dummify {DataExplorer}

Dummify discrete features to binary columns

Description

Data dummification is also known as one hot encoding or feature binarization. It turns each category to a distinct column with binary (numeric) values.

Usage

dummify(data, maxcat = 50L, select = NULL)

Arguments

data

input data

maxcat

maximum categories allowed for each discrete feature. Default is 50.

select

names of selected features to be dummified. Default is NULL.

Details

Continuous features will be ignored if added in select.

select features will be ignored if categories exceed maxcat.

Value

dummified dataset (discrete features only) preserving original features. However, column order might be different.

Note

This is different from model.matrix, where the latter aims to create a full rank matrix for regression-like use cases. If your intention is to create a design matrix, use model.matrix instead.

Examples

## Dummify iris dataset
str(dummify(iris))

## Dummify diamonds dataset ignoring features with more than 5 categories
data("diamonds", package = "ggplot2")
str(dummify(diamonds, maxcat = 5))
str(dummify(diamonds, select = c("cut", "color")))