Update: cs95 has updated hiscs95's answer to includeincludes plain numpyNumPy vectorization. You can simply refer to his answer.
cs95 shows that Pandas vectorization far outperforms other Pandas methods for computing stuff with dataframes.
I wanted to add that if you first convert the dataframe to a NumPy array and then use vectorization, it's even faster than Pandas dataframe vectorization, (and that includes the time to turn it back into a dataframe series).
If you add the following functions to cs95's benchmark code, this becomes pretty evident:
def np_vectorization(df):
np_arr = df.to_numpy()
return pd.Series(np_arr[:,0] + np_arr[:,1], index=df.index)
def just_np_vectorization(df):
np_arr = df.to_numpy()
return np_arr[:,0] + np_arr[:,1]
