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

Using pd.MultiIndex.from_arrays allows for a slightly more concise solution when defining the index explicitly:

import pandas as pd
ind = pd.MultiIndex.from_arrays([[]] * 3, names=(u'one', u'two', u'three'))
df = pd.DataFrame(columns=['alpha', 'beta'], index=ind)
df.loc[('apple','banana','cherry'), :] = [4, 3]

                     alpha  beta
one   two    three              
apple banana cherry      4     3