Remove NaN/NULL columns in a Pandas dataframe?

Question

I have a dataFrame in pandas and several of the columns have all null values. Is there a built in function which will let me remove those columns?

Answer 1

Here is a simple function which you can use directly by passing dataframe and threshold

df
'''
     pets   location     owner     id
0     cat  San_Diego     Champ  123.0
1     dog        NaN       Ron    NaN
2     cat        NaN     Brick    NaN
3  monkey        NaN     Champ    NaN
4  monkey        NaN  Veronica    NaN
5     dog        NaN      John    NaN
'''

---

def rmissingvaluecol(dff,threshold):
    l = []
    l = list(dff.drop(dff.loc[:,list((100*(dff.isnull().sum()/len(dff.index))>=threshold))].columns, 1).columns.values)
    print("# Columns having more than %s percent missing values:"%threshold,(dff.shape[1] - len(l)))
    print("Columns:\n",list(set(list((dff.columns.values))) - set(l)))
    return l


rmissingvaluecol(df,1) #Here threshold is 1% which means we are going to drop columns having more than 1% of missing values

#output
'''
# Columns having more than 1 percent missing values: 2
Columns:
 ['id', 'location']
'''

Now create new dataframe excluding these columns

l = rmissingvaluecol(df,1)
df1 = df[l]

PS: You can change threshold as per your requirement

Bonus step

You can find the percentage of missing values for each column (optional)

def missing(dff):
    print (round((dff.isnull().sum() * 100/ len(dff)),2).sort_values(ascending=False))

missing(df)

#output
'''
id          83.33
location    83.33
owner        0.00
pets         0.00
dtype: float64
'''