Get names of column with max value (n_largest) for every row on pandas dataframe-CodePudding

I want to output 3 column names that have the 3 maximum values for each pandas row.

For example:

import pandas as pd

# read data
data = pd.DataFrame({
    "carbohydrates": [42, 38, 39],
    "Proteins": [50, 40, 45],
    "Vegetables": [34, 98, 67],
    "Fats and Oil": [76, 45, 90],
    "Vitamins": [67, 23, 98],
    "Minerals": [65, 23, 99]

df

|    |   carbohydrates |   Proteins |   Vegetables |   Fats and Oil |   Vitamins |   Minerals |
|---:|----------------:|-----------:|-------------:|---------------:|-----------:|-----------:|
|  0 |              42 |         50 |           34 |             76 |         67 |         65 |
|  1 |              38 |         40 |           98 |             45 |         23 |         23 |
|  2 |              39 |         45 |           67 |             90 |         98 |         99 |


But I want to return:

[["Fats and Oil", "Vitamin", "Minerals"], 
["Vegetables", "Fats and Oil", "Proteins"], 
["Minerals", "Vitamins", "Fats and Oil"]]

Please pardon my text formatting. It is not clear to me how oto make it nice.

CodePudding user response：

Here is one way to get the (N) largest of each row :

N = 3

list_out = [data.iloc[row].nlargest(N).to_frame().T.columns.tolist() for row in range(0,len(data))]

# Output :

print(list_out)

[['Fats and Oil', 'Vitamins', 'Minerals'],
 ['Vegetables', 'Fats and Oil', 'Proteins'],
 ['Minerals', 'Vitamins', 'Fats and Oil']]