Is there a faster way through list comprehension to iterate through two dataframes? - pandas

Question

I have two dataframes, one contains screen names/display names and another contains individuals, and I am trying to create a third dataframe that contains all the data from each dataframe in a new row for each time a last name appears in the screen name/display name. Functionally this will create a list of possible matching names. My current code, which works perfectly but very slowly, looks like this:
# Original Social Media Screen Names
# cols = 'userid','screen_name','real_name'
usernames = pd.read_csv('social_media_accounts.csv')
# List Of Individuals To Match To Accounts
# cols = 'first_name','last_name'
individuals = pd.read_csv('individuals_list.csv')
userid, screen_name, real_name, last_name, first_name = [],[],[],[],[]
for index1, row1 in individuals.iterrows():
for index2, row2 in usernames.iterrows():
if (row2['Screen_Name'].lower().find(row1['Last_Name'].lower()) != -1) | (row2['Real_Name'].lower().find(row1['Last_Name'].lower()) != -1):
userid.append(row2['UserID'])
screen_name.append(row2['Screen_Name'])
real_name.append(row2['Real_Name'])
last_name.append(row1['Last_Name'])
first_name.append(row1['First_Name'])
cols = ['UserID', 'Screen_Name', 'Real_Name', 'Last_Name', 'First_Name']
index = range(0, len(userid))
match_list = pd.DataFrame(index=index, columns=cols)
match_list = match_list.fillna('')
match_list['UserID'] = userid
match_list['Screen_Name'] = screen_name
match_list['Real_Name'] = real_name
match_list['Last_Name'] = last_name
match_list['First_Name'] = first_name
Because I need the whole row from each column, the list comprehension methods I have tried do not seem to work.

Answer 1

The thing you want is to iterate through a dataframe faster. Doing that with a list comprehension is, taking data out of a pandas dataframe, handling it using operations in python, then putting it back in a pandas dataframe. The fastest way (currently, with small data) would be to handle it using pandas iteration methods.
The next thing you want to do is work with 2 dataframes. There is a tool in pandas called join.
result = pd.merge(usernames, individuals, on=['Screen_Name', 'Last_Name'])
After the merge you can do your filtering.
Here is the documentation: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/merging.html