Sum pandas columns, excluding some rows based on other column values - pandas

Question

I'm attempting to determine the number of widget failures from a test population.
Each widget can fail in 0, 1, or multiple ways. I'd like to calculate the number of failures of for each failure method, but once a widget is known to have failed, it should be excluded from future sums. In other words, the failure modes are known and ordered. If a widget fails via mode 1 and mode 3, I don't care about mode 3: I just want to count mode 1.
I have a dataframe with one row per item, and one column per failure mode. If the widget fails in that mode, the column value is 1, else it is 0.
d = {"item_1":
{"failure_1":0, "failure_2":0},
"item_2":
{"failure_1":1, "failure_2":0},
"item_3":
{"failure_1":0, "failure_2":1},
"item_4":
{"failure_1":1, "failure_2":1}}
df = pd.DataFrame(d).T
display(df)
Output:
failure_1 failure_2
item_1 0 0
item_2 1 0
item_3 0 1
item_4 1 1
If I just want to sum the columns, that's easy: df.sum(). And if I want to calculate percentage failures, easy too: df.sum()/len(df). But this counts widgets that fail in multiple ways, multiple times. For the problem stated, the best I can come up with is this:
# create empty df to store results
df2 = pd.DataFrame(columns=["total_failures"])
for col in df.columns:
# create a row, named after the column, and assign it the value of the sum
df2.loc[col] = df[col].sum()
# drop rows in the df column that are equal to 1
df = df.loc[df[col] != 1]
display(df2)
Output:
total_failures
failure_1 2
failure_2 1
This requires creating another dataframe (that's fine), but also requires iterating over the existing dataframe columns and deleting it a couple of rows at a time. If the dataframe takes a while to generate, or is needed for future calculations, this is not workable. I can deal with iterating over the columns.
Is there a way to do this without deleting the original df, or making a temporary copy? (Not workable with large data sets.)

Answer 1

You can do a cumsum on axis=1 and wherever the value is greater than 1 , mask it as 0 and then take sum:
out = df.mask(df.cumsum(axis=1).gt(1), 0).sum().to_frame('total_failures')
print(out)
total_failures
failure_1 2
failure_2 1
This way the original df is retained too.