Array of categorical variables vs one-hot encoding

Question

I have some JSON data to be transformed to a machine-learning friendly format. Every object in my data, which will eventually become an instance in my dataset, has the exact same fields (in this case, foo, bar and array). The array field contains a variable number of sub-objects (from 0 to 10). Each of these sub-objects has one categorical field with a massive range and some other fields which can be safely ignored. All categorical fields in these sub-objects belong to the same range.

Example (massively simplified object):

{
"foo": 1
"bar": 0.5
"array" : [
    {
        "categorical": "Lorem"
        "other": 34
        "stuff": 56
    },
    {
        "categorical": "Ipsum"
        "other": 53
        "stuff": 12
    },
    {
        "categorical": "Dolore"
        "other": 6
        "stuff": 101
    }
]
}

Obviously foo and bar are easily represented as numeric attributes. I would now like to represent this array (array) as one large one-hot (or several-hot) vector. Assuming I don't care about any other field of the sub-objects except for the category field categorical, here is my question:

Question

Is it valid and possible to set more than one bit in a one-hot vector (which would make it, I assume, a several-hot vector) to represent all categories present in this instance? If not, how could it be done?

Answer 1

Yes, it will work. Basically by creating the encoding, scikit-learn's label encoder does the same thing, you are creating such more features each representing the presence or absence of that level in your sample. To represent d levels you need d-1 variables, so in your case that is what is exactly happening. However since you said, the number of levels can be massive it will not be a good idea to use a vector that massive. It would be a good idea to run some preliminary analysis and check if some levels are totally useless and dont relate to the response as well, some might have the exact same effect and hence those levels can be combined.