New string data type aggregations (min, max, sum) work for DataFrames but not Series

[tdpetrou]

>>> s = pd.Series(['a', 'b'], dtype='string')
>>> s.max()
TypeError: Cannot perform reduction 'max' with string dtype
>>> df = s.to_frame()
>>> df.max()
0    b
dtype: object

Problem description

I assume this isn't supposed to work on DataFrames if it doesn't work on strings. min and sum do the same thing.

Expected Output

Consistent behavior for both dataframes and series

Output of pd.show_versions()

INSTALLED VERSIONS

commit : None
python : 3.8.1.final.0
python-bits : 64
OS : Darwin
OS-release : 19.2.0
machine : x86_64
processor : i386
byteorder : little
LC_ALL : None
LANG : en_US.UTF-8
LOCALE : en_US.UTF-8

pandas : 0+untagged.1.gce8af21.dirty
numpy : 1.18.1
pytz : 2019.3
dateutil : 2.8.1
pip : 20.0.2
setuptools : 45.1.0.post20200127
Cython : 0.29.14
pytest : None
hypothesis : None
sphinx : None
blosc : None
feather : None
xlsxwriter : None
lxml.etree : 4.5.0
html5lib : None
pymysql : None
psycopg2 : None
jinja2 : 2.10.3
IPython : 7.11.1
pandas_datareader: None
bs4 : None
bottleneck : None
fastparquet : None
gcsfs : None
lxml.etree : 4.5.0
matplotlib : 3.1.1
numexpr : None
odfpy : None
openpyxl : None
pandas_gbq : None
pyarrow : None
pytables : None
pytest : None
pyxlsb : None
s3fs : None
scipy : 1.3.1
sqlalchemy : 1.3.13
tables : None
tabulate : 0.8.3
xarray : None
xlrd : None
xlwt : None
xlsxwriter : None
numba : None

[jorisvandenbossche]

Thanks for the report!

The reductions on DataFrames are a bit messy / inconsistent with Series right now, in general. It first tries it on the 2D values, and then column wise (but still different as series).
While on the Series, it dispatches to the underlying array, which currently doesn't implement reductions for StringArray via _reduce.

But I think we can actually add those reductions, so the series case works as well?

[dsaxton]

@jorisvandenbossche It looks like these particular reductions are "sort of" working (they don't seem to be NA-aware at the moment) for StringArray already?

In [2]: arr                                                                                                                                                           
Out[2]: 
<StringArray>
['x', 'y', 'z']
Length: 3, dtype: string

In [3]: arr.min()                                                                                                                                                     
Out[3]: 'x'

In [4]: arr.max()                                                                                                                                                     
Out[4]: 'z'

In [5]: arr.sum()                                                                                                                                                     
Out[5]: 'xyz'

In [6]: arr[0] = pd.NA                                                                                                                                                

In [7]: arr.min()                                                                                                                                                     
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-7-8f52f7f0ded7> in <module>
----> 1 arr.min()

~/pandas/pandas/core/arrays/numpy_.py in min(self, axis, out, keepdims, skipna)
    356     def min(self, axis=None, out=None, keepdims=False, skipna=True):
    357         nv.validate_min((), dict(out=out, keepdims=keepdims))
--> 358         return nanops.nanmin(self._ndarray, axis=axis, skipna=skipna)
    359 
    360     def max(self, axis=None, out=None, keepdims=False, skipna=True):

~/pandas/pandas/core/nanops.py in f(values, axis, skipna, **kwds)
    126                     result = alt(values, axis=axis, skipna=skipna, **kwds)
    127             else:
--> 128                 result = alt(values, axis=axis, skipna=skipna, **kwds)
    129 
    130             return result

~/pandas/pandas/core/nanops.py in reduction(values, axis, skipna, mask)
    869                 result = np.nan
    870         else:
--> 871             result = getattr(values, meth)(axis)
    872 
    873         result = _wrap_results(result, dtype, fill_value)

~/opt/miniconda3/envs/pandas-dev/lib/python3.7/site-packages/numpy/core/_methods.py in _amin(a, axis, out, keepdims, initial, where)
     32 def _amin(a, axis=None, out=None, keepdims=False,
     33           initial=_NoValue, where=True):
---> 34     return umr_minimum(a, axis, None, out, keepdims, initial, where)
     35 
     36 def _sum(a, axis=None, dtype=None, out=None, keepdims=False,

TypeError: '<=' not supported between instances of 'float' and 'str'

[jorisvandenbossche]

Yeah, I noticed that as well, but that is the implementation StringArray inherits from Numpy PandasArray. So it only works "by accident" on the actual array, I think. Since the _reduce purposefully raises right now. To support it properly, we need to implement that specifically for StringArray.

So I think we certainly would like to get this working, but it will require some custom code (although for now falling back to a conversion to numpy array with None instead of NA and using nanops is probably fine, and not much work)

[TomAugspurger]

No one is currently working on this. Moving to 1.1.