Reversing 'one-hot' encoding in Pandas

Question:

I want to go from this data frame which is basically one hot encoded.

 In [2]: pd.DataFrame({"monkey":[0,1,0],"rabbit":[1,0,0],"fox":[0,0,1]})

    Out[2]:
       fox  monkey  rabbit
    0    0       0       1
    1    0       1       0
    2    1       0       0
    3    0       0       0
    4    0       0       0

To this one which is ‘reverse’ one-hot encoded.

    In [3]: pd.DataFrame({"animal":["monkey","rabbit","fox"]})
    Out[3]:
       animal
    0  monkey
    1  rabbit
    2     fox

I imagine there’s some sort of clever use of apply or zip to do thins but I’m not sure how… Can anyone help?

I’ve not had much success using indexing etc to try to solve this problem.

Asked By: Peadar Coyle

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Answers:

UPDATE: i think ayhan is right and it should be:

df.idxmax(axis=1)

This chooses a column label for each row, where the label has the maximum value. Since the data are 1s and 0s, it will pick the positions of 1s.

Demo:

In [40]: s = pd.Series(['dog', 'cat', 'dog', 'bird', 'fox', 'dog'])

In [41]: s
Out[41]:
0     dog
1     cat
2     dog
3    bird
4     fox
5     dog
dtype: object

In [42]: pd.get_dummies(s)
Out[42]:
   bird  cat  dog  fox
0   0.0  0.0  1.0  0.0
1   0.0  1.0  0.0  0.0
2   0.0  0.0  1.0  0.0
3   1.0  0.0  0.0  0.0
4   0.0  0.0  0.0  1.0
5   0.0  0.0  1.0  0.0

In [43]: pd.get_dummies(s).idxmax(1)
Out[43]:
0     dog
1     cat
2     dog
3    bird
4     fox
5     dog
dtype: object

OLD answer: (most probably, incorrect answer)

try this:

In [504]: df.idxmax().reset_index().rename(columns={'index':'animal', 0:'idx'})
Out[504]:
   animal  idx
0     fox    2
1  monkey    1
2  rabbit    0

data:

In [505]: df
Out[505]:
   fox  monkey  rabbit
0    0       0       1
1    0       1       0
2    1       0       0
3    0       0       0
4    0       0       0

I’d do:

cols = df.columns.to_series().values
pd.DataFrame(np.repeat(cols[None, :], len(df), 0)[df.astype(bool).values], df.index[df.any(1)])

enter image description here


Timing

MaxU’s method has edge for large dataframes

Small df 5 x 3

enter image description here

Large df 1000000 x 52

enter image description here

Answered By: piRSquared

I would use apply to decode the columns:

In [2]: animals = pd.DataFrame({"monkey":[0,1,0,0,0],"rabbit":[1,0,0,0,0],"fox":[0,0,1,0,0]})

In [3]: def get_animal(row):
   ...:     for c in animals.columns:
   ...:         if row[c]==1:
   ...:             return c

In [4]: animals.apply(get_animal, axis=1)
Out[4]: 
0    rabbit
1    monkey
2       fox
3      None
4      None
dtype: object
Answered By: PYOak

Try this:

df = pd.DataFrame({"monkey":[0,1,0,1,0],"rabbit":[1,0,0,0,0],"fox":[0,0,1,0,0], "cat":[0,0,0,0,1]})
df 

   cat  fox  monkey  rabbit
0    0    0       0       1
1    0    0       1       0
2    0    1       0       0
3    0    0       1       0
4    1    0       0       0

pd.DataFrame([x for x in np.where(df ==1, df.columns,'').flatten().tolist() if len(x) >0],columns= (["animal"]) )

   animal
0  rabbit
1  monkey
2     fox
3  monkey
4     cat
Answered By: Merlin

This works with both single and multiple labels.

We can use advanced indexing to tackle this problem. Here is the link.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({"monkey":[1,1,0,1,0],"rabbit":[1,1,1,1,0],
    "fox":[1,0,1,0,0], "cat":[0,0,0,0,1]})

df['tags']='' # to create an empty column

for col_name in df.columns:
    df.ix[df[col_name]==1,'tags']= df['tags']+' '+col_name

print df

And the result is:

   cat  fox  monkey  rabbit                tags
0    0    1       1       1   fox monkey rabbit
1    0    0       1       1       monkey rabbit
2    0    1       0       1          fox rabbit
3    0    0       1       1       monkey rabbit
4    1    0       0       0                 cat

Explanation:
We iterate over the columns on the dataframe.

df.ix[selection criteria, columns to write value] = value
df.ix[df[col_name]==1,'tags']= df['tags']+' '+col_name

The above line basically finds you all the places where df[col_name] == 1, selects column ‘tags’ and set it to the RHS value which is df[‘tags’]+’ ‘+ col_name

Note: .ix has been deprecated since Pandas v0.20. You should instead use .loc or .iloc, as appropriate.

Answered By: Sudharshann D

You could try using melt(). This method also works when you have multiple OHE labels for a row.

# Your OHE dataframe 
df = pd.DataFrame({"monkey":[0,1,0],"rabbit":[1,0,0],"fox":[0,0,1]})

mel = df.melt(var_name=['animal'], value_name='value') # Melting

mel[mel.value == 1].reset_index(drop=True) # this gives you the result 
Answered By: conflicted_user

It can be achieved with a simple apply on dataframe

# function to get column name with value one for each row in dataframe
def get_animal(row):
    return(row.index[row.apply(lambda x: x==1)][0])

# prepare a animal column
df['animal'] = df.apply(lambda row:get_animal(row), axis=1)
Answered By: Shakeeb Pasha

A way to deal with multiple labels without a for cycle. The result will be a list column. If you have the same number of labels in each row, you can add result_type='expand' to get several columns.

df.apply(lambda x: df.columns[x==1], axis=1)
Answered By: Denis Kazakov

As of pandas 1.5.0, reversing one-hot encoding is supported directly with pandas.from_dummies:

import pandas as pd  # v 1.5.0

onehot_df = pd.DataFrame({
    "monkey": [0, 1, 0],
    "rabbit": [1, 0, 0],
    "fox": [0, 0, 1]
})

new_df = pd.from_dummies(onehot_df)

#          
# 0  rabbit
# 1  monkey
# 2     fox

The resulting DataFrame appears to have no column header (it’s an empty string). To fix this, rename the column after from_dummies

new_df = pd.from_dummies(onehot_df).rename(columns={'': 'animal'})

#    animal
# 0  rabbit
# 1  monkey
# 2     fox

Alternatively, if the DataFrame is already defined with separated columns (like one-hot encoding produced by pandas.get_dummies), e.g.

import pandas as pd  # v 1.5.0

onehot_df = pd.DataFrame({
    'animal_fox': [0, 0, 1],
    'animal_monkey': [0, 1, 0],
    'animal_rabbit': [1, 0, 0]
})

#    animal_fox  animal_monkey  animal_rabbit
# 0           0              0              1
# 1           0              1              0
# 2           1              0              0

Simply specify the sep to reverse the encoding

new_df = pd.from_dummies(onehot_df, sep='_')

#    animal
# 0  rabbit
# 1  monkey
# 2     fox

The string before the first instance of the sep delimiter will become the column header in the new DataFrame (in this case "animal") and the rest of the string will become the column values (in this case "rabbit", "monkey", "fox").

Answered By: Henry Ecker
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