What is a good heuristic to detect if a column in a pandas.DataFrame is categorical?
IMO the opposite strategy, identifying categoricals is better because it depends on what the data is about. Technically address data can be thought of as unordered categorical data, but usually I wouldn't use it that way.
For survey data, an idea would be to look for Likert scales, e.g. 5-8 values, either strings (which might probably need hardcoded (and translated) levels to look for "good", "bad", ".agree.", "very .*",...) or int values in the 0-8 range + NA.
Countries and such things might also be identifiable...
Age groups (".-.") might also work.
I've been developing a tool that automatically preprocesses data in pandas.DataFrame format. During this preprocessing step, I want to treat continuous and categorical data differently. In particular, I want to be able to apply, e.g., a OneHotEncoder to only the categorical data.
Now, let's assume that we're provided a pandas.DataFrame and have no other information about the data in the DataFrame. What is a good heuristic to use to determine whether a column in the pandas.DataFrame is categorical?
My initial thoughts are:
1) If there are strings in the column (e.g., the column data type is object), then the column very likely contains categorical data
2) If some percentage of the values in the column is unique (e.g., >=20%), then the column very likely contains continuous data
I've found 1) to work fine, but 2) hasn't panned out very well. I need better heuristics. How would you solve this problem?
Edit: Someone requested that I explain why 2) didn't work well. There were some tests cases where we still had continuous values in a column but there weren't many unique values in the column. The heuristic in 2) obviously failed in that case. There were also issues where we had a categorical column that had many, many unique values, e.g., passenger names in the Titanic data set. Same column type misclassification problem there.