Apply function to pandas DataFrame that can return multiple rows

I know this is an old question, but I was having trouble getting Wes' answer to work for multiple columns in the dataframe so I made his code a bit more generic. Thought I'd share in case anyone else stumbles on this question with the same problem.

You just basically specify what column has the counts in it in and you get an expanded dataframe in return.

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({'class 1': ['A','B','C','A'],
                   'class 2': [ 1,  2,  3,  1], 
                   'count':   [ 3,  3,  3,  1]})
print df,"\n"

def f(group, *args):
    row = group.irow(0)
    Dict = {}
    row_dict = row.to_dict()
    for item in row_dict: Dict[item] = [row[item]] * row[args[0]]
    return pd.DataFrame(Dict)

def ExpandRows(df,WeightsColumnName):
    df_expand = df.groupby(df.columns.tolist(), group_keys=False).apply(f,WeightsColumnName).reset_index(drop=True)
    return df_expand


df_expanded = ExpandRows(df,'count')
print df_expanded

Returns:

  class 1  class 2  count
0       A        1      3
1       B        2      3
2       C        3      3
3       A        1      1 

  class 1  class 2  count
0       A        1      1
1       A        1      3
2       A        1      3
3       A        1      3
4       B        2      3
5       B        2      3
6       B        2      3
7       C        3      3
8       C        3      3
9       C        3      3

With regards to speed, my base df is 10 columns by ~6k rows and when expanded is ~100,000 rows takes ~7 seconds. I'm not sure in this case if grouping is necessary or wise since it's taking all the columns to group form, but hey whatever only 7 seconds.

You could use groupby:

def f(group):
    row = group.irow(0)
    return DataFrame({'class': [row['class']] * row['count']})
df.groupby('class', group_keys=False).apply(f)

so you get

In [25]: df.groupby('class', group_keys=False).apply(f)
Out[25]: 
  class
0     A
0     C
1     C

You can fix the index of the result however you like