AI engineering glossary · Feature engineering data prep
What is ordinal variable?
Ordinal variable: A categorical variable whose values have a meaningful order but no guaranteed equal spacing between levels. Preserving that order in the encoding, with integers such as 1, 2, 3, lets a model use the ranking.
Ordinal variable: an example
Customer satisfaction rated Poor, Average, Good, Excellent is ordinal; Excellent is above Good but the gap is not a fixed amount.
Related terms
More Feature engineering data prep terms
- Outlier treatment
- Oversampling
- Polynomial features
- Power transform
- Quantile transform
- Rare category grouping
- Ratio feature
- Recursive feature elimination
Where you learn it
Ordinal 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.