¿Puede la red neuronal funcionar con datos categóricos?

Can neural network work with categorical data?

Because neural networks work internally with numeric data, binary data (such as sex, which can be male or female) and categorical data (such as a community, which can be suburban, city or rural) must be encoded in numeric form.

Machine learning models require all input and output variables to be numeric. This means that if your data contains categorical data, you must encode it to numbers before you can fit and evaluate a model. The two most popular techniques are an Ordinal Encoding and a One-Hot Encoding.

The two most commonly used feature selection methods for categorical input data when the target variable is also categorical (e.g. classification predictive modeling) are the chi-squared statistic and the mutual information statistic.

One-Hot Encoding is the most common, correct way to deal with non-ordinal categorical data. It consists of creating an additional feature for each group of the categorical feature and mark each observation belonging (Value=1) or not (Value=0) to that group.

Improve classification with many categorical variables

1. For each categorical variable with many possible value, take only the one having more than 10000 sample that takes this value.
2. Build dummy variable for each categorical one (if 10 countries then for each sample add a binary vector of size 10).

To use a categorical variable as input you can encode it as a set of boolean inputs, each representing one category with 0 or 1. For instance, your ‘purpose’ variable can be transformed into three boolean variables (furniture, education, cars). Thanks user3324985.

To use a categorical variable as input you can encode it as a set of boolean inputs, each representing one category with 0 or 1. For instance, your ‘purpose’ variable can be transformed into three boolean variables (furniture, education, cars).

D. Our goal is to use categorical variables to explain variation in Y, a quantitative dependent variable. 1. We need to convert the categorical variable gender into a form that “makes sense” to regression analysis. E. One way to represent a categorical variable is to code the categories 0 and 1 as follows:

One of the issues I had was the handling of categorical values. While a decision tree or forest has no issues with such data (they actually work really well with it), it’s a bit more tricky to handle with a NN. Of course, we all learned One-Hot-Encoding is a way to map this kind of data into a NN passable format.