Pandas Sort Values
Finding interesting bits of data in a DataFrame is often easier if you change the rows' order. You can sort the rows by passing a column name to .sort_values().
In cases where rows have the same value (this is common if you sort on a categorical variable), you may wish to break the ties by sorting on another column. You can sort on multiple columns in this way by passing a list of column names.
Modifying the Order of Columns
You can change the rows' order by sorting them so that the most interesting data is at the top of the dataframe.
For example, when we apply sort_values() on the weight_kg column of the dogs dataframe, we get the lightest dog at the top, Stella the Chihuahua, and the heaviest dog at the bottom, Bernie the Saint Bernard.
dogs.sort_values("weight_kg")
name breed color height_cm weight_kg date_of_birth
5 Stella Chihuahua Tan 18 2 2015-04-20
3 Cooper Schnauzer Gray 49 17 2011-12-11
0 Bella Labrador Brown 56 24 2013-07-01
1 Charlie Poodle Black 43 24 2016-09-16
2 Lucy Chow Chow Brown 46 24 2014-08-25
4 Max Labrador Black 59 29 2017-01-20
6 Bernie St. Bernard White 77 74 2018-02-27
Setting the ascending argument to False will sort the data the other way round, from heaviest to lightest dog.
dogs.sort_values("weight_kg", ascending=False)
name breed color height_cm weight_kg date_of_birth
6 Bernie St. Bernard White 77 74 2018-02-27
4 Max Labrador Black 59 29 2017-01-20
0 Bella Labrador Brown 56 24 2013-07-01
1 Charlie Poodle Black 43 24 2016-09-16
2 Lucy Chow Chow Brown 46 24 2014-08-25
3 Cooper Schnauzer Gray 49 17 2011-12-11
5 Stella Chihuahua Tan 18 2 2015-04-20
Sorting by Multiple Variables
We can sort by multiple variables by passing a list of column names to sort_values. Here, we sort first by weight, then by height. Now, Charlie, Lucy, and Bella are ordered from shortest to tallest, even though they all weigh the same.
dogs.sort_values(["weight_kg", "height_cm"])
name breed color height_cm weight_kg date_of_birth
5 Stella Chihuahua Tan 18 2 2015-04-20
3 Cooper Schnauzer Gray 49 17 2011-12-11
1 Charlie Poodle Black 43 24 2016-09-16
2 Lucy Chow Chow Brown 46 24 2014-08-25
0 Bella Labrador Brown 56 24 2013-07-01
4 Max Labrador Black 59 29 2017-01-20
6 Bernie St. Bernard White 77 74 2018-02-27
To change the direction values are sorted in, pass a list to the ascending argument to specify which direction sorting should be done for each variable. Now, Charlie, Lucy, and Bella are ordered from tallest to shortest.
dogs.sort_values(["weight_kg", "height_cm"], ascending=[True, False])
name breed color height_cm weight_kg date_of_birth
5 Stella Chihuahua Tan 18 2 2015-04-20
3 Cooper Schnauzer Gray 49 17 2011-12-11
0 Bella Labrador Brown 56 24 2013-07-01
2 Lucy Chow Chow Brown 46 24 2014-08-25
1 Charlie Poodle Black 43 24 2016-09-16
4 Max Labrador Black 59 29 2017-01-20
6 Bernie St. Bernard White 77 74 2018-02-27
Interactive Example
In the following example, you will sort homelessness by the number of homeless individuals, from smallest to largest, and save this as homelessness_ind. Finally, you will print the head of the sorted DataFrame.
# Sort homelessness by individuals
homelessness_ind = homelessness.sort_values("individuals")
# Print the top few rows
print(homelessness_ind.head())
When we run the above code, it produces the following result:
region state individuals family_members state_pop
50 Mountain Wyoming 434.0 205.0 577601
34 West North Central North Dakota 467.0 75.0 758080
7 South Atlantic Delaware 708.0 374.0 965479
39 New England Rhode Island 747.0 354.0 1058287
45 New England Vermont 780.0 511.0 624358
To learn more about sorting and subsetting the data, please see this video from our course Data Manipulation with pandas.
This content is taken from DataCamp’s Data Manipulation with pandas course by Maggie Matsui and Richie Cotton.