From the course: Data Science Foundations: Data Assessment for Predictive Modeling

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What is dummy coding?

What is dummy coding?

From the course: Data Science Foundations: Data Assessment for Predictive Modeling

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What is dummy coding?

- [Instructor] What is dummy coding? Dummy coding is a special kind of data preparation that most software runs automatically on your categorical variables. That's both nominal and ordinal. We won't focus on the modeling aspect of it right now, just why you need to be aware of this while assessing your data. Take a nominal variable like marital status. We have four categories. These four categories will get converted into four new true or false variables. For instance, the new variable, marital, is true when the old variable, marital status, is equal to married. Why worry about this? Well, again, most software packages and analytics programming languages do this automatically during the modeling phase in your modeling algorithms. If you don't understand that, it's going to complicate interpreting the results. Also, when you go to deploy those same models, you need to make sure that you are creating these new variables…

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