API: numeric inference in Series constructor

[jbrockmendel]

Index.__new__ does inference on numeric data more aggressively than Series.__new__. It would be nice if these behaviors matched. (xref #40451 also about differenced between Series vs Index inference, though in that case Series is more aggressive about inference)

data = np.array([np.nan, np.nan, 2.0], dtype=object)

>>> pd.Series(data).dtype
dtype('O')

>>> pd.Index(data).dtype
dtype('float64')

>>> pd.array(data).dtype
Float64Dtype()

(if we passed data[:-1] to pd.array we'd get back a PandasArray[object] bc it passes skipna=True to lib.infer_dtype)

Changing the Series behavior to match Index breaks 207 tests (140 of which are for the str accessor; i expect some others are false-positives), so this would be a non-trivial API change.

[rhshadrach]

Is the current Index behavior more desirable than Series? Just considering the example, I would expect the Series result.

[jbrockmendel]

I find the Index behavior more useful, but would be OK with either way. Mostly I want them to be consistent.

[jorisvandenbossche]

You are specifically mentioning inferring numeric object dtype. But so there is a reason to infer object dtype in general, for scalars that otherwise have no numpy equivalent. It would find it also be a bit strange to infer object dtype depending on the content of it (i.e. if it turns out to be numeric, leave as object dtype)?

[jbrockmendel]

You are specifically mentioning inferring numeric object dtype.

The relevant cases where the behaviors differ are numeric and datetimelike, the latter is covered in #40451.

[jbrockmendel]

After experimenting with both possible changes (making Series behavior match Index or making Index behavior match Series), I'm now leaning towards preferring the Series behavior, i.e. inferring less aggressively.

In the branch that makes Series infer more, I've still got 49 test failures. The other branch I'm down to 3 (though with a ton of warnings to catch). In each case, some unrelated bugs surfaced that I'll try to address separately.

A couple of sticking points with the make-Index-less-aggressive option: 1) In the CategoricalDtype constructor we call Index and I think we do want the more aggressive casting there. 2) ensure_index casting is slightly different from Index; ATM ive kept it aggressive, but having non-matching behaviors isn't great.