Pandas run function only on subset of whole Dataframe - pandas

Question

Lets say i have Dataframe, which has 200 values, prices for products. I want to run some operation on this dataframe, like calculate average price for last 10 prices.
The way i understand it, right now pandas will go through every single row and calculate average for each row. Ie first 9 rows will be Nan, then from 10-200, it would calculate average for each row.
My issue is that i need to do a lot of these calculations and performance is an issue. For that reason, i would want to run the average only on say on last 10 values (dont need more) from all values, while i want to keep those values in the dataframe. Ie i dont want to get rid of those values or create new Dataframe.
I just essentially want to do calculation on less data, so it is faster.
Is something like that possible? Hopefully the question is clear.

Answer 1

Building off Chicodelarose's answer, you can achieve this in a more "pandas-like" syntax.
Defining your df as follows, we get 200 prices up to within [0, 1000).
df = pd.DataFrame((np.random.rand(200) * 1000.).round(decimals=2), columns=["price"])
The bit you're looking for, though, would the following:
def add10(n: float) -> float:
"""An exceptionally simple function to demonstrate you can set
values, too.
"""
return n + 10
df["price"].iloc[-12:] = df["price"].iloc[-12:].apply(add10)
Of course, you can also use these selections to return something else without setting values, too.
>>> df["price"].iloc[-12:].mean().round(decimals=2)
309.63 # this will, of course, be different as we're using random numbers
The primary justification for this approach lies in the use of pandas tooling. Say you want to operate over a subset of your data with multiple columns, you simply need to adjust your .apply(...) to contain an axis parameter, as follows: .apply(fn, axis=1).
This becomes much more readable the longer you spend in pandas. 🙂

Answer 2

Given a dataframe like the following:
Price
0 197.45
1 59.30
2 131.63
3 127.22
4 35.22
.. ...
195 73.05
196 47.73
197 107.58
198 162.31
199 195.02
[200 rows x 1 columns]
Call the following to obtain the mean over the last n rows of the dataframe:
def mean_over_n_last_rows(df, n, colname):
return df.iloc[-n:][colname].mean().round(decimals=2)
print(mean_over_n_last_rows(df, 2, "Price"))
Output:
178.67