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You're reading from  scikit-learn Cookbook - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inNov 2017
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781787286382
Edition2nd Edition
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Author (1)
Trent Hauck
Trent Hauck
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Trent Hauck

Trent Hauck is a data scientist living and working in the Seattle area. He grew up in Wichita, Kansas and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Kansas. He is the author of the book Instant Data Intensive Apps with pandas How-to, Packt Publishing—a book that can get you up to speed quickly with pandas and other associated technologies.
Read more about Trent Hauck

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Working with categorical variables

Categorical variables are a problem. On one hand they provide valuable information; on the other hand, it's probably text—either the actual text or integers corresponding to the text—such as an index in a lookup table.

So, we clearly need to represent our text as integers for the model's sake, but we can't just use the id field or naively represent them. This is because we need to avoid a similar problem to the Creating binary features through thresholding recipe. If we treat data that is continuous, it must be interpreted as continuous.

Getting ready

The Boston dataset won't be useful for this section. While it's useful for feature binarization, it...

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scikit-learn Cookbook - Second Edition
Published in: Nov 2017Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781787286382

Author (1)

author image
Trent Hauck

Trent Hauck is a data scientist living and working in the Seattle area. He grew up in Wichita, Kansas and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Kansas. He is the author of the book Instant Data Intensive Apps with pandas How-to, Packt Publishing—a book that can get you up to speed quickly with pandas and other associated technologies.
Read more about Trent Hauck