Python Dataframe process two columns of lists and find minimum

May 1, 2022

I have a data frame consisting of lists as elements. I want to subtract a value from each list and find the index of the minimum. I want to find the value corresponding to each list in another column.

My code:

df = pd.DataFrame({'A':[[1,2,3],[1,3,5,6]]})
df

      A              B
0   [1, 2, 3]       [10, 20, 30]
1   [1, 3, 5, 6]    [10, 30, 50, 60]  

# lets subtract 2 from A, find index of minimum in this result and find corresponding element in the B column
val = 2
df['A_new_min'] = (df['A'].map(np.array)-val).map(abs).map(np.argmin)
df['B_new'] = df[['A_new_min','B']].apply(lambda x: x[1][x[0]],axis=1)

Present solution: It produces a correct solution but I don’t to want to store the A_new_min and it is unnecessary. I am looking if it is possible to get this result in one line of code?

df = 
    A               B                 A_new_min     B_new
0   [1, 2, 3]       [10, 20, 30]        1           20
1   [1, 3, 5, 6]    [10, 30, 50, 60]    0           10

Expected solution:
How can I obtain the below solution directly without having to create an additional and unnecessary column A_new_min? In simple words, I would like to

df = 
    A               B                 B_new
0   [1, 2, 3]       [10, 20, 30]        20
1   [1, 3, 5, 6]    [10, 30, 50, 60]    10

>Solution :

With apply:

df["B_new"] = df.apply(lambda row: row["B"][np.argmin(abs(np.array(row["A"])-val))], axis=1)

>>> df
              A                 B  B_new
0     [1, 2, 3]      [10, 20, 30]     20
1  [1, 3, 5, 6]  [10, 30, 50, 60]     10