Question:

I have a pandas dataframe df which appears as following:

Month Day mnthShape 1 1 1.016754224 1 1 1.099451003 1 1 0.963911929 1 2 1.016754224 1 1 1.099451003 1 2 0.963911929 1 3 1.016754224 1 3 1.099451003 1 3 1.783775568

I want to get the following from df:

Month Day mnthShape 1 1 1.016754224 1 2 1.016754224 1 3 1.099451003

where the mnthShape values are selected at random from the index. i.e. if the query is df.loc[(1, 1)] it should look for all values for (1, 1) and select randomly from it a value to be displayed above.

Use groupby with apply to select a row at random per group.

np.random.seed(0) df.groupby(['Month', 'Day'])['mnthShape'].apply(np.random.choice).reset_index() Month Day mnthShape 0 1 1 1.016754 1 1 2 0.963912 2 1 3 1.099451

If you want to know what index the sampled rows come from, use pd.Series.sample with n=1:

np.random.seed(0) (df.groupby(['Month', 'Day'])['mnthShape'] .apply(pd.Series.sample, n=1) .reset_index(level=[0, 1])) Month Day mnthShape 2 1 1 0.963912 3 1 2 1.016754 6 1 3 1.016754

One way is to Series.sample() a random row from each group:

pd.np.random.seed(1) res = df.groupby(['Month', 'Day'])['mnthShape'].apply(lambda x: x.sample()).reset_index(level=[0, 1]) res Month Day mnthShape 0 1 1 1.099451 1 1 2 1.016754 2 1 3 1.016754