Wide to long data transform in pandas

Question

I have a dataset in the following format:

county   area    pop_2006    pop_2007    pop_2008
01001    275      1037         1052        1102
01003    394      2399         2424        2438
01005    312      1638         1647        1660

And I need it in a format like this:

county    year   pop      area
01001     2006   1037      275
01001     2007   1052      275
01001     2008   1102      275
01003     2006   2399      394
01003     2007   2424      394
...

I've tried every combination of pivot_table, stack, unstack, wide_to_long that I can think of, with no success yet. (clearly I'm mostly illiterate in Python/pandas, so please be gentle...).

Answer 1

You can use melt for reshaping, then split column variable and drop and sort_values. I think you can cast column year to int by astype and last change order of columns by subset:

df1 = (pd.melt(df, id_vars=['county','area'], value_name='pop'))
df1[['tmp','year']] = df1.variable.str.split('_', expand=True)
df1 = df1.drop(['variable', 'tmp'],axis=1).sort_values(['county','year'])
df1['year'] = df1.year.astype(int)
df1 = df1[['county','year','pop','area']]
print (df1)
   county  year   pop  area
0    1001  2006  1037   275
3    1001  2007  1052   275
6    1001  2008  1102   275
1    1003  2006  2399   394
4    1003  2007  2424   394
7    1003  2008  2438   394
2    1005  2006  1638   312
5    1005  2007  1647   312
8    1005  2008  1660   312

print (df1.dtypes)
county    int64
year      int32
pop       int64
area      int64
dtype: object

Another solution with set_index, stack and reset_index:

df2 = df.set_index(['county','area']).stack().reset_index(name='pop')
df2[['tmp','year']] = df2.level_2.str.split('_', expand=True)
df2 = df2.drop(['level_2', 'tmp'],axis=1)
df2['year'] = df2.year.astype(int)
df2 = df2[['county','year','pop','area']]

print (df2)
   county  year   pop  area
0    1001  2006  1037   275
1    1001  2007  1052   275
2    1001  2008  1102   275
3    1003  2006  2399   394
4    1003  2007  2424   394
5    1003  2008  2438   394
6    1005  2006  1638   312
7    1005  2007  1647   312
8    1005  2008  1660   312

print (df2.dtypes)
county    int64
year      int32
pop       int64
area      int64
dtype: object

Answer 2

As the question title suggests, we can use pd.wide_to_long:

res = pd.wide_to_long(df, stubnames="pop", i=["county", "area"], j="year", sep="_")

to get

                   pop
county area year
1001   275  2006  1037
            2007  1052
            2008  1102
1003   394  2006  2399
            2007  2424
            2008  2438
1005   312  2006  1638
            2007  1647
            2008  1660

To exactly match the output format in the question, a reset_index and reindex (over columns) can be chained:

>>> res.reset_index().reindex(["county", "year", "pop", "area"], axis=1)

   county  year   pop  area
0    1001  2006  1037   275
1    1001  2007  1052   275
2    1001  2008  1102   275
3    1003  2006  2399   394
4    1003  2007  2424   394
5    1003  2008  2438   394
6    1005  2006  1638   312
7    1005  2007  1647   312
8    1005  2008  1660   312