AI engineering glossary · Feature engineering data prep
What is categorical variable?
Categorical variable: A variable that takes values from a limited set of labels or groups instead of measuring a quantity. Models need numbers, so categories must be encoded first. They may be nominal (no order) or ordinal (ordered).
Categorical variable: an example
City with values Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai is categorical, as is payment type with UPI, card and cash.
Related terms
More Feature engineering data prep terms
- Class imbalance
- Class weights
- Column transformer
- Constant feature
- Constant imputation
- Cook's distance
- Correlation filter
- Count vectorizer
Where you learn it
Categorical variable is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.