AI engineering glossary · Feature engineering data prep
What is nominal variable?
Nominal variable: A categorical variable whose values are names with no natural order or ranking. Encoding must not imply any order, so methods like one-hot encoding are preferred over plain integer codes for linear and distance-based models.
Nominal variable: an example
Blood group (A, B, AB, O) or Indian state names have no inherent ranking, so they are nominal.
Related terms
More Feature engineering data prep terms
- One-hot encoding
- Ordinal encoding
- Ordinal variable
- Outlier treatment
- Oversampling
- Polynomial features
- Power transform
- Quantile transform
Where you learn it
Nominal 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.