iloc giving 'IndexError: single positional indexer is out-of-bounds'

Question

I am trying to encode some information to read into a Machine Learning model using the following

import numpy as np import pandas as pd import matplotlib.pyplot as py  Dataset = pd.read_csv('filename.csv', sep = ',')  X = Dataset.iloc[:,:-1].values Y = Dataset.iloc[:,18].values  from sklearn.preprocessing import LabelEncoder, OneHotEncoder labelencoder_X = LabelEncoder() X[:, 0] = labelencoder_X.fit_transform(X[:, 0]) onehotencoder = OneHotEncoder(categorical_features = [0]) X = onehotencoder.fit_transform(X).toarray() 

however I am getting an error that reads

IndexError: single positional indexer is out-of-bounds 

Answer 1

This error is caused by:

Y = Dataset.iloc[:,18].values 

Indexing is out of bounds here most probably because there are less than 19 columns in your Dataset, so column 18 does not exist. The following code you provided doesn't use Y at all, so you can just comment out this line for now.

Answer 2

This happens when you index a row/column with a number that is larger than the dimensions of your dataframe. For instance, getting the eleventh column when you have only three.

import pandas as pd  df = pd.DataFrame({'Name': ['Mark', 'Laura', 'Adam', 'Roger', 'Anna'],                    'City': ['Lisbon', 'Montreal', 'Lisbon', 'Berlin', 'Glasgow'],                    'Car': ['Tesla', 'Audi', 'Porsche', 'Ford', 'Honda']}) 

You have 5 rows and three columns:

    Name      City      Car 0   Mark    Lisbon    Tesla 1  Laura  Montreal     Audi 2   Adam    Lisbon  Porsche 3  Roger    Berlin     Ford 4   Anna   Glasgow    Honda 

Let's try to index the eleventh column (it doesn't exist):

df.iloc[:, 10] # there is obviously no 11th column 

IndexError: single positional indexer is out-of-bounds

If you are a beginner with Python, remember that df.iloc[:, 10] would refer to the eleventh column.