# Cleaning Data Types¶

In our past two readings, we learned about methods for cleaning our data by modifying the values of certain variables. But a second and extremely common data cleanliness problem pertains to managing data types. For example, it is very common to load data that you think should be numeric (say, float64), only to discover that pandas has loaded it as Categorical or Object type, which means you can’t do numeric computations on the data (e.g., mean, median, etc.).

There are two main reasons that this can happen:

• There are observations that are accidentally being parsed as non-numeric, or

• There are observations that are deliberately non-numeric you didn’t realize were there.

Because this is so common, let’s look at a quick example of this type of problem with our old friend world-very-small!

[6]:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
world

[6]:

country region gdppcap08 polityIV
0 Brazil S. America 10296 18
1 Germany W. Europe 35613 20 or higher
2 Mexico N. America na 18
3 Mozambique Africa 855 16
4 Russia C&E Europe 16139 17
5 Ukraine C&E Europe 7271 16

Obviously we can see there are going to be issues with gdppcap08 and polityIV, but this were a real (big) dataset where this wasn’t evident and you tried to calculate the average GDP of countries in the data. You would get a very weird ValueError / TypeError that might look something like this (I’m removing most of the stuff in the middle for sanity):

world["gdppcap08"].mean()

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
File ~/opt/miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/core/nanops.py:1622, in _ensure_numeric(x)
1621 try:
-> 1622     x = float(x)
1623 except (TypeError, ValueError):
1624     # e.g. "1+1j" or "foo"

ValueError: could not convert string to float: '1029635613na855161397271'

[...]

File ~/opt/miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/core/nanops.py:1629, in _ensure_numeric(x)
1626             x = complex(x)
1627         except ValueError as err:
1628             # e.g. "foo"
-> 1629             raise TypeError(f"Could not convert {x} to numeric") from err
1630 return x

TypeError: Could not convert 1029635613na855161397271 to numeric


What does all this mean? In short, it means that when pandas tried to run mean() it realized the method would only work if the data were numeric, so it tried to convert everything in the Series to a numeric type, but it found something in the Series it couldn’t convert. Why is the error TypeError: Could not convert 1029635613na855161397271 to numeric and not TypeError: Could not convert na to numeric? Honestly, I don’t have the foggiest notion, but that’s what I got with my current version of pandas so I’m gonna leave it in this lesson so you know how weird these things can get!

But the key take-away is this: what we can see is that there was a failure to convert a value to numeric. And that means there’s something in our Series that can’t be parsed.

## Finding Problematic Observations¶

So the first thing we can do, as a sanity check, is check the dtypes of our dataframe to confirm that what we thought was a numeric column is in fact an object or Categorical column:

[3]:

world.dtypes

[3]:

country      object
region       object
gdppcap08    object
polityIV     object
dtype: object


Oops! Yup, there it is! Indeed, we can also see that polityIV is also an object, something we’ll deal with later.

So this kind of phenomenon is such a common problem that pandas has a tool to deal with it: .str.isnumeric(). This method returns True is an observation can be converted to a number without issues, and False otherwise, so by using its logical negation, we can find all observations that aren’t convertible (which we may then need to fix):

[4]:

world.loc[~ world["gdppcap08"].str.isnumeric(), "gdppcap08"].value_counts()

[4]:

na    1
Name: gdppcap08, dtype: int64


(Recall we have to use ~ instead of not to invert True values to False in a numpy array or pandas Series)

There we are! One observation of "na" is the source of our problems. Note that you could also use .unique() instead of .value_counts() if you don’t care about the number of observations are causing problems.

OK, so how do we fix this? In this case, it seems like na is probably just short for np.nan, so we can replace it with np.nan, which is a number:

[7]:

world.loc[world["gdppcap08"] == "na", "gdppcap08"] = np.nan


Then we can either cast gdppcap08 to a numeric type directly with world["gdppcap08"] = world["gdppcap08"].astype("float"), or let pandas do it implicitly when we run world["gdppcap08"].mean(). In general the former is probably better practice, so let’s do that:

[8]:

world["gdppcap08"] = world["gdppcap08"].astype("float")
world["gdppcap08"].mean()

[8]:

14034.8


Now, there’s one other option in these situations: if na is appearing in lots of places in your data as a representation for missing data, we can also communicate this fact to read_csv. Remember when we said that read_csv has more options than you could ever imagine? Well one is na_values, where you can specify how missing data is represented in a dataset. If we use that to tell read_csv that "na" means data is missing, it’ll make this correction on the fly!

[10]:

world = pd.read_csv("data/world-very-small-type-errors.csv", na_values="na")
world

[10]:

country region gdppcap08 polityIV
0 Brazil S. America 10296.0 18
1 Germany W. Europe 35613.0 20 or higher
2 Mexico N. America NaN 18
3 Mozambique Africa 855.0 16
4 Russia C&E Europe 16139.0 17
5 Ukraine C&E Europe 7271.0 16
[11]:

world.dtypes

[11]:

country       object
region        object
gdppcap08    float64
polityIV      object
dtype: object

[12]:

world["gdppcap08"].mean()

[12]:

14034.8


Magic!

## Deliberate Non-Numerics¶

While in the example above "na" wasn’t really meant to be interpreted as a string, sometimes non-numeric values are inserted into datasets to communicate something important to the user. For example, in this toy example polityIV has a non-numeric value:

[14]:

world.loc[~world["polityIV"].str.isnumeric()]

[14]:

country region gdppcap08 polityIV
1 Germany W. Europe 35613.0 20 or higher

Here, the value is to indicate that the value of policy could be 20 or any value above 20. Why might this occur? In this case I’ve made it up, but in many surveys there will be a maximum value allowed (e.g., some surveys have a top income value they can record). These are called “top-codes”, and they are different from the case above because it’s not immediately clear what value you should put into the field. You could put in 20, but… the value might not be 20, it could be 21!

So when you find a top-code like this, you need to think carefully about what to do with it, as the answer will depend on the type of analysis you want to do. But the answer will almost always lie not in the data, but in the documentation for the data.

## Review¶

• Sometimes data you think should be numeric won’t be recognized as numeric by pandas.

• If you try and do a numeric operation on these columns, you’ll get a TypeError and/or ValueError, and usually a note about an inability to convert some value to numeric.

• You can confirm that pandas sees a column as non-numeric with .dtypes.

• You can find the non-numeric values with df[~ df["column"].str.isnumeric(), "column"].value_counts().

• You can then replace these values with numeric values if it’s clear how to do so and recast the column to numeric with df["column"] = df["column"].astype("float").