Need help using Loc to bin and replace numbers

Question

I have a column with number values. I want to determine if the number in the column is above or below the number 30 and replace it with a 1 if its above and 0 if its below. I am currently using.loc but I can't seem to figure out the | annotation feature

    kraken = pd.read_csv(data_path + 'ITSM_Master_2020-10-05.csv')
    kraken.loc[[kraken['Incident_Duration']<30, 'high_or_low']=0 | 
    [kraken['Incident_Duration']>=30, 'high_or_low']=1]

something like that? I am putting the numbers into a column called high or low Incident Duration is a large column with numbers ranging from 0-100 for example

  Incident Duration = [25,26,50,52,50,100,5]

Answer 1

Some issues:

1. Your syntax inside loc . You are passing a list with a dataframe and a string inside of it, I'm not even sure to be honest what's going on there. I'll show below how I usually work with loc , but perhaps you are not wrong I'm just not sure the source of your problem.
2. You don't need | between the two assignments.
3. Followed by 2. You should initiate the column 'high_or_low' before assigning values to it using loc . So let's initiate it with the values 0, and place 1 wherever needed by your condition.

Solution:

kraken['high_or_low'] = 0
kraken.loc[kraken['Incident_Duration'] >= 30, 'high_or_low'] = 1

Answer 2

There is no need to use loc . If you just do kraken["Incident_Duration"] >= 30 you get a boolean series that tells you, for each row, whether the condition was met. So all that is left is to convert that to 0 or 1 and append the series as a column of your data frame. You have two options for that:

• One is to cast the series to int using pandas' astype() method:

kraken["high_or_low"] = (kraken["Incident_Duration"] >= 30).astype(int)

• The other option is to multiply by 1, which causes pandas to cast it to int :

kraken["high_or_low"] = (kraken["Incident_Duration"] >= 30) * 1