Anti-Join Pandas

Question

I have two tables and I would like to append them so that only all the data in table A is retained and data from table B is only added if its key is unique (Key values are unique in table A and B however in some cases a Key will occur in both table A and B).

I think the way to do this will involve some sort of filtering join (anti-join) to get values in table B that do not occur in table A then append the two tables.

I am familiar with R and this is the code I would use to do this in R.

library("dplyr")

## Filtering join to remove values already in "TableA" from "TableB"
FilteredTableB <- anti_join(TableB,TableA, by = "Key")

## Append "FilteredTableB" to "TableA"
CombinedTable <- bind_rows(TableA,FilteredTableB)

How would I achieve this in python?

Answer 1

Consider the following dataframes

TableA = pd.DataFrame(np.random.rand(4, 3),
                      pd.Index(list('abcd'), name='Key'),
                      ['A', 'B', 'C']).reset_index()
TableB = pd.DataFrame(np.random.rand(4, 3),
                      pd.Index(list('aecf'), name='Key'),
                      ['A', 'B', 'C']).reset_index()

---

TableA

---

TableB

This is one way to do what you want

Method 1

# Identify what values are in TableB and not in TableA
key_diff = set(TableB.Key).difference(TableA.Key)
where_diff = TableB.Key.isin(key_diff)

# Slice TableB accordingly and append to TableA
TableA.append(TableB[where_diff], ignore_index=True)

Method 2

rows = []
for i, row in TableB.iterrows():
    if row.Key not in TableA.Key.values:
        rows.append(row)

pd.concat([TableA.T] + rows, axis=1).T

---

Timing

4 rows with 2 overlap

Method 1 is much quicker

10,000 rows 5,000 overlap

loops are bad

Answer 2

I had the same problem. This answer using how='outer' and indicator=True of merge inspired me to come up with this solution:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

TableA = pd.DataFrame(np.random.rand(4, 3),
                      pd.Index(list('abcd'), name='Key'),
                      ['A', 'B', 'C']).reset_index()
TableB = pd.DataFrame(np.random.rand(4, 3),
                      pd.Index(list('aecf'), name='Key'),
                      ['A', 'B', 'C']).reset_index()

print('TableA', TableA, sep='\n')
print('TableB', TableB, sep='\n')

TableB_only = pd.merge(
    TableA, TableB,
    how='outer', on='Key', indicator=True, suffixes=('_foo','')).query(
        '_merge == "right_only"')

print('TableB_only', TableB_only, sep='\n')

Table_concatenated = pd.concat((TableA, TableB_only), join='inner')

print('Table_concatenated', Table_concatenated, sep='\n')

Which prints this output:

TableA
  Key         A         B         C
0   a  0.035548  0.344711  0.860918
1   b  0.640194  0.212250  0.277359
2   c  0.592234  0.113492  0.037444
3   d  0.112271  0.205245  0.227157
TableB
  Key         A         B         C
0   a  0.754538  0.692902  0.537704
1   e  0.499092  0.864145  0.004559
2   c  0.082087  0.682573  0.421654
3   f  0.768914  0.281617  0.924693
TableB_only
  Key  A_foo  B_foo  C_foo         A         B         C      _merge
4   e    NaN    NaN    NaN  0.499092  0.864145  0.004559  right_only
5   f    NaN    NaN    NaN  0.768914  0.281617  0.924693  right_only
Table_concatenated
  Key         A         B         C
0   a  0.035548  0.344711  0.860918
1   b  0.640194  0.212250  0.277359
2   c  0.592234  0.113492  0.037444
3   d  0.112271  0.205245  0.227157
4   e  0.499092  0.864145  0.004559
5   f  0.768914  0.281617  0.924693

Answer 3

Easiest answer imaginable:

tableB = pd.concat([tableB, pd.Series(1)], axis=1)
mergedTable = tableA.merge(tableB, how="left" on="key")

answer = mergedTable[mergedTable.iloc[:,-1].isnull()][tableA.columns.tolist()]

Should be the fastest proposed as well.

Answer 4

You'll have both tables TableA and TableB such that both DataFrame objects have columns with unique values in their respective tables, but some columns may have values that occur simultaneously (have the same values for a row) in both tables.

Then, we want to merge the rows in TableA with the rows in TableB that don't match any in TableA for a 'Key' column. The concept is to picture it as comparing two series of variable length, and combining the rows in one series sA with the other sB if sB's values don't match sA's. The following code solves this exercise:

import pandas as pd

TableA = pd.DataFrame([[2, 3, 4], [5, 6, 7], [8, 9, 10]])
TableB = pd.DataFrame([[1, 3, 4], [5, 7, 8], [9, 10, 0]])

removeTheseIndexes = []
keyColumnA = TableA.iloc[:,1] # your 'Key' column here
keyColumnB = TableB.iloc[:,1] # same

for i in range(0, len(keyColumnA)):
    firstValue = keyColumnA[i]
    for j in range(0, len(keyColumnB)):
        copycat = keyColumnB[j]
        if firstValue == copycat:
            removeTheseIndexes.append(j)

TableB.drop(removeTheseIndexes, inplace = True)
TableA = TableA.append(TableB)
TableA = TableA.reset_index(drop=True)

Note this affects TableB's data as well. You can use inplace=False and re-assign it to a newTable, then TableA.append(newTable) alternatively.

# Table A
   0  1   2
0  2  3   4
1  5  6   7
2  8  9  10

# Table B
   0   1  2
0  1   3  4
1  5   7  8
2  9  10  0

# Set 'Key' column = 1
# Run the script after the loop

# Table A
   0   1   2
0  2   3   4
1  5   6   7
2  8   9  10
3  5   7   8
4  9  10   0

# Table B
   0   1  2
1  5   7  8
2  9  10  0