Pandas - make a column dtype object or Factor

Question

In pandas, how can I convert a column of a DataFrame into dtype object? Or better yet, into a factor? (For those who speak R, in Python, how do I as.factor()?)<

Answer 1

There's also pd.factorize function to use:

# use the df data from @herrfz

In [150]: pd.factorize(df.b)
Out[150]: (array([0, 1, 0, 1, 2]), array(['yes', 'no', 'absent'], dtype=object))
In [152]: df['c'] = pd.factorize(df.b)[0]

In [153]: df
Out[153]: 
   a       b  c
0  1     yes  0
1  2      no  1
2  3     yes  0
3  4      no  1
4  5  absent  2