Numerical Computing with Python

How it works...

The idxmax method is very powerful and becomes quite useful when the index is meaningfully labeled. It was unexpected that both MD_EARN_WNE_P10 and GRAD_DEBT_MDN_SUPP were of object data type. When importing, pandas coerces all numeric values of columns to strings if the column contains at least one string.

By examining a specific column value in step 2, we were able to see clearly that we had strings in these columns. In step 3, we sort in descending order as numeric characters appear first. This elevates all alphabetical values to the top of the Series. We uncover the PrivacySuppressed string causing havoc. Pandas has the ability to force all strings that contain only numeric characters to actual numeric data types with ...