Error thrown with truth values pandas

Question

I'm using a dataframe within a function to alter that dataframe. I get thrown this error:

The truth value of a Series is ambiguous. Use a.empty, a.bool(), a.item(), a.any() or a.all().

def hello(column):
    if data['State'] == 'CA': 
        answer = column * 3 
    return answer

This is the outter thing I'm trying to do:

data['sup'] = data['Amount paid'].apply(hello, axis=1)

'State' is a series of states like CA, VA, NY etc. 'Amount paid' is a number.

I'm trying to make it so that if the State is CA, multiply that row's 'Amount paid' by 3.

Aside from the error message, what does your function return when `data['State']!='CA'`? And what is the `answer`? — DYZ, Jun 18 '18 at 22:01
try looking at data.state == 'CA' - it is a time series, you need to decide on what to do next with it. please also provide a full and runnable example of you error, replicable at remote computer — Evgeny, Jun 18 '18 at 22:04
@EvgenyPogrebnyak Why do you think it's a _time_ series? A Series - yes. A time series - probably not. — DYZ, Jun 18 '18 at 22:05

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 18 '18 at 22:04

1

data['State'] is a Series. Therefore, data['State'] == 'CA' is also a Series of boolean values. Do you want all of them to be true for the condition to be true? Or just some of them? In the former case, use if (data['State'] == 'CA').all():. In the latter case, if (data['State'] == 'CA').any():

answered Jun 18 '18 at 22:04

DYZ

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edited my question – Jun 18 '18 at 22:18

Error thrown with truth values pandas

1 Answers1