Pandas column of lists, create a row for each list element

Question

I have a dataframe where some cells contain lists of multiple values. Rather than storing multiple values in a cell, I\'d like to expand the dataframe so that each item in t

Answer 1

I found the easiest way was to:

1. Convert the samples column into a DataFrame
2. Joining with the original df
3. Melting

Shown here:

    df.samples.apply(lambda x: pd.Series(x)).join(df).\
melt(['subject','trial_num'],[0,1,2],var_name='sample')

        subject  trial_num sample  value
    0         1          1      0  -0.24
    1         1          2      0   0.14
    2         1          3      0  -0.67
    3         2          1      0  -1.52
    4         2          2      0  -0.00
    5         2          3      0  -1.73
    6         1          1      1  -0.70
    7         1          2      1  -0.70
    8         1          3      1  -0.29
    9         2          1      1  -0.70
    10        2          2      1  -0.72
    11        2          3      1   1.30
    12        1          1      2  -0.55
    13        1          2      2   0.10
    14        1          3      2  -0.44
    15        2          1      2   0.13
    16        2          2      2  -1.44
    17        2          3      2   0.73

It's worth noting that this may have only worked because each trial has the same number of samples (3). Something more clever may be necessary for trials of different sample sizes.