Python: Real World Machine Learning

Label encoding

In supervised learning, we usually deal with a variety of labels. These can be in the form of numbers or words. If they are numbers, then the algorithm can use them directly. However, a lot of times, labels need to be in human readable form. So, people usually label the training data with words. Label encoding refers to transforming the word labels into numerical form so that the algorithms can understand how to operate on them. Let's take a look at how to do this.

How to do it…

1. Create a new Python file, and import the preprocessing package:

   from sklearn import preprocessing

2. This package contains various functions that are needed for data preprocessing. Let's define the label encoder, as follows:

   label_encoder = preprocessing.LabelEncoder() ...