Why is NaN considered as a float?

by

The short answer is IEEE 754 specifies NaN as a float value.

As for what you should do about converting a pd.Series to specific numeric data types, I prefer to use pd.to_numeric where possible. The below examples demonstrate why.

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

s = pd.Series([1, 2.5, 3, 4, 5.5])        # s.dtype = float64
s = s.astype(float)                       # s.dtype = float64
s = pd.to_numeric(s, downcast="float")    # s.dtype = float32

t = pd.Series([1, np.nan, 3, 4, 5])       # s.dtype = float64
t = t.astype(int)                         # ValueError
t = pd.to_numeric(t, downcast="integer")  # s.dtype = float64

u = pd.Series([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6])         # s.dtype = int64
u = u.astype(int)                         # s.dtype = int32
u = pd.to_numeric(u, downcast="integer")  # s.dtype = int8

More Related Contents:

  1. pandas create new column based on values from other columns / apply a function of multiple columns, row-wise
  2. Fast punctuation removal with pandas
  3. String concatenation of two pandas columns
  4. How to one-hot-encode from a pandas column containing a list?
  5. How can I split a column of tuples in a Pandas dataframe?
  6. Calculate average of every x rows in a table and create new table
  7. Find column name in pandas that matches an array
  8. Efficiently return the index of the first value satisfying condition in array
  9. Group duplicate column IDs in pandas dataframe
  10. Most efficient way to forward-fill NaN values in numpy array
  11. Select multiple ranges of columns in Pandas DataFrame
  12. Suppressing scientific notation in pandas? [duplicate]
  13. How to one hot encode variant length features?
  14. Improve Row Append Performance On Pandas DataFrames
  15. Missing data, insert rows in Pandas and fill with NAN
  16. Precision lost while using read_csv in pandas
  17. pandas equivalent of np.where
  18. how to read certain columns from Excel using Pandas – Python
  19. Compute *rolling* maximum drawdown of pandas Series
  20. which is faster for load: pickle or hdf5 in python
  21. Normalize data in pandas
  22. Python Pandas – Missing required dependencies [‘numpy’] 1
  23. Pandas in AWS lambda gives numpy error
  24. Pandas: Difference between largest and smallest value within group
  25. Filling in date gaps in MultiIndex Pandas Dataframe
  26. Iterating pandas dataframe, checking values and creating some of them
  27. Add numpy array as column to Pandas data frame
  28. Stratified Sampling in Pandas
  29. What’s the best way to sum all values in a Pandas dataframe? [duplicate]
  30. A faster alternative to Pandas `isin` function

Leave a Comment