Create a pivot table from a Pandas dataframe

Import modules

import pandas as pd

  Create some dummy data

raw_data = {'name': ['Willard Morris', 'Al Jennings', 'Omar Mullins', 'Spencer McDaniel'],
'age': [20, 19, 22, 21],
'favorite_color': ['blue', 'blue', 'yellow', "green"],
'grade': [88, 92, 95, 70]}
df = pd.DataFrame(raw_data)
df

	age	favorite_color	grade	name
0	20	blue	88	Willard Morris
1	19	blue	92	Al Jennings
2	22	yellow	95	Omar Mullins
3	21	green	70	Spencer McDaniel

Create the pivot table

#strip dataframe to contain just name, favorite_color
df = df[['name', 'favorite_color']]

#pivot the df (note that reset_index can be removed if we want to hold pivot levels. In most cases I reset the index)
df_pivot = df.groupby(['favorite_color']).count().reset_index()

#rename 'name' column to n-count of colors
df_pivot.columns = ['favorite_color', 'name']

df_pivot.head()

	favorite_color	name
0	blue	2
1	green	1
2	yellow	1

#you can pull mean, other aggregate functions by replacing 'count' with 'mean', etc
#you can select multiple levels for your pivot in the groupby function, e.g. df.groupby(['X', 'Y', 'Z']).count()