Here's yet another way to skin this cat, using a dictionary to map new values onto the keys in the list:
def map_values(row, values_dict):
return values_dict[row]
values_dict = {'A': 1, 'B': 2, 'C': 3, 'D': 4}
df = pd.DataFrame({'INDICATOR': ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D'], 'VALUE': [10, 9, 8, 7]})
df['NEW_VALUE'] = df['INDICATOR'].apply(map_values, args = (values_dict,))
What's it look like:
df
Out[2]:
INDICATOR VALUE NEW_VALUE
0 A 10 1
1 B 9 2
2 C 8 3
3 D 7 4
This approach can be very powerful when you have many ifelse-type statements to make (i.e. many unique values to replace).
And of course you could always do this:
df['NEW_VALUE'] = df['INDICATOR'].map(values_dict)
But that approach is more than three times as slow as the apply approach from above, on my machine.
And you could also do this, using dict.get:
df['NEW_VALUE'] = [values_dict.get(v, None) for v in df['INDICATOR']]