{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sufficient-representations-for-categorical","title":"Sufficient Representations for Categorical Variables","arxiv_id":"1908.09874","date":"2019-08-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jonathan Johannemann","Vitor Hadad","Susan Athey","Stefan Wager"],"abstract":"Many learning algorithms require categorical data to be transformed into real vectors before it can be used as input. Often, categorical variables are encoded as one-hot (or dummy) vectors. However, this mode of representation can be wasteful since it adds many low-signal regressors, especially when the number of unique categories is large. In this paper, we investigate simple alternative solutions for universally consistent estimators that rely on lower-dimensional real-valued representations of categorical variables that are \"sufficient\" in the sense that no predictive information is lost. We then compare preexisting and proposed methods on simulated and observational datasets.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.09874v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.09874v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sufficient-representations-for-categorical","repo_url":"https://github.com/grf-labs/sufrep","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"sufficient-representations-for-categorical","repo_url":"https://github.com/atecon/CategoryEncoders","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"sufficient-representations-for-categorical","repo_url":"https://github.com/ischeinfeld/natality","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"BSD-3-Clause"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}