Pandas - How to flatten a hierarchical index in columns

Question

I have a data frame with a hierarchical index in axis 1 (columns) (from a groupby.agg operation):

     USAF   WBAN  year  month  day  s_PC  s_CL         


        

Answer 1

Following @jxstanford and @tvt173, I wrote a quick function which should do the trick, regardless of string/int column names:

def flatten_cols(df):
    df.columns = [
        '_'.join(tuple(map(str, t))).rstrip('_') 
        for t in df.columns.values
        ]
    return df