pandas group by year, rank by sales column, in a dataframe with duplicate data

Question

I would like to create a rank on year (so in year 2012, Manager B is 1. In 2011, Manager B is 1 again). I struggled with the pandas rank function for awhile and DO NOT want

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to group by the Year, then rank the Returns in descending order.

import pandas as pd
s = pd.DataFrame([['2012', 'A', 3], ['2012', 'B', 8], ['2011', 'A', 20], ['2011', 'B', 30]],
                 columns=['Year', 'Manager', 'Return'])
s['Rank'] = s.groupby(['Year'])['Return'].rank(ascending=False)
print(s)

yields

   Year Manager  Return  Rank
0  2012       A       3     2
1  2012       B       8     1
2  2011       A      20     2
3  2011       B      30     1

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To address the OP's revised question: The error message

ValueError: cannot reindex from a duplicate axis

occurs when trying to groupby/rank on a DataFrame with duplicate values in the index. You can avoid the problem by constructing s to have unique index values after appending:

s = pd.DataFrame([['2012', 'A', 3], ['2012', 'B', 8], ['2011', 'A', 20], ['2011', 'B', 30]], columns=['Year', 'Manager', 'Return'])
b = pd.DataFrame([['2012', 'A', 3], ['2012', 'B', 8], ['2011', 'A', 20], ['2011', 'B', 30]], columns=['Year', 'Manager', 'Return'])
s = s.append(b, ignore_index=True)

yields

   Year Manager  Return
0  2012       A       3
1  2012       B       8
2  2011       A      20
3  2011       B      30
4  2012       A       3
5  2012       B       8
6  2011       A      20
7  2011       B      30

---

If you've already appended new rows using

s = s.append(b)

then use reset_index to create a unique index:

s = s.reset_index(drop=True)