Cast string to float is not supported in Linear Model

Question

I keep getting this error in my linear model: Cast string to float is not supported Specifically, the error is on this line: ``` results = m.evaluate(input_fn=lambda: input_fn(df_test), steps=1) ``` If it helps, here's the stack trace: ``` File "tensorflowtest.py", line 164, in <module> m.fit(input_fn=lambda: input_fn(df_train), steps=int(100)) File "/home/computer/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tensorflow/contrib/learn/python/learn/estimators/linear.py", line 475, in fit max_steps=max_steps) File "/home/computer/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tensorflow/contrib/learn/python/learn/estimators/estimator.py", line 333, in fit max_steps=max_steps) File "/home/computer/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tensorflow/contrib/learn/python/learn/estimators/estimator.py", line 662, in _train_model train_op, loss_op = self._get_train_ops(features, targets) File "/home/computer/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tensorflow/contrib/learn/python/learn/estimators/estimator.py", line 963, in _…

Accepted Answer

I had the exact same problem, you need to make sure that the input data you are feeding the model is in the right format. ( not just the features but also the label column)

My problem was that i was not skipping the first row in the data file, so i was trying to convert the titles to float format.Something as simple as adding

```
skiprows=1
```

When reading the csv:

```
df_test = pd.read_csv(test_file, names=COLUMNS_TEST, skipinitialspace=True, skiprows=1, engine="python")
```

I would recommend you to check:

```
df_test.dtypes
```

You should get something like

```
Feature1      int64
Feature2      int64
Feature3      int64
Feature4      object
Feature5      object
Feature6      float64
dtype: object
```

If you are not getting the correct dtype then the model.fit is going to fail

Cast string to float is not supported in Linear Model

Solution

Problem