Converting Pandas DatetimeIndex to a numeric format

Question

I want to convert the DatetimeIndex in my DataFrame to float format,which can be analysed in my model.Could someone tell me how to do it? Do I need to use date2num()functio

Answer 1

Use astype float i.e if you have a dataframe like

df = pd.DataFrame({'date': ['1998-03-01 00:00:01', '2001-04-01 00:00:01','1998-06-01 00:00:01','2001-08-01 00:00:01','2001-05-03 00:00:01','1994-03-01 00:00:01'] })
df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date'])
df['x'] = list('abcdef')
df = df.set_index('date')

Then

df.index.values.astype(float)

array([  8.88710401e+17,   9.86083201e+17,   8.96659201e+17,
     9.96624001e+17,   9.88848001e+17,   7.62480001e+17])

pd.to_datetime(df.index.values.astype(float))

DatetimeIndex(['1998-03-01 00:00:01', '2001-04-01 00:00:01',
           '1998-06-01 00:00:01', '2001-08-01 00:00:01',
           '2001-05-03 00:00:01', '1994-03-01 00:00:01'],
          dtype='datetime64[ns]', freq=None)