Recipe Objective

Have you ever tried to encode ordinal categorical features by making a simple function which is quiet easy to understand and change.

So this is the recipe on how we can encode ordinal categorical features in Python.

Step 1 - Import the library

We have imported pandas which will be needed for the dataset.

Step 2 - Setting up the Data

We have created a dataframe with one feature "score" with categorical variables "Low", "Medium" and "High". df = pd.DataFrame({"Score": ["Low", "Low", "Medium", "Medium", "High", "Low", "Medium","High", "Low"]}) print(df)

Step 3 - Encoding variable

We have created an object scale_mapper in which we have passed the encoding parameter i.e putting numerical values instead of categorical variable. We have made a feature scale in which there will be numerical encoded values. scale_mapper = {"Low":1, "Medium":2, "High":3} df["Scale"] = df["Score"].replace(scale_mapper) print(df) So the output comes as:

    Score
0     Low
1     Low
2  Medium
3  Medium
4    High
5     Low
6  Medium
7    High
8     Low

    Score  Scale
0     Low      1
1     Low      1
2  Medium      2
3  Medium      2
4    High      3
5     Low      1
6  Medium      2
7    High      3
8     Low      1