How to Find Closest Value in Pandas DataFrame (With Example)

You can use the following basic syntax to find the row in a pandas DataFrame that contains the value closest to some specified value in a particular column:

#find row with closest value to 101 in points column
df_closest = df.iloc[(df['points']-101).abs().argsort()[:1]]

The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.

Example: Find Closest Value in Pandas DataFrame

Suppose we have the following pandas DataFrame that contains the number of points scored by various basketball teams:

import pandas as pd

#create DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame({'team': ['Mavs', 'Nets', 'Hawks', 'Kings', 'Spurs', 'Cavs'],
                   'points': [99, 100, 96, 104, 89, 93]})

#view DataFrame
print(df)

    team  points
0   Mavs      99
1   Nets     100
2  Hawks      96
3  Kings     104
4  Spurs      89
5   Cavs      93

Now suppose we would like to select the row in the DataFrame that contains a value in the points column that is closest to 101.

We can use the following syntax to do so:

#find row with closest value to 101 in points column
df_closest = df.iloc[(df['points']-101).abs().argsort()[:1]]

#view results
print(df_closest)

   team  points
1  Nets     100

From the output we can see that the Nets have a value in the points column closest to 101.

Note that we could also use tolist() to only display the closest value itself instead of the entire row in the pandas DataFrame:

#display value closest to 101 in the points column
df_closest['points'].tolist()

[100]

Also note that we can change the value after the argsort() function to find several closest values.

For example, we can use the following syntax to find the rows in the DataFrame with the 2 closest values to 101 in the points column:

#find rows with two closest values to 101 in points column
df_closest2 = df.iloc[(df['points']-101).abs().argsort()[:2]]

#view results
print(df_closest2)

   team  points
1  Nets     100
0  Mavs      99

From the output we can see that the Nets have the closest value to 101 in the points column while the Mavs have the next closest value to 101 in the points column.

Additional Resources

The following tutorials explain how perform other common tasks in pandas:

Pandas: How to Select Rows Based on Column Values
Pandas: How to Combine Rows with Same Column Values
Pandas: How to Drop All Rows Except Specific Ones