Python - 'TypeError: '<=' not supported between instances of 'str' and 'int''

Question

I have a df column that has values ranging from -5 to 10. I want to change values <= -1 to negative, all 0 values to neutral, and all values >=

Answer 1

As roganjosh pointed out, you're doing your replacement in 3 steps - this is causing a problem because after step 1, you end up with a column of mixed dtypes, so subsequent equality checks start to fail.

You can either assign to a new column, or use numpy.select.

condlist = [
   test['sentiment_score'] > 0,
   test['sentiment_score'] < 0
]
choicelist = ['pos', 'neg']

test['sentiment_score'] = np.select(
   condlist, choicelist, default='neutral')

Answer 2

Another alternative is to define a custom function:

def transform_sentiment(x):
    if x < 0:
        return 'Negative'
    elif x == 0:
        return 'Neutral'
    else:
        return 'Positive'

df['Sentiment_new'] = df['Sentiment'].apply(lambda x: transform_sentiment(x))