Encoding Categorical Variables: A Deep Dive into Target Encoding

Data comes in different shapes and forms. One of those shapes and forms is known as categorical data.

This poses a problem because most Machine Learning algorithms use only numerical data as input. However, categorical data is usually not a challenge to deal with, thanks to simple, well-defined functions that transform them into numerical values. If you have taken any data science course, you will be familiar with the one hot encoding strategy for categorical features. This strategy is …

data preprocessing data science encoding feature engineering machine learning