How to determine whether a column/variable is numeric or not in Pandas/NumPy?

Question

Is there a better way to determine whether a variable in Pandas and/or NumPy is numeric or not ?

I have a self defined

Answer 1

In pandas 0.20.2 you can do:

import pandas as pd
from pandas.api.types import is_string_dtype
from pandas.api.types import is_numeric_dtype

df = pd.DataFrame({'A': ['a', 'b', 'c'], 'B': [1.0, 2.0, 3.0]})

is_string_dtype(df['A'])
>>>> True

is_numeric_dtype(df['B'])
>>>> True

Answer 2

This is a pseudo-internal method to return only the numeric type data

In [27]: df = DataFrame(dict(A = np.arange(3), 
                             B = np.random.randn(3), 
                             C = ['foo','bar','bah'], 
                             D = Timestamp('20130101')))

In [28]: df
Out[28]: 
   A         B    C                   D
0  0 -0.667672  foo 2013-01-01 00:00:00
1  1  0.811300  bar 2013-01-01 00:00:00
2  2  2.020402  bah 2013-01-01 00:00:00

In [29]: df.dtypes
Out[29]: 
A             int64
B           float64
C            object
D    datetime64[ns]
dtype: object

In [30]: df._get_numeric_data()
Out[30]: 
   A         B
0  0 -0.667672
1  1  0.811300
2  2  2.020402

Answer 3

You can also try:

df_dtypes = np.array(df.dtypes)
df_numericDtypes= [x.kind in 'bifc' for x in df_dtypes]

It returns a list of booleans: True if numeric, False if not.