Pandas Apply method bug with NaT type and dictionaries

Code Sample

I've come across a peculiar case, it has two conditions: 1. The dataframe contains NaT values (I've tried NoneType and that seems to work just fine) 2. The applied function returns a dict

sample = pd.DataFrame({'date': [pd.NaT, pd.NaT, pd.NaT, pd.NaT], 'period': [1,1,1,1], 'parent_id': ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']})
sample.apply(lambda x: {'parent_user_id': x.parent_id}, axis=1, reduce=True)

Problem description

This is flawed since the output should be a series where each element is a dictionary, instead this outputs a dataframe of NaNs.

Expected Output

Out[40]: 
0    {'parent_user_id': 'a'}
1    {'parent_user_id': 'b'}
2    {'parent_user_id': 'c'}
3    {'parent_user_id': 'd'}

Output

Out[46]: 
   date  parent_id  period
0   NaN        NaN     NaN
1   NaN        NaN     NaN
2   NaN        NaN     NaN
3   NaN        NaN     NaN

# Paste the output here pd.show_versions() here

Comment From: TomAugspurger

Nothing to do with NaT, as this same thing happens after you fill the values

In [15]: sample.fillna(dict(date=pd.Timestamp('2017'))).apply(lambda x: {'parent_user_id': x.parent_id}, axis=1, reduce=True)
    ...:
    ...:
Out[15]:
   date  parent_id  period
0   NaN        NaN     NaN
1   NaN        NaN     NaN
2   NaN        NaN     NaN
3   NaN        NaN     NaN

NaT and None might have behaved differently, if using None forced an object dtype.

This is more about the output shape inference that apply does. You'll be much better off avoiding .apply(..., axis=1) and just doing things directly:

In [20]: pd.Series([{'parent_user_id': x.parent_id} for x in sample.itertuples()])
Out[20]:
0    {'parent_user_id': 'a'}
1    {'parent_user_id': 'b'}
2    {'parent_user_id': 'c'}
3    {'parent_user_id': 'd'}
dtype: object

Comment From: TomAugspurger

This falls under https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/15628