Test whether your data is of the correct type
When working with time series data in pandas
, any date information should be formatted as a datetime64
type. Therefore, it is important to check that the columns containing the date information are of the correct type. You can check the type of each column in a DataFrame by using the .dtypes
attribute. Fortunately, if your date columns come as strings, epochs, etc… you can use the to_datetime()
function to convert them to the appropriate datetime64
type:
df['date_column'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date_column'])
In this exercise, you will learn how to check the data type of the columns in your time series data and convert a date column to the appropriate datetime
type.
This exercise is part of the course
Visualizing Time Series Data in Python
Hands-on interactive exercise
Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.
# Print the data type of each column in discoveries
print(discoveries____)