Create a set from a series in pandas
PythonPandasDataframeSeriesKagglePython Problem Overview
I have a dataframe extracted from Kaggle's San Fransico Salaries: https://www.kaggle.com/kaggle/sf-salaries and I wish to create a set of the values of a column, for instance 'Status'.
This is what I have tried but it brings a list of all the records instead of the set (sf is how I name the data frame).
a=set(sf['Status'])
print a
According to this webpage, this should work. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15768757/how-to-construct-a-set-out-of-list-items
Python Solutions
Solution 1 - Python
If you only need to get list of unique values, you can just use unique method.
If you want to have Python's set, then do set(some_series)
In [1]: s = pd.Series([1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 4])
In [2]: s.unique()
Out[2]: array([1, 2, 3, 4])
In [3]: set(s)
Out[3]: {1, 2, 3, 4}
However, if you have DataFrame, just select series out of it ( some_data_frame['<col_name>'] ).
Solution 2 - Python
With large size series with duplicates the set(some_series) execution-time will evolve exponentially with series size.
Better practice would be to set(some_series.unique()).
