Date Difference Between Two Device Failures

Using pandas.DataFrame.groupby with diff and apply:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date'])
s = df.groupby(['device', 'failure'])['date'].diff().dt.days.add(1)
s = s.fillna(0)
df['elapsed'] = np.where(df['failure'], s, 0)

Output:

         Date    Device  Failure  Elapsed
0  2015-10-01  S1F0KYCR        1      0.0
1  2015-10-07  S1F0KYCR        1      7.0
2  2015-10-08  S1F0KYCR        0      0.0
3  2015-10-09  S1F0KYCR        0      0.0
4  2015-10-17  S1F0KYCR        1     11.0
5  2015-10-31  S1F0KYCR        0      0.0
6  2015-10-01  S8KLM011        1      0.0
7  2015-10-02  S8KLM011        1      2.0
8  2015-10-07  S8KLM011        0      0.0
9  2015-10-09  S8KLM011        0      0.0
10 2015-10-11  S8KLM011        0      0.0
11 2015-10-21  S8KLM011        1     20.0

Update:

Found out the actual data linked in the OP contains No device that has more than two failure cases, making the final result all zeros (i.e. no second failure has ever happened and thus nothing to calculate for elapsed). Using OP's original snippet:

import pandas as pd

url = "http://aws-proserve-data-science.s3.amazonaws.com/device_failure.csv"

df = pd.read_csv(url, encoding = "ISO-8859-1")
df = df.sort_values(by = ['date', 'device'], ascending = True) 
df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date'],format='%Y/%m/%d')

Find if any device has more than 1 failure:

df.groupby(['device'])['failure'].sum().gt(1).any()
# False

Which actually confirms that the all zeros in df['elapsed'] is actually a correct answer :)

If you tweak your data a bit, it does yield elapsed just as expected.

df.loc[6879, 'device'] = 'S1F0RRB1'
# Making two occurrence of failure for device S1F0RRB1

s = df.groupby(['device', 'failure'])['date'].diff().dt.days.add(1)
s = s.fillna(0)
df['elapsed'] = np.where(df['failure'], s, 0)
df['elapsed'].value_counts()
# 0.0    124493
# 3.0         1