Let’s reduce it to a simpler example. By doing for instance the following comparison:
3 == pd.Series([3,2,4,1])
0 True
1 False
2 False
3 False
dtype: bool
The result you get is a Series of booleans, equal in size to the pd.Series in the right hand side of the expression. So really what’s happening here is that the integer is being broadcast across the series, and then they are compared. So when you do:
if 3 == pd.Series([3,2,4,1]):
pass
ValueError: The truth value of a Series is ambiguous. Use a.empty, a.bool(), a.item(), a.any() or a.all().
You get an error. The problem here is that you are comparing a pd.Series with a value, so you’ll have multiple True and multiple False values, as in the case above. This of course is ambiguous, since the condition is neither True or False.
So you need to further aggregate the result so that a single boolean value results from the operation. For that you’ll have to use either any or all depending on whether you want at least one (any) or all values to satisfy the condition.
(3 == pd.Series([3,2,4,1])).all()
# False
or
(3 == pd.Series([3,2,4,1])).any()
# True