Hands-On Transfer Learning with Python

Working with categorical data

Another important class of data commonly encountered is categorical data. Categorical features have discrete values that belong to a finite set of classes. These classes may be represented as text or numbers. Depending upon whether there is any order to the classes or not, categorical features are termed as ordinal and nominal respectively.

Nominal features are those categorical features that have a finite set of values but do not have any natural ordering to them. For instance, weather seasons, movie genres, and so on are all nominal features. Categorical features that have a finite set of classes with a natural ordering to them are termed as ordinal features. For instance, days of the week, dress sizes, and ...