How to Deal with Categorical Data for Machine Learning - KDnuggets

Categorical data is a type of data that is used to group information with similar characteristics, while numerical data is a type of data that expresses information in the form of numbers. Why do we need encoding? We will also refer to a cheat sheet that shows when to use which type of encoding. In this method, each category is mapped to a vector that contains 1 and 0 denoting the presence or absence of the feature. The number of vectors depends on the number of categories for features.