Create Empty Dataframe in Pandas specifying column types

Question

I\'m trying to create an empty data frame with an index and specify the column types. The way I am doing it is the following:

df = pd.DataFrame(index=[\'pbp\         


        

Answer 1

My solution (without setting an index) is to initialize a dataframe with column names and specify data types using astype() method.

df = pd.DataFrame(columns=['contract',
                     'state_and_county_code',
                     'state',
                     'county',
                     'starting_membership',
                     'starting_raw_raf',
                     'enrollment_trend',
                     'projected_membership',
                     'projected_raf'])
df = df.astype( dtype={'contract' : str, 
                 'state_and_county_code': str,
                 'state': str,
                 'county': str,
                 'starting_membership': int,
                 'starting_raw_raf': float,
                 'enrollment_trend': float,
                 'projected_membership': int,
                 'projected_raf': float})