Norminal and Ordinal input variables
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Description
It will be very helpful to include an example in UMAP documentation about how to handle nominal and ordinal input variables.
I come across a number of input variables like gender which can simply be one-hot encoded, but there are ones like "When did you last take anitibiotics?" One can, for example, choose, among 1 week ago, 2 weeks ago, 1 month ago, .. or none. There is an intrinsic order here. Do I simply one-hot encode them, in which case there will be a loss of information regarding the order.
Can I input all these together to UMAP using a relevant metric like hamming? I have left out the continuous input variables like height and weight as there is no off-the-shelf method available that can handle both continuous and categorical data together at the present time.
The examples in the UMAP documentation are mostly on input variables which are continuous. An example on nominal and ordinal input variables will be very much appreciated. Thank you for your help.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
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- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start with the existing UMAP documentation examples, which currently focus on continuous inputs, and review how nominal and ordinal variables are described. Add an example covering categorical encoding, intrinsic order, and the use of a relevant metric, while addressing how these inputs relate to continuous variables. Done means the documentation gives practical guidance for the cases described in the issue.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- documentation, machine-learning
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 42/100