Pandas accessing last non-null value

numpy, pandas, python

Solution

It looks like you want to first do a `ffill` then do a `shift`:

In [11]: df['value'].ffill()
Out[11]:
7   NaN
6     1
4     0
5     0
1     0
0     1
8     1
2     0
3     0
9     0
Name: value, dtype: float64

In [12]: df['value'].ffill().shift(1)
Out[12]:
7   NaN
6   NaN
4     1
5     0
1     0
0     0
8     1
2     1
3     0
9     0
Name: value, dtype: float64

To do this over each group you have to groupby category first and then apply this function:

In [13]: g = df.groupby('category')

In [14]: g['value'].apply(lambda x: x.ffill().shift(1))
Out[14]:
7   NaN
6   NaN
4     1
5     0
1     0
0   NaN
8     1
2     1
3     0
9     0
dtype: float64

In [15]: df['last_value'] = g['value'].apply(lambda x: x.ffill().shift(1))

Problem

I want to fill data frame NaNs with the last valid value for a given group. For instance: ``` import pandas as pd import random as randy import numpy as np df_size = int(1e1) df = pd.DataFrame({'category': randy.sample(np.repeat(['Strawberry','Apple',],df_size),df_size), 'values': randy.sample(np.repeat([np.NaN,0,1],df_size),df_size)}, index=randy.sample(np.arange(0,10),df_size)).sort_index(by=['category'], ascending=[True]) ``` Delivers: ``` category value 7 Apple NaN 6 Apple 1 4 Apple 0 5 Apple NaN 1 Apple NaN 0 Strawberry 1 8 Strawberry NaN 2 Strawberry 0 3 Strawberry 0 9 Strawberry NaN ``` And the column I wish to calculate looks like this: ``` category value last_value 7 Apple NaN NaN 6 Apple 1 NaN 4 Apple 0 1 5 Apple NaN 0 1 Apple NaN 0 0 Strawberry 1 NaN 8 Strawberry NaN 1 2 Strawberry 0 1 3 Strawberry 0 0 9 Strawberry NaN 0 ``` Tried `shift()` and `iterrows()` but to no avail.

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