How can I obtain the element-wise logical NOT of a pandas Series?

I just give it a shot:

In [9]: s = Series([True, True, True, False])

In [10]: s
Out[10]: 
0     True
1     True
2     True
3    False

In [11]: -s
Out[11]: 
0    False
1    False
2    False
3     True

You can also use numpy.invert:

In [1]: import numpy as np

In [2]: import pandas as pd

In [3]: s = pd.Series([True, True, False, True])

In [4]: np.invert(s)
Out[4]: 
0    False
1    False
2     True
3    False

EDIT: The difference in performance appears on Ubuntu 12.04, Python 2.7, NumPy 1.7.0 – doesn’t seem to exist using NumPy 1.6.2 though:

In [5]: %timeit (-s)
10000 loops, best of 3: 26.8 us per loop

In [6]: %timeit np.invert(s)
100000 loops, best of 3: 7.85 us per loop

In [7]: %timeit ~s
10000 loops, best of 3: 27.3 us per loop

@unutbu’s answer is spot on, just wanted to add a warning that your mask needs to be dtype bool, not ‘object’. Ie your mask can’t have ever had any nan’s. See here – even if your mask is nan-free now, it will remain ‘object’ type.

The inverse of an ‘object’ series won’t throw an error, instead you’ll get a garbage mask of ints that won’t work as you expect.

In[1]: df = pd.DataFrame({'A':[True, False, np.nan], 'B':[True, False, True]})
In[2]: df.dropna(inplace=True)
In[3]: df['A']
Out[3]:
0    True
1   False
Name: A, dtype object
In[4]: ~df['A']
Out[4]:
0   -2
0   -1
Name: A, dtype object

After speaking with colleagues about this one I have an explanation: It looks like pandas is reverting to the bitwise operator:

In [1]: ~True
Out[1]: -2

As @geher says, you can convert it to bool with astype before you inverse with ~

~df['A'].astype(bool)
0    False
1     True
Name: A, dtype: bool
(~df['A']).astype(bool)
0    True
1    True
Name: A, dtype: bool

NumPy is slower because it casts the input to boolean values (so None and 0 becomes False and everything else becomes True).

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
s = pd.Series([True, None, False, True])
np.logical_not(s)

gives you

0    False
1     True
2     True
3    False
dtype: object

whereas ~s would crash. In most cases tilde would be a safer choice than NumPy.

Pandas 0.25, NumPy 1.17

In support to the excellent answers here, and for future convenience, there may be a case where you want to flip the truth values in the columns and have other values remain the same (nan values for instance)

In[1]: series = pd.Series([True, np.nan, False, np.nan])
In[2]: series = series[series.notna()] #remove nan values
 
In[3]: series # without nan                                            
Out[3]: 
0     True
2    False
dtype: object

# Out[4] expected to be inverse of Out[3], pandas applies bitwise complement 
# operator instead as in `lambda x : (-1*x)-1`

In[4]: ~series
Out[4]: 
0    -2
2    -1
dtype: object

as a simple non-vectorized solution you can just, 1. check types2. inverse bools

In[1]: series = pd.Series([True, np.nan, False, np.nan])

In[2]: series = series.apply(lambda x : not x if x is bool else x)
Out[2]: 
Out[2]: 
0     True
1      NaN
2    False
3      NaN
dtype: object