Even though Pandas is not really made for this kind of usage, with function aggregation and boolean indexing it allows for an elegant-ish solution for your problem. Alternatively, constraint-based programing might be an option (see python-constraint on pypi).
- Define the constraints as functions.
x_constraints = [lambda x: 0 <= x < 5,
lambda x: 5 <= x < 10,
lambda x: 10<= x < 15,
lambda x: x >= 15
]
y_constraints = [lambda y: 0 <= y < 20,
lambda y: 20 <= y < 50,
lambda y: y >= 50]
x = 15
y = 30
- Now we want to make two dataframes: One that only holds the x-values,
and another that only holds the y-values where number of columns = number of x-constraints and number of rows = number of y-constraints.
import pandas as pd
def make_dataframe(value):
return pd.DataFrame(data=value,
index=range(len(y_constraints)),
columns=range(len(x_constraints)))
x_df = make_dataframe(x)
y_df = make_dataframe(y)
The dataframes look like this:
>>> x_df
0 1 2 3
0 15 15 15 15
1 15 15 15 15
2 15 15 15 15
>>> y_df
0 1 2 3
0 30 30 30 30
1 30 30 30 30
2 30 30 30 30
- Next, we need the dataframe
label_df that holds the possible outcomes. The shape must match the dimension of x_df and y_df above. (What's cool about this is that you can store the data in a
CSV-file and directly read it into a dataframe with pd.read_csv if you wish.)
label_df = pd.DataFrame([[f"{w}{i+1}" for i in range(len(x_constraints))] for w in "something another again".split()])
>>> label_df
0 1 2 3
0 something1 something2 something3 something4
1 another1 another2 another3 another4
2 again1 again2 again3 again4
- Next, we want to apply the
x_constraints to the columns of x_df, and the y_constraints to the rows of y_df. .aggregate takes
a dictionary that maps column or row names to functions {colname: func},
which we construct inline using dict(zip(...)). axis=1 means "apply the functions row-wise".
x_mask = x_df.aggregate(dict(zip(x_df.columns, x_constraints)))
y_mask = y_df.aggregate(dict(zip(y_df.columns, y_constraints)), axis=1)
The result are two dataframes holding boolean values, and ideally,
there should be exactly one column in x_mask and one row in y_mask that's all True, e.g.
>>> x_mask
0 1 2 3
0 False False False True
1 False False False True
2 False False False True
>>> y_mask
0 1 2 3
0 False False False False
1 True True True True
2 False False False False
If we combine them with bit-wise and &, we get a boolean mask with exactly
one True value.
>>> m = x_mask & y_mask
>>> m
0 1 2 3
0 False False False False
1 False False False True
2 False False False False
- Use
m to select the target value from label_df. The result df is all NaN except one value, which we extract with df.stack().iloc[0]:
>>> df = label_df[m]
0 1 2 3
0 NaN NaN NaN NaN
1 NaN NaN NaN another4
2 NaN NaN NaN NaN
>>> df.stack().iloc[0]
'another4'
And that's it! It should be very easy to maintain, by just changing the list of constraints and adapting the possible outcomes in label_df.