291  0.461821
5 -0.788073 -0.231291 -0.530307
6 -0.916080 -0.612343 -0.530307
7 -0.887858  1.033826 -0.530307
8  1.948430  1.025011 -2.982224
9  0.019698 -0.795876 -0.046431

The docstring of fillna says that value should be a scalar or a dict, however, it seems to work with a Series as well. If you want to pass a dict, you could use df.mean().to_dict().

Try:

sub2['income'].fillna((sub2['income'].mean()), inplace=True)

In [16]: df = DataFrame(np.random.randn(10,3))

In [17]: df.iloc[3:5,0] = np.nan

In [18]: df.iloc[4:6,1] = np.nan

In [19]: df.iloc[5:8,2] = np.nan

In [20]: df
Out[20]: 
          0         1         2
0  1.148272  0.227366 -2.368136
1 -0.820823  1.071471 -0.784713
2  0.157913  0.602857  0.665034
3       NaN -0.985188 -0.324136
4       NaN       NaN  0.238512
5  0.769657       NaN       NaN
6  0.141951  0.326064       NaN
7 -1.694475 -0.523440       NaN
8  0.352556 -0.551487 -1.639298
9 -2.067324 -0.492617 -1.675794

In [22]: df.mean()
Out[22]: 
0   -0.251534
1   -0.040622
2   -0.841219
dtype: float64

Apply per-column the mean of that columns and fill

In [23]: df.apply(lambda x: x.fillna(x.mean()),axis=0)
Out[23]: 
          0         1         2
0  1.148272  0.227366 -2.368136
1 -0.820823  1.071471 -0.784713
2  0.157913  0.602857  0.665034
3 -0.251534 -0.985188 -0.324136
4 -0.251534 -0.040622  0.238512
5  0.769657 -0.040622 -0.841219
6  0.141951  0.326064 -0.841219
7 -1.694475 -0.523440 -0.841219
8  0.352556 -0.551487 -1.639298
9 -2.067324 -0.492617 -1.675794

Although, the below code does the job, BUT its performance takes a big hit, as you deal with a DataFrame with # records 100k or more:

df.fillna(df.mean())

In my experience, one should replace NaN values (be it with Mean or Median), only where it is required, rather than applying fillna() all over the DataFrame.

I had a DataFrame with 20 variables, and only 4 of them required NaN values treatment (replacement). I tried the above code (Code 1), along with a slightly modified version of it (code 2), where i ran it selectively .i.e. only on variables which had a NaN value

#------------------------------------------------
#----(Code 1) Treatment on overall DataFrame-----

df.fillna(df.mean())

#------------------------------------------------
#----(Code 2) Selective Treatment----------------

for i in df.columns[df.isnull().any(axis=0)]:     #---Applying Only on variables with NaN values
    df[i].fillna(df[i].mean(),inplace=True)

#---df.isnull().any(axis=0) gives True/False flag (Boolean value series), 
#---which when applied on df.columns[], helps identify variables with NaN values

Below is the performance i observed, as i kept on increasing the # records in DataFrame

DataFrame with ~100k records

• Code 1: 22.06 Seconds
• Code 2: 0.03 Seconds

DataFrame with ~200k records

• Code 1: 180.06 Seconds
• Code 2: 0.06 Seconds

DataFrame with ~1.6 Million records

• Code 1: code kept running endlessly
• Code 2: 0.40 Seconds

DataFrame with ~13 Million records

• Code 1: --did not even try, after seeing performance on 1.6 Mn records--
• Code 2: 3.20 Seconds

Apologies for a long answer ! Hope this helps !

# To read data from csv file
Dataset = pd.read_csv('Data.csv')

X = Dataset.iloc[:, :-1].values

# To calculate mean use imputer class
from sklearn.impute import SimpleImputer
imputer = SimpleImputer(missing_values=np.nan, strategy='mean')
imputer = imputer.fit(X[:, 1:3])
X[:, 1:3] = imputer.transform(X[:, 1:3])