What's a simple and efficient way to shuffle a dataframe in pandas, by rows or by columns? I.e. how to write a function shuffle(df, n, axis=0)
that takes a dataframe, a number of shuffles n
, and an axis (axis=0
is rows, axis=1
is columns) and returns a copy of the dataframe that has been shuffled n
times.
Edit: key is to do this without destroying the row/column labels of the dataframe. If you just shuffle df.index
that loses all that information. I want the resulting df
to be the same as the original except with the order of rows or order of columns different.
Edit2: My question was unclear. When I say shuffle the rows, I mean shuffle each row independently. So if you have two columns a
and b
, I want each row shuffled on its own, so that you don't have the same associations between a
and b
as you do if you just re-order each row as a whole. Something like:
for 1...n:
for each col in df: shuffle column
return new_df
But hopefully more efficient than naive looping. This does not work for me:
def shuffle(df, n, axis=0):
shuffled_df = df.copy()
for k in range(n):
shuffled_df.apply(np.random.shuffle(shuffled_df.values),axis=axis)
return shuffled_df
df = pandas.DataFrame({'A':range(10), 'B':range(10)})
shuffle(df, 5)
In [16]: def shuffle(df, n=1, axis=0):
...: df = df.copy()
...: for _ in range(n):
...: df.apply(np.random.shuffle, axis=axis)
...: return df
...:
In [17]: df = pd.DataFrame({'A':range(10), 'B':range(10)})
In [18]: shuffle(df)
In [19]: df
Out[19]:
A B
0 8 5
1 1 7
2 7 3
3 6 2
4 3 4
5 0 1
6 9 0
7 4 6
8 2 8
9 5 9