How to Drop Rows with NaN Values in Pandas

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Often you may be interested in dropping rows that contain NaN values in a pandas DataFrame. Fortunately this is easy to do using the pandas dropna() function.

This tutorial shows several examples of how to use this function on the following pandas DataFrame:

import numpy as np
import scipy.stats as stats

#create DataFrame with some NaN values
df = pd.DataFrame({'rating': [np.nan, 85, np.nan, 88, 94, 90, 76, 75, 87, 86],
                   'points': [np.nan, 25, 14, 16, 27, 20, 12, 15, 14, 19],
                   'assists': [5, 7, 7, np.nan, 5, 7, 6, 9, 9, 5],
                   'rebounds': [11, 8, 10, 6, 6, 9, 6, 10, 10, 7]})

#view DataFrame
df


        rating	points	assists	rebounds
0	NaN	NaN	5.0	11
1	85.0	25.0	7.0	8
2	NaN	14.0	7.0	10
3	88.0	16.0	NaN	6
4	94.0	27.0	5.0	6
5	90.0	20.0	7.0	9
6	76.0	12.0	6.0	6
7	75.0	15.0	9.0	10
8	87.0	14.0	9.0	10
9	86.0	19.0	5.0	7

Example 1: Drop Rows with Any NaN Values

We can use the following syntax to drop all rows that have any NaN values:

df.dropna()

	rating	points	assists	rebounds
1	85.0	25.0	7.0	8
4	94.0	27.0	5.0	6
5	90.0	20.0	7.0	9
6	76.0	12.0	6.0	6
7	75.0	15.0	9.0	10
8	87.0	14.0	9.0	10
9	86.0	19.0	5.0	7

Example 2: Drop Rows with All NaN Values

We can use the following syntax to drop all rows that have all NaN values in each column:

df.dropna(how='all') 

        rating	points	assists	rebounds
0	NaN	NaN	5.0	11
1	85.0	25.0	7.0	8
2	NaN	14.0	7.0	10
3	88.0	16.0	NaN	6
4	94.0	27.0	5.0	6
5	90.0	20.0	7.0	9
6	76.0	12.0	6.0	6
7	75.0	15.0	9.0	10
8	87.0	14.0	9.0	10
9	86.0	19.0	5.0	7

There were no rows with all NaN values in this particular DataFrame, so none of the rows were dropped.

Example 3: Drop Rows Below a Certain Threshold

We can use the following syntax to drop all rows that don’t have a certain at least a certain number of non-NaN values:

df.dropna(thresh=3) 

	rating	points	assists	rebounds
1	85.0	25.0	7.0	8
2	NaN	14.0	7.0	10
3	88.0	16.0	NaN	6
4	94.0	27.0	5.0	6
5	90.0	20.0	7.0	9
6	76.0	12.0	6.0	6
7	75.0	15.0	9.0	10
8	87.0	14.0	9.0	10
9	86.0	19.0	5.0	7

The very first row in the original DataFrame did not have at least 3 non-NaN values, so it was the only row that got dropped.

Example 4: Drop Row with Nan Values in a Specific Column

We can use the following syntax to drop all rows that have a NaN value in a specific column:

df.dropna(subset=['assists'])

	rating	points	assists	rebounds
0	NaN	NaN	5.0	11
1	85.0	25.0	7.0	8
2	NaN	14.0	7.0	10
4	94.0	27.0	5.0	6
5	90.0	20.0	7.0	9
6	76.0	12.0	6.0	6
7	75.0	15.0	9.0	10
8	87.0	14.0	9.0	10
9	86.0	19.0	5.0	7

Example 5: Reset Index After Dropping Rows with NaNs

We can use the following syntax to reset the index of the DataFrame after dropping the rows with the NaN values:

#drop all rows that have any NaN values
df = df.dropna()

#reset index of DataFrame
df = df.reset_index(drop=True)

#view DataFrame
df

        rating	points	assists	rebounds
0	85.0	25.0	7.0	8
1	94.0	27.0	5.0	6
2	90.0	20.0	7.0	9
3	76.0	12.0	6.0	6
4	75.0	15.0	9.0	10
5	87.0	14.0	9.0	10
6	86.0	19.0	5.0	77

You can find the complete documentation for the dropna() function here.