by Georgi Bikov | Mar 11, 2020 | Blog
Background Do you have tones of data and probably you want to take advantage of Data science and AI which are slowly but surely coming to the retail and ecommerce sector and these businesses are constantly generating huge amount of data. Before going into any modeling or data analysis each observer need to prepare the data in a way that machines can work with it. We decided to write an article about main approaches for data preparation of categorical variables called data encoding mainly observed in survey data. What data preparation means? Computers like variable as numbers therefore all textual values need to be presented in their numerical equivalent in order to be used for machine learning algorithms and deep learning neural networks. Simply they don’t like text. Here is an example. We have variables like: “Brand of car” with values “Mercedes”,”BMW” or others “Retailers Name” with values like “Kaufland”, “Metro” or “Mr.Bricolage” . “Sex” – “Male”, “Female” and many others...
