Remove duplicates from dataframe, based on two columns A,B, keeping row with max value in another column C

Question

I have a pandas dataframe which contains duplicates values according to two columns (A and B):

A B C 1 2 1 1 2 4 2 7 1 3 4 0 3 4 8 

I want to remove duplicates keeping the row with max value in column C. This would lead to:

A B C 1 2 4 2 7 1 3 4 8 

I cannot figure out how to do that. Should I use drop_duplicates(), something else?

Answer 1

You can do it using group by:

c_maxes = df.groupby(['A', 'B']).C.transform(max) df = df.loc[df.C == c_maxes] 

c_maxes is a Series of the maximum values of C in each group but which is of the same length and with the same index as df. If you haven't used .transform then printing c_maxes might be a good idea to see how it works.

Another approach using drop_duplicates would be

df.sort('C').drop_duplicates(subset=['A', 'B'], take_last=True) 

Not sure which is more efficient but I guess the first approach as it doesn't involve sorting.

EDIT: From pandas 0.18 up the second solution would be

df.sort_values('C').drop_duplicates(subset=['A', 'B'], keep='last') 

or, alternatively,

df.sort_values('C', ascending=False).drop_duplicates(subset=['A', 'B']) 

In any case, the groupby solution seems to be significantly more performing:

%timeit -n 10 df.loc[df.groupby(['A', 'B']).C.max == df.C] 10 loops, best of 3: 25.7 ms per loop  %timeit -n 10 df.sort_values('C').drop_duplicates(subset=['A', 'B'], keep='last') 10 loops, best of 3: 101 ms per loop 

Answer 2

You can do this simply by using pandas drop duplicates function

df.drop_duplicates(['A','B'],keep= 'last')