sum values of columns starting with the same string in pandas dataframe

Question

I have a dataframe with about 100 columns that looks like this:

   Id  Economics-1  English-107  English-2  History-3  Economics-zz  Economics-2  \
0  56          1            1          0        1       0           0   
1  11          0            0          0        0       1           0   
2   6          0            0          1        0       0           1   
3  43          0            0          0        1       0           1   
4  14          0            1          0        0       1           0   

   Histo      Economics-51      Literature-re         Literatureu4  
0           1            0           1                0  
1           0            0           0                1  
2           0            0           0                0  
3           0            1           1                0  
4           1            0           0                0  

My goal is to leave only global categories -- English, History, Literature -- and write the sum of the value of their components, respectively, in this dataframe. For instance, "English" would be the sum of "English-107" and "English-2":

    Id  Economics      English    History  Literature  
0  56          1            1          2        1                     
1  11          1            0          0        1                    
2   6          0            1          1        0                     
3  43          2            0          1        1                     
4  14          0            1          1        0          

For this purpose, I have tried two methods. First method:

df = pd.read_csv(file_path, sep='\t')
df['History'] = df.loc[df[df.columns[pd.Series(df.columns).str.startswith('History')]].sum(axes=1)]

Second method:

df = pd.read_csv(file_path, sep='\t')
filter_col = [col for col in list(df) if col.startswith('History')]
df['History'] = 0 # initialize value, otherwise throws KeyError
for c in df[filter_col]:
    df['History'] = df[filter_col].sum(axes=1)
    print df['History', df[filter_col]]

However, both gives the error:

TypeError: 'DataFrame' objects are mutable, thus they cannot be hashed

My question is either: how can I debug this error or is there another solution for my problem. Notice that I have a rather large dataframe with about 100 columns and 400000 rows, so I'm looking for an optimized solution, like using loc in pandas.

Answer 1

I'd suggest that you do something different, which is to perform a transpose, groupby the prefix of the rows (your original columns), sum, and transpose again.

Consider the following:

df = pd.DataFrame({
        'a_a': [1, 2, 3, 4],
        'a_b': [2, 3, 4, 5],
        'b_a': [1, 2, 3, 4],
        'b_b': [2, 3, 4, 5],
    })

Now

[s.split('_')[0] for s in df.T.index.values]

is the prefix of the columns. So

>>> df.T.groupby([s.split('_')[0] for s in df.T.index.values]).sum().T
    a   b
0   3   3
1   5   5
2   7   7
3   9   9

does what you want.

In your case, make sure to split using the '-' character.