Shuffling/Permutating a DataFrame in pandas

Learn, how to shuffle/Permutate dataframe in Python pandas? By Pranit Sharma Last updated : October 06, 2023

Pandas is a special tool that allows us to perform complex manipulations of data effectively and efficiently. Inside pandas, we mostly deal with a dataset in the form of DataFrame. DataFrames are 2-dimensional data structures in pandas. DataFrames consist of rows, columns, and data.

Problem statement

Suppose that we are given a pandas DataFrame and we need to shuffle this dataframe either by rows or by columns.

Shuffling/Permutating a pandas dataframe

For this purpose, we will use numpy random.permutation() which randomly permutes a sequence, or return a permuted range.

We will permute this dataframe row-wise and pass the dataframe indices as an argument in the permutation method.

Let us understand with the help of an example,

Python program to shuffle/Permutate dataframe in pandas

# Importing pandas package
import pandas as pd

# Import numpy
import numpy as np

# Creating a DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame({'A':range(10), 'B':range(10)})

# Display DataFrame
print("Original DataFrame:\n",df,"\n")

# Shuffling dataframe
res = df.reindex(np.random.permutation(df.index))

# Display result
print("Result:\n",res)