pandas dataframe columns scaling with sklearn

Question

I am not sure if previous versions of pandas prevented this but now the following snippet works perfectly for me and produces exactly what you want without having to use apply

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> from sklearn.preprocessing import MinMaxScaler


>>> scaler = MinMaxScaler()

>>> dfTest = pd.DataFrame({'A':[14.00,90.20,90.95,96.27,91.21],
                           'B':[103.02,107.26,110.35,114.23,114.68],
                           'C':['big','small','big','small','small']})

>>> dfTest[['A', 'B']] = scaler.fit_transform(dfTest[['A', 'B']])

>>> dfTest
          A         B      C
0  0.000000  0.000000    big
1  0.926219  0.363636  small
2  0.935335  0.628645    big
3  1.000000  0.961407  small
4  0.938495  1.000000  small

Like this?

dfTest = pd.DataFrame({
           'A':[14.00,90.20,90.95,96.27,91.21],
           'B':[103.02,107.26,110.35,114.23,114.68], 
           'C':['big','small','big','small','small']
         })
dfTest[['A','B']] = dfTest[['A','B']].apply(
                           lambda x: MinMaxScaler().fit_transform(x))
dfTest

    A           B           C
0   0.000000    0.000000    big
1   0.926219    0.363636    small
2   0.935335    0.628645    big
3   1.000000    0.961407    small
4   0.938495    1.000000    small

df = pd.DataFrame(scale.fit_transform(df.values), columns=df.columns, index=df.index)

This should work without depreciation warnings.

As it is being mentioned in pir's comment - the .apply(lambda el: scale.fit_transform(el)) method will produce the following warning:

DeprecationWarning: Passing 1d arrays as data is deprecated in 0.17 and will raise ValueError in 0.19. Reshape your data either using X.reshape(-1, 1) if your data has a single feature or X.reshape(1, -1) if it contains a single sample.

Converting your columns to numpy arrays should do the job (I prefer StandardScaler):

from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
scale = StandardScaler()

dfTest[['A','B','C']] = scale.fit_transform(dfTest[['A','B','C']].as_matrix())

-- Edit Nov 2018 (Tested for pandas 0.23.4)--

As Rob Murray mentions in the comments, in the current (v0.23.4) version of pandas .as_matrix() returns FutureWarning. Therefore, it should be replaced by .values:

from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
scaler = StandardScaler()

scaler.fit_transform(dfTest[['A','B']].values)

-- Edit May 2019 (Tested for pandas 0.24.2)--

As joelostblom mentions in the comments, "Since 0.24.0, it is recommended to use .to_numpy() instead of .values."

Updated example:

import pandas as pd
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
scaler = StandardScaler()
dfTest = pd.DataFrame({
               'A':[14.00,90.20,90.95,96.27,91.21],
               'B':[103.02,107.26,110.35,114.23,114.68],
               'C':['big','small','big','small','small']
             })
dfTest[['A', 'B']] = scaler.fit_transform(dfTest[['A','B']].to_numpy())
dfTest
      A         B      C
0 -1.995290 -1.571117    big
1  0.436356 -0.603995  small
2  0.460289  0.100818    big
3  0.630058  0.985826  small
4  0.468586  1.088469  small