How to change values in a column into binary?

Question

New to python and I am stuck at this. My CSV file contain this:

Sr,Gender
1,Male
2,Male
3,Female

Now I want to convert the Gender values into binary so the the file will look something like:

Sr,Gender
1,1
2,1
3,0

So, I imported the CSV file as data and ran this code:

data["Gender_new"]=1
data["Gender_new"][data["Gender"]=="Male"]=0
data["Gender_new"]=1=data["Gender_new"].astype(float)

But I got the error ValueError: could not convert string 'Male' to float:

What am I doing wrong and how can I make this work?

Thanks

`data[‘Gender’] = (data[‘Gender’] ==‘Male’).astpye(int)` — DJK, Jun 25 '18 at 04:23
As I'm not able to put an answer, the below code would be a solution for your question: `from sklearn.preprocessing import LabelEncoder le = LabelEncoder() df['Gender_new'] = le.fit_transform(df['Gender_new'])` — Ikbel, Nov 11 '19 at 10:16

Nidhin Sajeev · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-25T04:42:52.523

13

Try this:

import pandas as pd

file = open("your.csv", "r")

data = pd.read_csv(file, sep = ",")

gender = {'male': 1,'female': 0}

data.Gender = [gender[item] for item in data.Gender]
print(data)

Or

data.Gender[data.Gender == 'male'] = 1
data.Gender[data.Gender == 'female'] = 0
print(data)

edited Jun 25 '18 at 04:42

answered Jun 25 '18 at 04:29

Nidhin Sajeev

562
4
11

It worked. Thank you very much. – Akshat Bhardwaj Jun 25 '18 at 04:54
3

Good happy Coding !! – Nidhin Sajeev Jun 25 '18 at 05:02

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 25 '18 at 04:29

You can do the conversion as you load the file:

d = pandas.read_csv('yourfile.csv', converters={'Gender': lambda x: int(x == 'Male')})

The converters argument takes a dictionary whose keys are the column names (or indices), and the value is a function to call for each item. The function must return the converted value.

The other way to do it is to convert it once you have the dataframe, as @DJK pointed in their comment:

data['Gender'] = (data['Gender'] == 'Male').astype(int)

How to change values in a column into binary?

2 Answers2