What's a simple and efficient way to shuffle a dataframe in pandas, by rows or by columns? I.e. how to write a function shuffle(df, n, axis=0) that takes a dataframe, a number of shuffles n, and an axis (axis=0 is rows, axis=1 is columns) and returns a copy of the dataframe that has been shuffled n times.
Edit: key is to do this without destroying the row/column labels of the dataframe. If you just shuffle df.index that loses all that information. I want the resulting df to be the same as the original except with the order of rows or order of columns different.
Edit2: My question was unclear. When I say shuffle the rows, I mean shuffle each row independently. So if you have two columns a and b, I want each row shuffled on its own, so that you don't have the same associations between a and b as you do if you just re-order each row as a whole. Something like:
for 1...n:
for each col in df: shuffle column
return new_df
But hopefully more efficient than naive looping. This does not work for me:
def shuffle(df, n, axis=0):
shuffled_df = df.copy()
for k in range(n):
shuffled_df.apply(np.random.shuffle(shuffled_df.values),axis=axis)
return shuffled_df
df = pandas.DataFrame({'A':range(10), 'B':range(10)})
shuffle(df, 5)
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