Pandas custom file format - pandas

Question

I have a huge Pandas DataFrame that I need to write away to a format that RankLib can understand. Example with a target, a query ID and 3 features is this:
5 qid:4 1:12 2:0.6 3:13
1 qid:4 1:8 2:0.4 3:11
I have written my own function that iterates over the rows and writes them away like this:
data_file = open(filename, 'w')
for index, row in data.iterrows():
line = str(row['score'])
line += ' qid:'+str(row['srch_id'])
counter = 0
for feature in feature_columns:
counter += 1
line += ' '+str(counter)+':'+str(row[feature])
data_file.write(line+'\n')
data_file.close()
Since I have about 200 features and 5m rows this is obviously very slow. Is there a better approach using the I/O of Pandas itself?

Answer 1

you can do it this way:
Data:
In [155]: df
Out[155]:
f1 f2 f3 score srch_id
0 12 0.6 13 5 4
1 8 0.4 11 1 4
2 11 0.7 14 2 10
In [156]: df.dtypes
Out[156]:
f1 int64
f2 float64
f3 int64
score object
srch_id int64
dtype: object
Solution:
feature_columns = ['f1','f2','f3']
cols2id = {col:str(i+1) for i,col in enumerate(feature_columns)}
def f(x):
if x.name in feature_columns:
return cols2id[x.name] + ':' + x.astype(str)
elif x.name == 'srch_id':
return 'quid:' + x.astype(str)
else:
return x
(df.apply(lambda x: f(x))[['score','srch_id'] + feature_columns]
.to_csv('d:/temp/out.csv', sep=' ', index=False, header=None)
)
out.csv:
5 quid:4 1:12 2:0.6 3:13
1 quid:4 1:8 2:0.4 3:11
2 quid:10 1:11 2:0.7 3:14
cols2id helper dict:
In [158]: cols2id
Out[158]: {'f1': '1', 'f2': '2', 'f3': '3'}