Selection with .loc in python

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I saw this code in someone's iPython notebook, and I'm very confused as to how this code works. As far as I understood, pd.loc[] is used as a location based indexer where the format is:

df.loc[index,column_name]

However, in this case, the first index seems to be a series of boolean values. Could someone please explain to me how this selection works. I tried to read through the documentation but I couldn't figure out an explanation. Thanks!

iris_data.loc[iris_data['class'] == 'versicolor', 'class'] = 'Iris-versicolor'

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pandas dataframe ipython selection python
5 Answers

  1. Whenever slicing (a:n) can be used, it can be replaced by fancy indexing (e.g. [a,b,c,...,n]). Fancy indexing is nothing more than listing explicitly all the index values instead of specifying only the limits.

  2. Whenever fancy indexing can be used, it can be replaced by a list of Boolean values (a mask) the same size than the index. The value will be True for index values that would have been included in the fancy index, and False for the values that would have been excluded. It's another way of listing some index values, but which can be easily automated in NumPy and Pandas, e.g by a logical comparison (like in your case).

The second replacement possibility is the one used in your example. In:

iris_data.loc[iris_data['class'] == 'versicolor', 'class'] = 'Iris-versicolor'

the mask

iris_data['class'] == 'versicolor'

is a replacement for a long and silly fancy index which would be list of row numbers where class column (a Series) has the value versicolor.

Whether a Boolean mask appears within a .iloc or .loc (e.g. df.loc[mask]) indexer or directly as the index (e.g. df[mask]) depends on wether a slice is allowed as a direct index. Such cases are shown in the following indexer cheat-sheet:

Pandas indexers loc and iloc cheat-sheet
Pandas indexers loc and iloc cheat-sheet

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