python - Computing np.diff in Pandas after using groupby leads to unexpected result

Question

I've got a dataframe, and I'm trying to append a column of sequential differences to it. I have found a method that I like a lot (and generalizes well for my use case). But I noticed one weird thing along the way. Can you help me make sense of it?

Here is some data that has the right structure (code modeled on an answer here):

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import random
from itertools import product

random.seed(1)       # so you can play along at home
np.random.seed(2)    # ditto

# make a list of dates for a few periods
dates = pd.date_range(start='2013-10-01', periods=4).to_native_types()
# make a list of tickers
tickers = ['ticker_%d' % i for i in range(3)]
# make a list of all the possible (date, ticker) tuples
pairs = list(product(dates, tickers))
# put them in a random order
random.shuffle(pairs)
# exclude a few possible pairs
pairs = pairs[:-3]
# make some data for all of our selected (date, ticker) tuples
values = np.random.rand(len(pairs))

mydates, mytickers = zip(*pairs)
data = pd.DataFrame({'date': mydates, 'ticker': mytickers, 'value':values})

Ok, great. This gives me a frame like so:

     date        ticker      value
0    2013-10-03  ticker_2    0.435995
1    2013-10-04  ticker_2    0.025926
2    2013-10-02  ticker_1    0.549662
3    2013-10-01  ticker_0    0.435322
4    2013-10-02  ticker_2    0.420368
5    2013-10-03  ticker_0    0.330335
6    2013-10-04  ticker_1    0.204649
7    2013-10-02  ticker_0    0.619271
8    2013-10-01  ticker_2    0.299655

My goal is to add a new column to this dataframe that will contain sequential changes. The data needs to be in order to do this, but the ordering and the differencing needs to be done "ticker-wise" so that gaps in another ticker don't cause NA's for a given ticker. I want to do this without perturbing the dataframe in any other way (i.e. I do not want the resulting DataFrame to be reordered based on what was necessary to do the differencing). The following code works:

data1 = data.copy() #let's leave the original data alone for later experiments
data1.sort(['ticker', 'date'], inplace=True)
data1['diffs'] = data1.groupby(['ticker'])['value'].transform(lambda x: x.diff())
data1.sort_index(inplace=True)
data1

and returns:

     date        ticker      value       diffs
0    2013-10-03  ticker_2    0.435995    0.015627
1    2013-10-04  ticker_2    0.025926   -0.410069
2    2013-10-02  ticker_1    0.549662    NaN
3    2013-10-01  ticker_0    0.435322    NaN
4    2013-10-02  ticker_2    0.420368    0.120713
5    2013-10-03  ticker_0    0.330335   -0.288936
6    2013-10-04  ticker_1    0.204649   -0.345014
7    2013-10-02  ticker_0    0.619271    0.183949
8    2013-10-01  ticker_2    0.299655    NaN

So far, so good. If I replace the middle line above with the more concise code shown here, everything still works:

data2 = data.copy()
data2.sort(['ticker', 'date'], inplace=True)
data2['diffs'] = data2.groupby('ticker')['value'].diff()
data2.sort_index(inplace=True)
data2

A quick check shows that, in fact, data1 is equal to data2. However, if I do this:

data3 = data.copy()
data3.sort(['ticker', 'date'], inplace=True)
data3['diffs'] = data3.groupby('ticker')['value'].transform(np.diff)
data3.sort_index(inplace=True)
data3

I get a strange result:

     date        ticker     value       diffs
0    2013-10-03  ticker_2    0.435995    0
1    2013-10-04  ticker_2    0.025926   NaN
2    2013-10-02  ticker_1    0.549662   NaN
3    2013-10-01  ticker_0    0.435322   NaN
4    2013-10-02  ticker_2    0.420368   NaN
5    2013-10-03  ticker_0    0.330335    0
6    2013-10-04  ticker_1    0.204649   NaN
7    2013-10-02  ticker_0    0.619271   NaN
8    2013-10-01  ticker_2    0.299655    0

What's going on here? When you call the .diff method on a Pandas object, is it not just calling np.diff? I know there's a diff method on the DataFrame class, but I couldn't figure out how to pass that to transform without the lambda function syntax I used to make data1 work. Am I missing something? Why is the diffs column in data3 screwy? How can I have call the Pandas diff method within transform without needing to write a lambda to do it?

Answer 1

Nice easy to reproduce example!! more questions should be like this!

Just pass a lambda to transform (this is tantamount to passing afuncton object, e.g. np.diff (or Series.diff) directly. So this equivalent to data1/data2

In [32]: data3['diffs'] = data3.groupby('ticker')['value'].transform(Series.diff)

In [34]: data3.sort_index(inplace=True)

In [25]: data3
Out[25]: 
         date    ticker     value     diffs
0  2013-10-03  ticker_2  0.435995  0.015627
1  2013-10-04  ticker_2  0.025926 -0.410069
2  2013-10-02  ticker_1  0.549662       NaN
3  2013-10-01  ticker_0  0.435322       NaN
4  2013-10-02  ticker_2  0.420368  0.120713
5  2013-10-03  ticker_0  0.330335 -0.288936
6  2013-10-04  ticker_1  0.204649 -0.345014
7  2013-10-02  ticker_0  0.619271  0.183949
8  2013-10-01  ticker_2  0.299655       NaN

[9 rows x 4 columns]

I believe that np.diff doesn't follow numpy's own unfunc guidelines to process array inputs (whereby it tries various methods to coerce input and send output, e.g. __array__ on input __array_wrap__ on output). I am not really sure why, see a bit more info here. So bottom line is that np.diff is not dealing with the index properly and doing its own calculation (which in this case is wrong).

Pandas has a lot of methods where they don't just call the numpy function, mainly because they handle different dtypes, handle nans, and in this case, handle 'special' diffs. e.g. you can pass a time frequency to a datelike-index where it calculates how many n to actually diff.