ListenData: How to drop one or multiple columns from Pandas Dataframe

In this tutorial, we will cover how to drop or remove one or multiple columns from pandas dataframe.

What is pandas in Python?

pandas is a python package for data manipulation. It has several functions for the following data tasks:

1. Drop or Keep rows and columns
2. Aggregate data by one or more columns
3. Sort or reorder data
4. Merge or append multiple dataframes
5. String Functions to handle text data
6. DateTime Functions to handle date or time format columns

Import or Load Pandas library

To make use of any python library, we first need to load them up by using import command.

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

Let's create a fake dataframe for illustration

The code below creates 4 columns named A through D.

df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(6, 4), columns=list('ABCD'))

          A         B         C         D
0 -1.236438 -1.656038  1.655995 -1.413243
1  0.507747  0.710933 -1.335381  0.832619
2  0.280036 -0.411327  0.098119  0.768447
3  0.858730 -0.093217  1.077528  0.196891
4 -0.905991  0.302687  0.125881 -0.665159
5 -2.012745 -0.692847 -1.463154 -0.707779

Drop a column in python

In pandas, drop( ) function is used to remove column(s).axis=1 tells Python that you want to apply function on columns instead of rows.

df.drop(['A'], axis=1)

Column A has been removed. See the output shown below.

          B         C         D
0 -1.656038  1.655995 -1.413243
1  0.710933 -1.335381  0.832619
2 -0.411327  0.098119  0.768447
3 -0.093217  1.077528  0.196891
4  0.302687  0.125881 -0.665159
5 -0.692847 -1.463154 -0.707779

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