Skip to Content
Python Data Cleaning and Preparation Best Practices
book

Python Data Cleaning and Preparation Best Practices

by Maria Zervou
September 2024
Beginner to intermediate
456 pages
11h 53m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Python Data Cleaning and Preparation Best Practices

10

Handling Categorical Features

Handling categorical features involves representing and processing information that isn’t inherently numerical. Categorical features are attributes that can take on a limited, fixed number of values or categories, and they often define distinct categories or groups within a dataset, such as types of products, genres of books, or customer segments. Effectively managing categorical data is crucial because most machine learning (ML) algorithms require numerical inputs.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Label encoding
  • One-hot encoding
  • Target encoding (mean encoding)
  • Frequency encoding
  • Binary encoding

Technical requirements

The complete code for this chapter can be found in the following GitHub ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Practical Python Data Wrangling and Data Quality

Practical Python Data Wrangling and Data Quality

Susan E. McGregor

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781837634743