Prepend a level to a pandas MultiIndex

Question

I have a DataFrame with a MultiIndex created after some grouping:

import numpy as np
import pandas as p
from numpy.random import randn

df = p.DataFrame({
           


        

Answer 1

You can first add it as a normal column and then append it to the current index, so:

df['Firstlevel'] = 'Foo'
df.set_index('Firstlevel', append=True, inplace=True)

And change the order if needed with:

df.reorder_levels(['Firstlevel', 'A', 'B'])

Which results in:

                      Vals
Firstlevel A  B           
Foo        a1 b1  0.871563
              b2  0.494001
           a2 b3 -0.167811
           a3 b4 -1.353409