How would I change the values (type is string) of a series to an int?

Question

So basically I have this dataframe and in this dataframe there is the series 'shape' with the unique values ['cylinder', 'circle', 'light', 'cigar', 'diamond', 'oval', ...] and I want to turn these shapes into numbers so I can use those to make a scatterplot for example.

Is there a way to make another series when each unique shape has its own 'id' as an int?

Edit: Managed to get it working with pandas factorize

code

Could you edit to add an example of what you want? It's not totally clear to me at this point — CoffeeTableEspresso, Apr 01 '19 at 16:41

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 01 '19 at 16:46

Try sklean LabelEncoder to convert you categorical columns to Numerical , then you can Plot it

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame(['cylinder', 'circle', 'light', 'cigar', 'diamond', 'oval'])
df.columns = ['shape']
from sklearn.preprocessing import LabelEncoder
le = LabelEncoder()
le.fit_transform(df)
plt.scatter(df.index , df['shape'])

How would I change the values (type is string) of a series to an int?

1 Answers1