Is there a way in Pandas to use previous row value in dataframe.apply when previous value is also calculated in the apply?

First, create the derived value:

df.loc[0, 'C'] = df.loc[0, 'D']

Then iterate through the remaining rows and fill the calculated values:

for i in range(1, len(df)):
    df.loc[i, 'C'] = df.loc[i-1, 'C'] * df.loc[i, 'A'] + df.loc[i, 'B']


  Index_Date   A   B    C    D
0 2015-01-31  10  10   10   10
1 2015-02-01   2   3   23   22
2 2015-02-02  10  60  290  280

Given a column of numbers:

lst = []
cols = ['A']
for a in range(100, 105):
    lst.append([a])
df = pd.DataFrame(lst, columns=cols, index=range(5))
df

    A
0   100
1   101
2   102
3   103
4   104

You can reference the previous row with shift:

df['Change'] = df.A - df.A.shift(1)
df

    A   Change
0   100 NaN
1   101 1.0
2   102 1.0
3   103 1.0
4   104 1.0

numba

For recursive calculations which are not vectorisable, numba, which uses JIT-compilation and works with lower level objects, often yields large performance improvements. You need only define a regular for loop and use the decorator @njit or (for older versions) @jit(nopython=True):

For a reasonable size dataframe, this gives a ~30x performance improvement versus a regular for loop:

from numba import jit

@jit(nopython=True)
def calculator_nb(a, b, d):
    res = np.empty(d.shape)
    res[0] = d[0]
    for i in range(1, res.shape[0]):
        res[i] = res[i-1] * a[i] + b[i]
    return res

df['C'] = calculator_nb(*df[list('ABD')].values.T)

n = 10**5
df = pd.concat([df]*n, ignore_index=True)

# benchmarking on Python 3.6.0, Pandas 0.19.2, NumPy 1.11.3, Numba 0.30.1
# calculator() is same as calculator_nb() but without @jit decorator
%timeit calculator_nb(*df[list('ABD')].values.T)  # 14.1 ms per loop
%timeit calculator(*df[list('ABD')].values.T)     # 444 ms per loop