In a pandas dataframe can I convert my column values into numbers?
Well, one way i like to handle this problem (which is a common problem, at least in daily job life) is to convert each possibility in a column with binary value. Let me elaborate a bit. Let's say you have your column animals with 3 possibilities : dog, cat, and horse. You explode your column in 3 differents columns : colDog, colCat and colHorse. And you fill your new columns based on the value of the column animals. For example : if you have dog in the first row, you put 1 in the column colDog, etc.
The problem with handling categorical data with numerical value instead of binary is that you create a hierarchical order between your values. If dog is 1, cat is 2 and horse is 3, then horse will have more impact than cat and dog. Or i think you just want to represent your categories.