Creating an element-wise minimum Series from two other Series in Python Pandas

Question

I am having trouble finding a way to do an efficient element-wise minimum of two Series objects in pandas. For example I can add two Series easily enough:

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Answer 1

You can use the combine method of a DataFrame with np.minimum as the argument. np.minimum has special handling for NaN and complex NaNs.

Indeed, the pandas docs for combine uses the np.minimum function to illustrate a "true element-wise combine":

>>> df1 = pd.DataFrame({'A': [5, 0], 'B': [2, 4]})
>>> df2 = pd.DataFrame({'A': [1, 1], 'B': [3, 3]})
>>> df1.combine(df2, np.minimum)
   A  B
0  1  2
1  0  3