Categorical Features: What’s Wrong With Label Encoding?

Why we can’t arbitrarily encode categorical features

Harrison Hoffman
Towards Data Science
10 min readNov 20, 2023

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It’s well known that many machine learning models can’t process categorical features natively. While there are some exceptions, it’s usually up to the practitioner to decide on a numeric representation of each categorical feature. There are many ways to accomplish this, but one…

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Believer, husband, dad, and data scientist interested in applied math, data science, software development, and machine learning.