Pandas get topmost n records within each group

Since 0.14.1, you can now do nlargest and nsmallest on a groupby object:

In [23]: df.groupby('id')['value'].nlargest(2)
Out[23]: 
id   
1   2    3
    1    2
2   6    4
    5    3
3   7    1
4   8    1
dtype: int64

There's a slight weirdness that you get the original index in there as well, but this might be really useful depending on what your original index was.

If you're not interested in it, you can do .reset_index(level=1, drop=True) to get rid of it altogether.

(Note: From 0.17.1 you'll be able to do this on a DataFrameGroupBy too but for now it only works with Series and SeriesGroupBy.)

Did you try

df.groupby('id').head(2)

Output generated:

       id  value
id             
1  0   1      1
   1   1      2 
2  3   2      1
   4   2      2
3  7   3      1
4  8   4      1

(Keep in mind that you might need to order/sort before, depending on your data)

EDIT: As mentioned by the questioner, use

df.groupby('id').head(2).reset_index(drop=True)

to remove the MultiIndex and flatten the results:

    id  value
0   1      1
1   1      2
2   2      1
3   2      2
4   3      1
5   4      1

Sometimes sorting the whole data ahead is very time consuming. We can groupby first and doing topk for each group:

g = df.groupby(['id']).apply(lambda x: x.nlargest(topk,['value'])).reset_index(drop=True)