Pandas “.convert_objects(convert_numeric=True)” deprecated [duplicate]

Answer 1

You can effect a replacement using apply as done here. An example would be:

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> a = pd.DataFrame([{"letter":"a", "number":"1"},{"letter":"b", "number":"2"}])
>>> a.dtypes
letter    object
number    object
dtype: object
>>> b = a.apply(pd.to_numeric, errors="ignore")
>>> b.dtypes
letter    object
number     int64
dtype: object
>>> 

But it sucks in two ways:

1. You have to use apply rather than a non-native dataframe method
2. You have to copy to another dataframe--can't be done in place. So much for use with "big data."

I'm not really loving the direction pandas is going. I haven't used R data.table much, but so far it seems superior.

I think a data table with native, in-place type conversion is pretty basic for a competitive data analysis framework.