Encoding categorical variables in Data Analysis Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Encoding categorical variables

📖 Scenario: You work in a small online store. You have a list of products with their categories. You want to prepare this data for a computer program that only understands numbers, not words.

🎯 Goal: You will convert the product categories from words into numbers using encoding. This helps computers understand and analyze the data better.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with product names as keys and their categories as values

Create a list of unique categories

Create a dictionary that assigns a unique number to each category

Create a new dictionary with products and their encoded category numbers

Print the new encoded dictionary

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Stores and businesses often have product categories as words. Encoding them into numbers helps in building recommendation systems and sales analysis.

💼 Career

Data scientists and analysts frequently encode categorical data to prepare datasets for machine learning models.

1

Create the product data dictionary

Create a dictionary called products with these exact entries: 'T-shirt': 'Clothing', 'Jeans': 'Clothing', 'Coffee Mug': 'Kitchen', 'Notebook': 'Stationery', 'Pen': 'Stationery'.

Data Analysis Python

# Create the products dictionary with product names and categories
# Your code here

Hint

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary. Each entry has a product name as key and category as value.

2

Create a list of unique categories

Create a list called categories that contains the unique category names from the products dictionary values.

Data Analysis Python

products = {
    'T-shirt': 'Clothing',
    'Jeans': 'Clothing',
    'Coffee Mug': 'Kitchen',
    'Notebook': 'Stationery',
    'Pen': 'Stationery'
}
# Create a list called categories with unique category names
# Your code here

Hint

Use products.values() to get all categories, then set() to get unique ones, and convert back to list.

3

Create the encoding dictionary

Create a dictionary called category_encoding that assigns a unique number to each category in the categories list. Use a for loop with variables index and category and enumerate(categories).

Data Analysis Python

products = {
    'T-shirt': 'Clothing',
    'Jeans': 'Clothing',
    'Coffee Mug': 'Kitchen',
    'Notebook': 'Stationery',
    'Pen': 'Stationery'
}
categories = list(set(products.values()))
# Create category_encoding dictionary assigning numbers to categories
# Your code here

Hint

Use enumerate() to get index and category, then assign index as value in category_encoding.

4

Create and print the encoded product categories

Create a new dictionary called encoded_products where each product name from products is a key and its value is the encoded number from category_encoding. Use a for loop with variables product and category iterating over products.items(). Then print encoded_products.

Data Analysis Python

products = {
    'T-shirt': 'Clothing',
    'Jeans': 'Clothing',
    'Coffee Mug': 'Kitchen',
    'Notebook': 'Stationery',
    'Pen': 'Stationery'
}
categories = list(set(products.values()))
category_encoding = {}
for index, category in enumerate(categories):
    category_encoding[category] = index
# Create encoded_products dictionary with product names and encoded category numbers
# Print encoded_products
# Your code here

Hint

Use a for loop over products.items() to build encoded_products. Then print it.