How to find the last row in a dataframe that contains a specific value in a specific column?

Question

I am looking for a Python function that will allow me to retrieve the information in the ‘date’ column for the last row in my dataframe for each person in my dataframe. This is because I need to know the last date that each person in the dataframe entered data.

I have tried split the dataframe by person, then use the tail() function to find the information for all columns in the last row, then grab the date, however this does not work for a dataframe of a large size containing many people.

   name   score    date
1  Mary   2        22-Feb-2022
2  Mary   1        16-Mar-2022
5  John   2        18-Dec-2022
6  Mary   3        01-Jan-2023

Asked By: Greg

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Source

Answer 1

A possible solution:

df.groupby('name')['date'].last()

Output:

name
John   2022-12-18
Mary   2023-01-01
Name: date, dtype: datetime64[ns]

If you want to add the last date to the dataframe:

df['last_date'] = df.groupby('name')['date'].transform('last')

Output:

   name  score       date  last_date
1  Mary      2 2022-02-22 2023-01-01
2  Mary      1 2022-03-16 2023-01-01
5  John      2 2022-12-18 2022-12-18
6  Mary      3 2023-01-01 2023-01-01

Answered By: PaulS

Answer 2

If you want the last iteration of each name, you can use drop_duplicates:

# Assume your dataframe is already sorted by date
>>> df.drop_duplicates('name', keep='last')

   name  score         date
5  John      2  18-Dec-2022
6  Mary      3  01-Jan-2023

Answered By: Corralien

How to find the last row in a dataframe that contains a specific value in a specific column?

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