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Checking column types

Take a look at the UFO dataset's column types using the .info() method. Two columns jump out for transformation: the seconds column, which is a numeric column but is being read in as object, and the date column, which can be transformed into the datetime type. That will make our feature engineering efforts easier later on.

This exercise is part of the course

Preprocessing for Machine Learning in Python

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Exercise instructions

  • Call the .info() method on the ufo dataset.
  • Convert the type of the seconds column to the float data type.
  • Convert the type of the date column to the datetime data type.
  • Call .info() on ufo again to see if the changes worked.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Print the DataFrame info
print(ufo.____)

# Change the type of seconds to float
ufo["seconds"] = ____

# Change the date column to type datetime
ufo["date"] = ____

# Check the column types
print(ufo.____)
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