Convert array of string (category) to array of int from a pandas dataframe

Question

I am trying to do something very similar to that previous question but I get an error. I have a pandas dataframe containing features,label I need to do some convertion to se

Answer 1

The previous answers are outdated, so here is a solution for mapping strings to numbers that works with version 0.18.1 of Pandas.

For a Series:

In [1]: import pandas as pd
In [2]: s = pd.Series(['single', 'touching', 'nuclei', 'dusts',
                       'touching', 'single', 'nuclei'])
In [3]: s_enc = pd.factorize(s)
In [4]: s_enc[0]
Out[4]: array([0, 1, 2, 3, 1, 0, 2])
In [5]: s_enc[1]
Out[5]: Index([u'single', u'touching', u'nuclei', u'dusts'], dtype='object')

For a DataFrame:

In [1]: import pandas as pd
In [2]: df = pd.DataFrame({'labels': ['single', 'touching', 'nuclei', 
                       'dusts', 'touching', 'single', 'nuclei']})
In [3]: catenc = pd.factorize(df['labels'])
In [4]: catenc
Out[4]: (array([0, 1, 2, 3, 1, 0, 2]), 
        Index([u'single', u'touching', u'nuclei', u'dusts'],
        dtype='object'))
In [5]: df['labels_enc'] = catenc[0]
In [6]: df
Out[4]:
         labels  labels_enc
    0    single           0
    1  touching           1
    2    nuclei           2
    3     dusts           3
    4  touching           1
    5    single           0
    6    nuclei           2