pandas get rows which are NOT in other dataframe

Question

I\'ve two pandas data frames which have some rows in common.

Suppose dataframe2 is a subset of dataframe1.

How can I get the rows of dataframe1 which

Answer 1

Suppose you have two dataframes, df_1 and df_2 having multiple fields(column_names) and you want to find the only those entries in df_1 that are not in df_2 on the basis of some fields(e.g. fields_x, fields_y), follow the following steps.

Step1.Add a column key1 and key2 to df_1 and df_2 respectively.

Step2.Merge the dataframes as shown below. field_x and field_y are our desired columns.

Step3.Select only those rows from df_1 where key1 is not equal to key2.

Step4.Drop key1 and key2.

This method will solve your problem and works fast even with big data sets. I have tried it for dataframes with more than 1,000,000 rows.

df_1['key1'] = 1
df_2['key2'] = 1
df_1 = pd.merge(df_1, df_2, on=['field_x', 'field_y'], how = 'left')
df_1 = df_1[~(df_1.key2 == df_1.key1)]
df_1 = df_1.drop(['key1','key2'], axis=1)