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

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

This question is related to python

The answer is


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.


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.