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

I am answering the question for Pandas 0.10.1. Factor.from_array seems to do the trick.

>>> s = pandas.Series(['a', 'b', 'a', 'c', 'a', 'b', 'a'])
>>> s
0    a
1    b
2    a
3    c
4    a
5    b
6    a
>>> f = pandas.Factor.from_array(s)
>>> f
Categorical: 
array([a, b, a, c, a, b, a], dtype=object)
Levels (3): Index([a, b, c], dtype=object)
>>> f.labels
array([0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0])
>>> f.levels
Index([a, b, c], dtype=object)