Pandas groupby to to_csv

kalmdown picture kalmdown · Dec 1, 2017 · Viewed 30.8k times · Source

Want to output a Pandas groupby dataframe to CSV. Tried various StackOverflow solutions but they have not worked.

Python 3.6.1, Pandas 0.20.1

groupby result looks like:

id  month   year    count
week                
0   9066    82  32142   895
1   7679    84  30112   749
2   8368    126 42187   872
3   11038   102 34165   976
4   8815    117 34122   767
5   10979   163 50225   1252
6   8726    142 38159   996
7   5568    63  26143   582

Want a csv that looks like

week  count
0   895
1   749
2   872
3   976
4   767
5   1252
6   996
7   582

Current code:

week_grouped = df.groupby('week')
week_grouped.sum() #At this point you have the groupby result
week_grouped.to_csv('week_grouped.csv') #Can't do this - .to_csv is not a df function. 

Read SO solutions:

output groupby to csv file pandas

week_grouped.drop_duplicates().to_csv('week_grouped.csv')

Result: AttributeError: Cannot access callable attribute 'drop_duplicates' of 'DataFrameGroupBy' objects, try using the 'apply' method

Python pandas - writing groupby output to file

week_grouped.reset_index().to_csv('week_grouped.csv')

Result: AttributeError: "Cannot access callable attribute 'reset_index' of 'DataFrameGroupBy' objects, try using the 'apply' method"

Answer

Alex Luis Arias picture Alex Luis Arias · Dec 1, 2017

Try doing this:

week_grouped = df.groupby('week')
week_grouped.sum().reset_index().to_csv('week_grouped.csv')

That'll write the entire dataframe to the file. If you only want those two columns then,

week_grouped = df.groupby('week')
week_grouped.sum().reset_index()[['week', 'count']].to_csv('week_grouped.csv')

Here's a line by line explanation of the original code:

# This creates a "groupby" object (not a dataframe object) 
# and you store it in the week_grouped variable.
week_grouped = df.groupby('week')

# This instructs pandas to sum up all the numeric type columns in each 
# group. This returns a dataframe where each row is the sum of the 
# group's numeric columns. You're not storing this dataframe in your 
# example.
week_grouped.sum() 

# Here you're calling the to_csv method on a groupby object... but
# that object type doesn't have that method. Dataframes have that method. 
# So we should store the previous line's result (a dataframe) into a variable 
# and then call its to_csv method.
week_grouped.to_csv('week_grouped.csv')

# Like this:
summed_weeks = week_grouped.sum()
summed_weeks.to_csv('...')

# Or with less typing simply
week_grouped.sum().to_csv('...')