AI engineering glossary · Feature engineering data prep
What is high-cardinality feature?
High-cardinality feature: A categorical feature with a very large number of distinct values, such as user IDs, product SKUs or pincodes. One-hot encoding it creates enormous, sparse data, so alternatives such as target, frequency or hashed encoding, or embeddings, are used.
High-cardinality feature: an example
India has over 19,000 pincodes; one-hot encoding a pincode column would create thousands of mostly-zero columns.
Related terms
More Feature engineering data prep terms
- Hot-deck imputation
- Information value
- Interaction feature
- Interpolation
- IQR method
- Iterative imputation
- K-fold target encoding
- KNN imputation
Where you learn it
High-cardinality feature is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.