First, to convert a Categorical column to its numerical codes, you can do this easier with: dataframe['c'].cat.codes
.
Further, it is possible to select automatically all columns with a certain dtype in a dataframe using select_dtypes
. This way, you can apply above operation on multiple and automatically selected columns.
First making an example dataframe:
In [75]: df = pd.DataFrame({'col1':[1,2,3,4,5], 'col2':list('abcab'), 'col3':list('ababb')})
In [76]: df['col2'] = df['col2'].astype('category')
In [77]: df['col3'] = df['col3'].astype('category')
In [78]: df.dtypes
Out[78]:
col1 int64
col2 category
col3 category
dtype: object
Then by using select_dtypes
to select the columns, and then applying .cat.codes
on each of these columns, you can get the following result:
In [80]: cat_columns = df.select_dtypes(['category']).columns
In [81]: cat_columns
Out[81]: Index([u'col2', u'col3'], dtype="object")
In [83]: df[cat_columns] = df[cat_columns].apply(lambda x: x.cat.codes)
In [84]: df
Out[84]:
col1 col2 col3
0 1 0 0
1 2 1 1
2 3 2 0
3 4 0 1
4 5 1 1