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You're reading from  Learning Predictive Analytics with Python

Product typeBook
Published inFeb 2016
Reading LevelIntermediate
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ISBN-139781783983261
Edition1st Edition
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Authors (2):
Ashish Kumar
Ashish Kumar
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Ashish Kumar

Ashish Kumar is a seasoned data science professional, a publisher author and a thought leader in the field of data science and machine learning. An IIT Madras graduate and a Young India Fellow, he has around 7 years of experience in implementing and deploying data science and machine learning solutions for challenging industry problems in both hands-on and leadership roles. Natural Language Procession, IoT Analytics, R Shiny product development, Ensemble ML methods etc. are his core areas of expertise. He is fluent in Python and R and teaches a popular ML course at Simplilearn. When not crunching data, Ashish sneaks off to the next hip beach around and enjoys the company of his Kindle. He also trains and mentors data science aspirants and fledgling start-ups.
Read more about Ashish Kumar

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Creating dummy variables


Creating dummy variables is a method to create separate variable for each category of a categorical variable., Although, the categorical variable contains plenty of information and might show a causal relationship with output variable, it can't be used in the predictive models like linear and logistic regression without any processing.

In our dataset, sex is a categorical variable with two categories that are male and female. We can create two dummy variables out of this, as follows:

dummy_sex=pd.get_dummies(data['sex'],prefix='sex')

The result of this statement is, as follows:

Fig. 2.17: Dummy variable for the sex variable in the Titanic dataset

This process is called dummifying, the variable creates two new variables that take either 1 or 0 value depending on what the sex of the passenger was. If the sex was female, sex_female would be 1 and sex_male would be 0. If the sex was male, sex_male would be 1 and sex_female would be 0. In general, all but one dummy variable...

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Learning Predictive Analytics with Python
Published in: Feb 2016Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781783983261

Authors (2)

author image
Ashish Kumar

Ashish Kumar is a seasoned data science professional, a publisher author and a thought leader in the field of data science and machine learning. An IIT Madras graduate and a Young India Fellow, he has around 7 years of experience in implementing and deploying data science and machine learning solutions for challenging industry problems in both hands-on and leadership roles. Natural Language Procession, IoT Analytics, R Shiny product development, Ensemble ML methods etc. are his core areas of expertise. He is fluent in Python and R and teaches a popular ML course at Simplilearn. When not crunching data, Ashish sneaks off to the next hip beach around and enjoys the company of his Kindle. He also trains and mentors data science aspirants and fledgling start-ups.
Read more about Ashish Kumar