I have a small dataframe, say this one :
Mass32 Mass44
12 0.576703 0.496159
13 0.576658 0.495832
14 0.576703 0.495398
15 0.576587 0.494786
16 0.576616 0.494473
...
I would like to have a rolling mean of column Mass32, so I do this:
x['Mass32s'] = pandas.rolling_mean(x.Mass32, 5).shift(-2)
It works as in I have a new column named Mass32s which contains what I expect it to contain but I also get the warning message:
A value is trying to be set on a copy of a slice from a DataFrame. Try using .loc[row_indexer,col_indexer] = value instead
See the the caveats in the documentation: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/indexing.html#indexing-view-versus-copy
I'm wondering if there's a better way to do it, notably to avoid getting this warning message.
This warning comes because your dataframe x is a copy of a slice. This is not easy to know why, but it has something to do with how you have come to the current state of it.
You can either create a proper dataframe out of x by doing
x = x.copy()
This will remove the warning, but it is not the proper way
You should be using the DataFrame.loc method, as the warning suggests, like this:
x.loc[:,'Mass32s'] = pandas.rolling_mean(x.Mass32, 5).shift(-2)
Source: Stackoverflow.com