Question
Background
I just upgraded my Pandas from 0.11 to 0.13.0rc1. Now, the application is popping out many new warnings. One of them like this:
E:\FinReporter\FM_EXT.py:449: SettingWithCopyWarning: A value is trying to be set on a copy of a slice from a DataFrame.
Try using .loc[row_index,col_indexer] = value instead
quote_df['TVol'] = quote_df['TVol']/TVOL_SCALE
I want to know what exactly it means? Do I need to change something?
How should I suspend the warning if I insist to use quote_df['TVol'] = quote_df['TVol']/TVOL_SCALE
?
The function that gives warnings
def _decode_stock_quote(list_of_150_stk_str):
"""decode the webpage and return dataframe"""
from cStringIO import StringIO
str_of_all = "".join(list_of_150_stk_str)
quote_df = pd.read_csv(StringIO(str_of_all), sep=',', names=list('ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefg')) #dtype={'A': object, 'B': object, 'C': np.float64}
quote_df.rename(columns={'A':'STK', 'B':'TOpen', 'C':'TPCLOSE', 'D':'TPrice', 'E':'THigh', 'F':'TLow', 'I':'TVol', 'J':'TAmt', 'e':'TDate', 'f':'TTime'}, inplace=True)
quote_df = quote_df.ix[:,[0,3,2,1,4,5,8,9,30,31]]
quote_df['TClose'] = quote_df['TPrice']
quote_df['RT'] = 100 * (quote_df['TPrice']/quote_df['TPCLOSE'] - 1)
quote_df['TVol'] = quote_df['TVol']/TVOL_SCALE
quote_df['TAmt'] = quote_df['TAmt']/TAMT_SCALE
quote_df['STK_ID'] = quote_df['STK'].str.slice(13,19)
quote_df['STK_Name'] = quote_df['STK'].str.slice(21,30)#.decode('gb2312')
quote_df['TDate'] = quote_df.TDate.map(lambda x: x[0:4]+x[5:7]+x[8:10])
return quote_df
More warning messages
E:\FinReporter\FM_EXT.py:449: SettingWithCopyWarning: A value is trying to be set on a copy of a slice from a DataFrame.
Try using .loc[row_index,col_indexer] = value instead
quote_df['TVol'] = quote_df['TVol']/TVOL_SCALE
E:\FinReporter\FM_EXT.py:450: SettingWithCopyWarning: A value is trying to be set on a copy of a slice from a DataFrame.
Try using .loc[row_index,col_indexer] = value instead
quote_df['TAmt'] = quote_df['TAmt']/TAMT_SCALE
E:\FinReporter\FM_EXT.py:453: SettingWithCopyWarning: A value is trying to be set on a copy of a slice from a DataFrame.
Try using .loc[row_index,col_indexer] = value instead
quote_df['TDate'] = quote_df.TDate.map(lambda x: x[0:4]+x[5:7]+x[8:10])
Answer
The SettingWithCopyWarning
was created to flag potentially confusing
"chained" assignments, such as the following, which does not always work as
expected, particularly when the first selection returns a copy. [see
GH5390 and
GH5597 for background
discussion.]
df[df['A'] > 2]['B'] = new_val # new_val not set in df
The warning offers a suggestion to rewrite as follows:
df.loc[df['A'] > 2, 'B'] = new_val
However, this doesn't fit your usage, which is equivalent to:
df = df[df['A'] > 2]
df['B'] = new_val
While it's clear that you don't care about writes making it back to the original frame (since you are overwriting the reference to it), unfortunately this pattern cannot be differentiated from the first chained assignment example. Hence the (false positive) warning. The potential for false positives is addressed in the [docs on indexing](https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/user_guide/indexing.html#returning-a-view-versus-a-copy), if you'd like to read further. You can safely disable this new warning with the following assignment.
import pandas as pd
pd.options.mode.chained_assignment = None # default='warn'
Other Resources
- pandas User Guide: Indexing and selecting data
- Python Data Science Handbook: Data Indexing and Selection
- Real Python: SettingWithCopyWarning in Pandas: Views vs Copies
- Dataquest: SettingwithCopyWarning: How to Fix This Warning in Pandas
- Towards Data Science: Explaining the SettingWithCopyWarning in pandas