Examples

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'num_legs': [2, 4, 8, 0],
                   'num_wings': [2, 0, 0, 0],
                   'num_specimen_seen': [8, 2, 1, 6]},
                  index=['sparrow', 'cat', 'spider', 'snake'])
df

	num_legs	num_wings	num_specimen_seen
sparrow	2	2	8
cat	4	0	2
spider	8	0	1
snake	0	0	6

Extract 3 random elements from the Series df['num_legs']: Note that we use random_state
to ensure the reproducibility of the examples.

df['num_legs'].sample(n=3, random_state=1)

snake      0
spider     8
sparrow    2
Name: num_legs, dtype: int64

A random 50% sample of the DataFrame with replacement:

df.sample(frac=0.5, replace=True, random_state=1)

	num_legs	num_wings	num_specimen_seen
cat	4	0	2
snake	0	0	6

Using a DataFrame column as weights. Rows with larger value in the num_specimen_seen
column are more likely to be sampled.

df.sample(n=2, weights='num_specimen_seen', random_state=1)

	num_legs	num_wings	num_specimen_seen
sparrow	2	2	8
snake	0	0	6