What is a good heuristic to detect if a column in a pandas.DataFrame is categorical?

Question

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 dif

Answer 1

There's are many places where you could "steal" the definitions of formats that can be cast as "number". ##,#e-# would be one of such format, just to illustrate. Maybe you'll be able to find a library to do so. I try to cast everything to numbers first and what is left, well, there's no other way left but to keep them as categorical.