Merge two dataframes by index

by

I have the following dataframes:

> df1
  id begin conditional confidence discoveryTechnique  
0 278    56       false        0.0                  1   
1 421    18       false        0.0                  1 

> df2
   concept 
0  A  
1  B

How do I merge on the indices to get:

  id begin conditional confidence discoveryTechnique   concept 
0 278    56       false        0.0                  1  A 
1 421    18       false        0.0                  1  B

I ask because it is my understanding that merge() i.e. df1.merge(df2) uses columns to do the matching. In fact, doing this I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/core/frame.py", line 4618, in merge
    copy=copy, indicator=indicator)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/tools/merge.py", line 58, in merge
    copy=copy, indicator=indicator)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/tools/merge.py", line 491, in __init__
    self._validate_specification()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/tools/merge.py", line 812, in _validate_specification
    raise MergeError('No common columns to perform merge on')
pandas.tools.merge.MergeError: No common columns to perform merge on

Is it bad practice to merge on index? Is it impossible? If so, how can I shift the index into a new column called “index”?

7 Answers
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