Selecting the first row of a sorted group from pandas data frame

Question

Suppose, I have a dataframe in pandas like below:

campaignname    category_type    amount
A               cat_A_0            2.0
A               cat_A_1            1.0
A               cat_A_2            3.0
A               cat_A_2            3.0
A               cat_A_2            4.0
B               cat_B_0            3.0
C               cat_C_0            1.0
C               cat_C_1            2.0

I am using the following code to group the above dataframe (say it's assigned variable name df) by different columns as follows:

for name, gp in df.groupby('campaignname'):
    sorted_gp = gp.groupby(['campaignname', 'category_type']).sum().sort_values(['amount'], ascending=False)
    # I'd like to know how to select this in a cleaner/more concise way
    first_row = [sorted_gp.iloc[0].name[0], sorted_gp.iloc[0].name[1], sorted_gp.iloc[0].values.tolist()[0]]

The purpose of the above code is to first groupby the raw data on campaignname column, then in each of the resulting group, I'd like to group again by both campaignname and category_type, and finally, sort by amount column to choose the first row that comes up (the one with the highest amount in each group. Specifically for the above example, I'd like to get results like this:

first_row = ['A', 'cat_A_2', 4.0] # for the first group
first_row = ['B', 'cat_B_0', 3.0] # for the second group
first_row = ['C', 'cat_C_1', 2.0] # for the third group

etc.

As you can see, I'm using a rather (in my opinion) 'ugly' way to retrieve the first row of each sorted group, but since I'm new to pandas, I don't know a better/cleaner way to accomplish this. If anyone could let me know a way to select the first row in a sorted group from a pandas dataframe, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thank you in advance for your answers/suggestions!

Answer 1

IIUC you can do it this way:

In [83]: df.groupby('campaignname', as_index=False) \
           .apply(lambda x: x.nlargest(1, columns=['amount'])) \
           .reset_index(level=1, drop=1)
Out[83]:
  campaignname category_type  amount
0            A       cat_A_2     4.0
1            B       cat_B_0     3.0
2            C       cat_C_1     2.0

or:

In [76]: df.sort_values('amount', ascending=False).groupby('campaignname').head(1)
Out[76]:
  campaignname category_type  amount
4            A       cat_A_2     4.0
5            B       cat_B_0     3.0
7            C       cat_C_1     2.0

Answer 2

My preferred way to do this is with idxmax. It returns the index of the maximum value. I subsequently use that index to slice df

df.loc[df.groupby('campaignname').amount.idxmax()]

  campaignname category_type  amount
4            A       cat_A_2     4.0
5            B       cat_B_0     3.0
7            C       cat_C_1     2.0