Creating an empty MultiIndex

Question

I would like to create an empty DataFrame with a MultiIndex before assigning rows to it. I already found that empty DataFrames

Answer 1

The solution is to leave out the labels. This works fine for me:

>>> my_index = pd.MultiIndex(levels=[[],[],[]],
                             labels=[[],[],[]],
                             names=[u'one', u'two', u'three'])
>>> my_index
MultiIndex(levels=[[], [], []],
           labels=[[], [], []],
           names=[u'one', u'two', u'three'])
>>> my_columns = [u'alpha', u'beta']
>>> df = pd.DataFrame(index=my_index, columns=my_columns)
>>> df
Empty DataFrame
Columns: [alpha, beta]
Index: []
>>> df.loc[('apple','banana','cherry'),:] = [0.1, 0.2]
>>> df
                    alpha beta
one   two    three            
apple banana cherry   0.1  0.2

Hope that helps!