Encoding Categorical Variables

70 min
Block 6 — Transforming the data
Objective
separate nominal, ordinal and binary variables rigorously; master one-hot encoding, ordinal encoding and label encoding, and know the exact domain of validity of each; identify and quantify the distortion an artificial order injects into a model; handle high cardinality with methods whose dimensional cost and leakage risk are both known; implement the whole thing correctly in a ColumnTransformer fitted on the training set alone.
Estimated duration
60 minutes
Prerequisites
chapters 005 (dataset structure), 006 (features and target), 013 (exploratory data analysis) and 014 (descriptive statistics); the notion of a train/test split (chapter 026)
Associated quizzes
022.1-quiz-why-encoding.md to 022.7-quiz-columntransformer.md

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This lesson is part of the “Transforming the Data” module

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