Problems with a binary one-hot (one-of-K) coding in python

Question

Binary one-hot (also known as one-of-K) coding lies in making one binary column for each distinct value for a categorical variable. For example, if one has a color column (categorical variable) that takes the values 'red', 'blue', 'yellow', and 'unknown' then a binary one-hot coding replaces the color column with binaries columns 'color=red', 'color=blue', and 'color=yellow'. I begin with data in a pandas data-frame and I want to use this data to train a model with scikit-learn. I know two ways to do the binary one-hot coding, none of them satisfactory to me.

1. Pandas and get_dummies in the categorical columns of the data-frame. This method seems excellent as far as the original data-frame contains all data available. That is, you do the one-hot coding before splitting your data in training, validation, and test sets. However, if the data is already split in different sets, this method doesn't work very well. Why? Because one of the data sets (say, the test set) can contain fewer values for a given variable. For example, it can happen that whereas the training set contain the values red, blue, yellow, and unknown for the variable color, the test set only contains red and blue. So the test set would end up having fewer columns than the training set. (I don't know either how the new columns are sorted, and if even having the same columns, this could be in a different order in each set).

2. Sklearn and DictVectorizer This solves the previous issue, as we can make sure that we are applying the very same transformation to the test set. However, the outcome of the transformation is a numpy array instead of a pandas data-frame. If we want to recover the output as a pandas data-frame, we need to (or at least this is the way I do it): 1) pandas.DataFrame(data=outcome of DictVectorizer transformation, index=index of original pandas data frame, columns= DictVectorizer().get_features_names) and 2) join along the index the resulting data-frame with the original one containing the numerical columns. This works, but it is somewhat cumbersome.

Is there a better way to do a binary one-hot encoding within a pandas data-frame if we have our data split in training and test set?

Answer 1

If your columns are in the same order, you can concatenate the dfs, use get_dummies, and then split them back again, e.g.,

encoded = pd.get_dummies(pd.concat([train,test], axis=0))
train_rows = train.shape[0]
train_encoded = encoded.iloc[:train_rows, :]
test_encoded = encoded.iloc[train_rows:, :] 

If your columns are not in the same order, then you'll have challenges regardless of what method you try.