Keep seeing TypeError: 'value' must be an instance of str or bytes, not a float

Question

I am relatively new to using Python, I am trying to run a regression with a merged dataset and it keeps showing me the error "TypeError: 'value' must be an instance of str or bytes, not a float". I do not know what it means or how to fix it. Anything Helps!!!

Here is my code

from statsmodels.formula.api import ols

fit = ols('Congregations ~ ViolentCrime ', data=data).fit() 

print(fit.summary())
print(fit.params)

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot(data['ViolentCrime'], data['Congregations'], 'ro')
plt.plot(data['ViolentCrime'], fit.params.focal_year*data['ViolentCrime'] + fit.params.Intercept)
plt.ylabel('Congregations')
plt.xlabel('ViolentCrime')

image of error

Answer 1

plt.plot considers its first two positional arguments to be a labels of x and y axes.

Plotting labelled data

There's a convenient way for plotting objects with labelled data (i.e. data that can be accessed by index obj['y']). Instead of giving the data in x and y, you can provide the object in the data parameter and just give the labels for x and y:

>>> plot('xlabel', 'ylabel', data=obj)

All indexable objects are supported. > This could e.g. be a dict, a pandas.DataFrame or a structured numpy array.

Answer 2

I found the source of the error. Even after removing all commas and periods on my excel sheet, excel was automatically adding commas in the thousands. I found out how to remove them and it worked. I Ctl+A selected all the cells, then right clicked, selected Format Cells, go under the tab 'Number', and unselected the box 'Use 1000 separator (,)'