Pandas drop_duplicates method not working on dataframe containing lists

drop_duplicates won’t work with lists in your dataframe as the error message implies. However, you can drop duplicates on the dataframe casted as str and then extract the rows from original df using the index from the results.

Setup

df = pd.DataFrame({'Keyword': {0: 'apply', 1: 'apply', 2: 'apply', 3: 'terms', 4: 'terms'},
 'X': {0: [1, 2], 1: [1, 2], 2: 'xy', 3: 'xx', 4: 'yy'},
 'Y': {0: 'yy', 1: 'yy', 2: 'yx', 3: 'ix', 4: 'xi'}})

#Drop directly causes the same error
df.drop_duplicates()
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
TypeError: unhashable type: 'list'

Solution

#convert hte df to str type, drop duplicates and then select the rows from original df.

df.loc[df.astype(str).drop_duplicates().index]
Out[205]: 
  Keyword       X   Y
0   apply  [1, 2]  yy
2   apply      xy  yx
3   terms      xx  ix
4   terms      yy  xi

#the list elements are still list in the final results.
df.loc[df.astype(str).drop_duplicates().index].loc[0,'X']
Out[207]: [1, 2]

Edit: replaced iloc with loc. In this particular case, both work as the
index matches the positional index, but it is not general