ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

One-hot encoding

Imagine you have a lot of different fruits like apples, oranges, bananas, and pineapples. Now you want to put them in different baskets based on their type. But you don’t want to write the name of the fruit on the basket because it can take up a lot of space and also be confusing if you have a lot of fruits. So you decide to use some codes on the basket.

One-hot encoding is similar to what you did with your fruit baskets. It is a way to represent categorical data (like different types of fruits) using codes instead of words. In this case, instead of having one big list of fruits, we will break it down into different categories.

For example, let us take the fruits: apples, oranges, bananas, and pineapples. We can create four categories, each representing one fruit type. Then we assign a code to each category. The code should be unique but simple, like 0 or 1, that a computer can recognize easily.

Now, to represent a fruit, we use a row of numbers that are all zeros, except for the category that matches the fruit. For instance, if we have an apple, we would use the code for the "Apples" category and put a "1" on its place in the row. Then we would put zeros in the other categories because it's not an orange, banana or a pineapple.

The output would look like this:

Apples: 1 0 0 0
Oranges: 0 1 0 0
Bananas: 0 0 1 0
Pineapples: 0 0 0 1

We can use this type of encoding to represent any categorical data like gender, color, or size. It makes the data easier for computers to analyze and understand, which can help us make better decisions or predictions based on that data.