mean over axis=1 in not-completely-numeric frame returns all nans

[cpcloud]

DataFrame from #3688. This might be related to that:

df = pd.DataFrame({'bar': {0: 1, 1: 1, 2: 1}, 'foo': {0: 0, 1: 1, 2: 2}, 'foo1': {0: 1, 1: 2, 2: 3}, 'hello': {0: 'a', 1: 'a', 2: 'a'}}, columns=['bar', 'foo', 'foo', 'hello'])
print df.T.sum(1) == df.sum()  # fine. + is str cat
print df.T.mean(1).isnull().all()  # prints True

I think non numeric should be dropped...

[jreback]

linking to #3679

[jreback]

I think this is actually a confusing API, mean should work (on the non-numeric), though they are object dtype, so not entirely sure

sum is defined for numeric and non-numeric (strings).
however meanis not

In [27]: df.T.sum(1)
Out[27]: 
bar        3
foo        3
foo        3
hello    aaa
dtype: object

In [28]: df.T.mean(1)
Out[28]: 
bar     NaN
foo     NaN
foo     NaN
hello   NaN
dtype: float64

maybe could see it raising....?

[cpcloud]

i kind of don't like the summing strings behavior, but that's just me. here's why: just because the binary operator associated with the reduction (or fold if you are into fp) is defined doesn't mean that the reduction itself makes any sense (e.g., lambda x, y: 2 * x + 3 * y, with string input), and in fact the built-in sum function is not defined for strings. it's probably too late to change that. i think not raising here is a bit magical, but i think that (df.T.mean(1) == df.mean()).all() should be True in as many cases as possible. I can't think of any right now where you wouldn't want that to be true.

[jreback]

moving to 0.12; I tried to fix this but a big non-trivial

[cpcloud]

Yeah I checked out ur dupe fix branch and tried to fix it. Didn't say anything cuz you weren't finished when I tried that, sorry. Next time I will speak up so you don't waste ur time!

[jreback]

no...nothing really to do with the dups.....this is embeded in groupby....(dupe fixes are in master btw)

[cpcloud]

@jreback is this worth fixing? this doesn't work fundamentally because of the way pandas objects are represented (as Blocks). i just stepped thru the code for this and my intuition tells me that all sorts of transposing acrobatics would be necessary to make this work, for an extreme edge case that can be very easily worked around by simply transpose -> convert_objects -> mean. i vote close.

[hayd]

The annoying/inconsistent part here is that you can take the mean of a object dtype Series...

[cpcloud]

It's because the objects here can't really be converted. Because the blocks are column wise getting the numeric data doesn't return anything

[jreback]

actually i think this is easy.
in _reduce (can do for series / frame)

• just check for object dtypes on reductions (need to check because don't want to call convert_objects everytime which recreates everything (even with no copy)
• if have object dtypes, try to convert_objects()
• _get_numeric_data() (if numeric_only=True).

by definition it will raise if its still mixed type at this point, otherwise perform the op (you might need to do slightly differently for sum as that can handle object)

would need a perf check too