Encoding Categorical Variables in Machine Learning Dataset

What is Categorical Data .Encoding Categorical Variables in Machine Learning Dataset

What is Categorical Data

Categorical variables are those values in a dataset that are selected from a group of categories or labels. Typically, any data attribute which is categorical in nature represents discrete values that belong to a specific finite set of categories or classes. These are also often known as classes or labels in the context of attributes or variables which are to be predicted by a model (popularly known as response variables). These discrete values can be text or numeric in nature (or even unstructured data like images!).

There are two major classes of categorical data, nominal and ordinal.

In any nominal categorical data attribute, there is no concept of ordering amongst the values of that attribute. Consider a simple example of weather categories like — sunny, cloudy, rainy, etc. These are without any concept or notion of order (windy doesn’t always occur before sunny nor is it smaller or bigger than sunny).

For example, the variable may be “color” and may take on the values “red,” “green,” and “green.” Or the variable Gender with the values of male or female is categorical, and so is the variable marital status with the values of never married, married, divorced, or widowed.

Another example, in a survey about the preferred brand of car they owned, the result would be categorical (e.g. Tesla, Toyota, Ford, None, etc.). Responses fall into a fixed set of categories.

Ordinal categorical attributes have some sense or notion of order amongst its values. For instance, say shirt sizes. It is quite evident that order or in this case ‘size’ matters when thinking about shirts (S is smaller than M which is smaller than L and so on).

data data-science python machine-learning

🔵 Intellipaat Data Science with Python course: https://intellipaat.com/python-for-data-science-training/In this Data Science With Python Training video, you...

Applied Data Analysis in Python Machine learning and Data science, we will investigate the use of scikit-learn for machine learning to discover things about whatever data may come across your desk.

Practice your skills in Data Science with Python, by learning and then trying all these hands-on, interactive projects, that I have posted for you.

Practice your skills in Data Science with Python, by learning and then trying all these hands-on, interactive projects, that I have posted for you.

Practice your skills in Data Science with Python, by learning and then trying all these hands-on, interactive projects, that I have posted for you.