Pandas - unstack column values into new columns

Question

I have a large dataframe and I am storing a lot of redundant values that are making it hard to handle my data. I have a dataframe of the form:

import pandas          


        

Answer 1

If you group your meta columns into a list then you can do this:

metas = ['meta1', 'meta2']

new_df = df.set_index(['name'] + metas).unstack('name')
print new_df

            data    
name          n1  n2
meta1 meta2         
a     g       y1  y2
b     h       y3  y4

Which gets you most of the way there. Additional tailoring can get you the rest of the way.

print new_df.data.rename_axis([None], axis=1).reset_index()

  meta1 meta2  n1  n2
0     a     g  y1  y2
1     b     h  y3  y4