Pandas groupby with categories with redundant nan

Question

I am having issues using pandas groupby with categorical data. Theoretically, it should be super efficient: you are grouping and indexing via integers rather than strings. B

Answer 1

Since Pandas 0.23.0, the groupby method can now take a parameter observed which fixes this issue if it is set to True (False by default). Below is the exact same code as in the question with just observed=True added :

import pandas as pd

group_cols = ['Group1', 'Group2', 'Group3']

df = pd.DataFrame([['A', 'B', 'C', 54.34],
                   ['A', 'B', 'D', 61.34],
                   ['B', 'A', 'C', 514.5],
                   ['B', 'A', 'A', 765.4],
                   ['A', 'B', 'D', 765.4]],
                  columns=(group_cols+['Value']))

for col in group_cols:
    df[col] = df[col].astype('category')

df.groupby(group_cols, as_index=False, observed=True).sum()