How to slice multindex columns in pandas DataFrames?

Question

I have a DataFrame object with 16 rows and 14671872 columns. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to slice this array in any reasonable amount of time on a quad core Dell T410 with 24GB of RAM.

I would just use the transpose of the array because that's much faster, but then I would have a MultiIndex on the columns, and I haven't yet found any documentation in Pandas showing how to use MultiIndexs as columns.

I thought about opening up an issue on the Github tracker, but I wanted to post here before I did that just in case I missed something totally obvious.

Could you be more specific about what you mean by "how to use MultiIndex as columns"? What do you need to do? — Chang She
– Chang She, Commented Sep 25, 2012 at 23:19

jmloser · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-26 01:03:36Z

5

I think .xs might do what you want.

To get all shank 1's (i.e. where the first level of the MultiIndex is equal to 1).

df.xs(1, axis=1, level=0)

This is pretty flexible if you need to cross-section by a different level of the MultiIndex as well.

answered Sep 26, 2012 at 1:03

jmloser

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