How can I one hot encode in Python?

Question

I have a machine learning classification problem with 80% categorical variables. Must I use one hot encoding if I want to use some classifier for the classification? Can i pass the data to a classifier without the encoding?

I am trying to do the following for feature selection:

1. I read the train file:

   num_rows_to_read = 10000
   train_small = pd.read_csv("../../dataset/train.csv",   nrows=num_rows_to_read)
   

2. I change the type of the categorical features to 'category':

   non_categorial_features = ['orig_destination_distance',
                             'srch_adults_cnt',
                             'srch_children_cnt',
                             'srch_rm_cnt',
                             'cnt']
   
   for categorical_feature in list(train_small.columns):
       if categorical_feature not in non_categorial_features:
           train_small[categorical_feature] = train_small[categorical_feature].astype('category')
   

3. I use one hot encoding:

   train_small_with_dummies = pd.get_dummies(train_small, sparse=True)
   

The problem is that the 3'rd part often get stuck, although I am using a strong machine.

Thus, without the one hot encoding I can't do any feature selection, for determining the importance of the features.

What do you recommend?

Answer 1

Approach 1: You can use pandas' pd.get_dummies.

Example 1:

import pandas as pd
s = pd.Series(list('abca'))
pd.get_dummies(s)
Out[]: 
     a    b    c
0  1.0  0.0  0.0
1  0.0  1.0  0.0
2  0.0  0.0  1.0
3  1.0  0.0  0.0

Example 2:

The following will transform a given column into one hot. Use prefix to have multiple dummies.

import pandas as pd
        
df = pd.DataFrame({
          'A':['a','b','a'],
          'B':['b','a','c']
        })
df
Out[]: 
   A  B
0  a  b
1  b  a
2  a  c

# Get one hot encoding of columns B
one_hot = pd.get_dummies(df['B'])
# Drop column B as it is now encoded
df = df.drop('B',axis = 1)
# Join the encoded df
df = df.join(one_hot)
df  
Out[]: 
       A  a  b  c
    0  a  0  1  0
    1  b  1  0  0
    2  a  0  0  1

Approach 2: Use Scikit-learn

Using a OneHotEncoder has the advantage of being able to fit on some training data and then transform on some other data using the same instance. We also have handle_unknown to further control what the encoder does with unseen data.

Given a dataset with three features and four samples, we let the encoder find the maximum value per feature and transform the data to a binary one-hot encoding.

>>> from sklearn.preprocessing import OneHotEncoder
>>> enc = OneHotEncoder()
>>> enc.fit([[0, 0, 3], [1, 1, 0], [0, 2, 1], [1, 0, 2]])   
OneHotEncoder(categorical_features='all', dtype=<class 'numpy.float64'>,
   handle_unknown='error', n_values='auto', sparse=True)
>>> enc.n_values_
array([2, 3, 4])
>>> enc.feature_indices_
array([0, 2, 5, 9], dtype=int32)
>>> enc.transform([[0, 1, 1]]).toarray()
array([[ 1.,  0.,  0.,  1.,  0.,  0.,  1.,  0.,  0.]])

Here is the link for this example: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.preprocessing.OneHotEncoder.html