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

Factor and Categorical are the same, as far as I know. I think it was initially called Factor, and then changed to Categorical. To convert to Categorical maybe you can use pandas.Categorical.from_array, something like this:

In [27]: df = pd.DataFrame({'a' : [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], 'b' : ['yes', 'no', 'yes', 'no', 'absent']})

In [28]: df
Out[28]: 
   a       b
0  1     yes
1  2      no
2  3     yes
3  4      no
4  5  absent

In [29]: df['c'] = pd.Categorical.from_array(df.b).labels

In [30]: df
Out[30]: 
   a       b  c
0  1     yes  2
1  2      no  1
2  3     yes  2
3  4      no  1
4  5  absent  0