I have a pandas dataframe with the following structure:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
myData = pd.DataFrame({'x': [1.2,2.4,5.3,2.3,4.1], 'y': [6.7,7.5,8.1,5.3,8.3], 'condition':[1,1,np.nan,np.nan,1],'calculation': [np.nan]*5})print myDatacalculation  condition    x    y
0          NaN          1  1.2  6.7
1          NaN          1  2.4  7.5
2          NaN        NaN  5.3  8.1
3          NaN        NaN  2.3  5.3
4          NaN          1  4.1  8.3

I want to enter a value in the 'calculation' column based on the values in 'x' and 'y' (e.g. x/y) but only in those cells where the 'condition' column contains NaN (np.isnan(myData['condition']). The final dataframe should look like this:

   calculation  condition    x    y
0          NaN          1  1.2  6.7
1          NaN          1  2.4  7.5
2        0.654        NaN  5.3  8.1
3        0.434        NaN  2.3  5.3
4          NaN          1  4.1  8.3

I'm happy with the idea of stepping through each row in turn using a 'for' loop and then using 'if' statements to make the calculations but the actual dataframe I have is very large and I wanted do the calculations in an array-based way. Is this possible? I guess I could calculate the value for all rows and then delete the ones I don't want but this seems like a lot of wasted effort (the NaNs are quite rare in the dataframe) and, in some cases where 'condition' equals 1, the calculation cannot be made due to division by zero.

Thanks in advance.

Use where and pass your condition to it, this will then only perform your calculation where the rows meet the condition:

In [117]:myData['calculation'] = (myData['x']/myData['y']).where(myData['condition'].isnull())
myData
Out[117]:calculation  condition    x    y
0          NaN          1  1.2  6.7
1          NaN          1  2.4  7.5
2     0.654321        NaN  5.3  8.1
3     0.433962        NaN  2.3  5.3
4          NaN          1  4.1  8.3