Identifying consecutive NaNs with Pandas

You can use multiple boolean conditions to test if the current value and previous value are NaN:

In [3]:

df = pd.DataFrame({'a':[1,3,np.NaN, np.NaN, 4, np.NaN, 6,7,8]})
df
Out[3]:
    a
0   1
1   3
2 NaN
3 NaN
4   4
5 NaN
6   6
7   7
8   8
In [6]:

df[(df.a.isnull()) & (df.a.shift().isnull())]
Out[6]:
    a
3 NaN

If you wanted to find where consecutive NaNs occur where you are looking for more than 2 you could do the following:

In [38]:

df = pd.DataFrame({'a':[1,2,np.NaN, np.NaN, np.NaN, 6,7,8,9,10,np.NaN,np.NaN,13,14]})
df
Out[38]:
     a
0    1
1    2
2  NaN
3  NaN
4  NaN
5    6
6    7
7    8
8    9
9   10
10 NaN
11 NaN
12  13
13  14

In [41]:

df.a.isnull().astype(int).groupby(df.a.notnull().astype(int).cumsum()).sum()
Out[41]:
a
1    0
2    3
3    0
4    0
5    0
6    0
7    2
8    0
9    0
Name: a, dtype: int32