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Encoding categorical variables in Pandas

schedule Aug 11, 2023
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To encode categorical variables, either using one-hot encoding or dummy coding, use Pandas get_dummies(~) method.

As an example, consider the following DataFrame:

df = pd.DataFrame({"name":["alice","bob","cathy","david"],"major":["math","physics","math","english"]})
df
name major
0 alice math
1 bob physics
2 cathy math
3 david english

One-hot encoding

To perform one-hot encoding on the variable major:

pd.get_dummies(df, columns=["major"])
name major_english major_math major_physics
0 alice 0 1 0
1 bob 0 0 1
2 cathy 0 1 0
3 david 1 0 0

Dummy coding

To perform dummy coding on major, pass drop_first=True like so:

pd.get_dummies(df, columns=["major"], drop_first=True)
name major_math major_physics
0 alice 1 0
1 bob 0 1
2 cathy 1 0
3 david 0 0
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Published by Isshin Inada
Edited by 0 others
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