Neural Network Projects with Python

Encoding categorical variables

In machine learning projects, it is common to receive datasets with categorical variables. Here are some examples of categorical variables in datasets:

• Gender: Male, female
• Day: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
• Country: USA, UK, China, Japan

Machine learning algorithms such as neural networks are unable to work with such categorical variables as they expect numerical variables. Therefore, we need to perform preprocessing on these variables before feeding them into a machine learning algorithm.

One common way to convert these categorical variables into numerical variables is a technique known as one-hot encoding, implemented by the get_dummies() function in pandas. One-hot encoding ...