Categorical values

Concept and definition

Categorical values

What is Categorical values?

Categorical values are those that represent a category or group of data, in contrast to numerical values, which represent quantities. In machine learning, categorical values are important because many algorithms require data to be represented numerically.

For example, categorical values can represent the make of a car, the colour of a product, the category of an image or the type of a question. These values can be represented as character strings or as integers representing a particular category.

When processing categorical values in a machine learning model, it is necessary to encode them into a numerical form that can be interpreted by the algorithm. A common technique for encoding categorical values is one-hot encoding, which converts each categorical value into a binary vector in which only one of the elements is "1" and the others are "0".

It is important to note that the choice of the appropriate encoding of categorical values can significantly affect the performance of the machine learning model.

« Back to glossary

Do you want to get in touch?

CDRs contain data that a telecommunications company collects about phone calls, such as time and length of call. This data can be used in analytical applications.
Fill the form
Share:
What is Business Intelligence and how can it help your company?

The term Business Intelligence (or BI) defines the use of information technologies to identify, discover, and analyze business data, such as business [...]

Read More »
How AI is revolutionizing fraud detection in e-commerce

As e-commerce continues to grow at a dizzying pace, fraudsters are also finding new and sophisticated ways to exploit the potential [...]

Read More »
Market, privacy and artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are currently being used in companies to transform business processes, drive innovation and improve the quality of life of their [...]

Read More »
How to verify the viability of a business opportunity

It is convenient that by means of a brief questionnaire we are able to verify the viability of a business opportunity. Next, develop [...]

Read More »
See more entries
© Gamco 2021, All Rights Reserved - Legal notice - Privacy - Cookies