Pandas scatter_matrix - plot categorical variables

Question

I am looking at the famous Titanic dataset from the Kaggle competition found here: http://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic-gettingStarted/data

I have loaded and processed the data using:

# import required libraries
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline

# load the data from the file
df = pd.read_csv('./data/train.csv')

# import the scatter_matrix functionality
from pandas.tools.plotting import scatter_matrix

# define colors list, to be used to plot survived either red (=0) or green (=1)
colors=['red','green']

# make a scatter plot
scatter_matrix(df,figsize=[20,20],marker='x',c=df.Survived.apply(lambda x:colors[x]))

df.info()

How can I add the categorical columns like Sex and Embarked to the plot?

Answer 1

You need to transform the categorical variables into numbers to plot them.

Example (assuming that the column 'Sex' is holding the gender data, with 'M' for males & 'F' for females)

df['Sex_int'] = np.nan
df.loc[df['Sex'] == 'M', 'Sex_int'] = 0
df.loc[df['Sex'] == 'F', 'Sex_int'] = 1

Now all females are represented by 0 & males by 1. Unknown genders (if there are any) will be ignored.

The rest of your code should process the updated dataframe nicely.