AI engineering glossary · Feature engineering data prep
What is ordinal encoding?
Ordinal encoding (also called OrdinalEncoder): Mapping ordered categories to integers that respect their ranking, such as Low = 1, Medium = 2, High = 3. It keeps the order information in a single column, but assumes the steps between levels are roughly meaningful.
Ordinal encoding: an example
Education level mapped to 1 for 10th, 2 for 12th, 3 for graduate, 4 for postgraduate keeps the natural ranking in one column.
Related terms
More Feature engineering data prep terms
- Ordinal variable
- Outlier treatment
- Oversampling
- Polynomial features
- Power transform
- Quantile transform
- Rare category grouping
- Ratio feature
Where you learn it
Ordinal encoding is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.