Machine Learning for Healthcare Analytics Projects

One-hot encoding

Now, we need to take care of the fact that we have values such as Others, Middle Eastern, and a ? all in the same column. We will have to convert the data to categorical variables so that the machine learning algorithm can read them. These variables are also called one-hot encoded vectors and they can be created easily using pandas:

1. All we need to do is use the get_dummies function. This will convert the values in the x dataset to categorical variables and show the dummy values. This is done using the following line:

X = pd.get_dummies(x)

2. Now, if we print out the DataFrame, we won't be able to see everything in the window because there are many more columns present. Instead, we will print out the values for all the columns ...