One hot encoding for multiple label(trainy) in .fit() method?

Question

I have a mobile price classification dataset in which I have 20 features and one target variable called price_range. I need to classify mobile prices as low, medium, high, very high.

I have applied a one-hot encoding to my target variable. After that, I split the data into trainX, testX, trainy, testy. So my shape for trainX and trainy is (1600,20) and (1600,4) respectively.

Now when I try to fit trainX and trainy to logisticRegresion, i.e -> lr.fit(trainX,trainy) I am getting an

error and it says: bad input (1600,4)

So, I understood that I have to give trainy value in shape (1600,1) but by one hot encoding I have got array of 4 columns for each individual price_range as per the concept of one hot encoding.

So now I am totally confused how people use one hot encoding for target variable in practice? please help me out.

Answer 1

So now I am totally confused how people use one hot encoding for target variable in practice? please help me out.

This mostly comes down to the tool you are using. Sklearn, which I assume you are using, does not use one hot encoded target variables. So your y should be of dimension (1600, 1) where the classes are 0, 1, 2 and 3. Instead of applying one hot encoding you can use a LabelEncoder to get it on the correct format.

I suspect the reason for your confusion comes from having seen deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow and Keras. With them you always one hot encode your target variable.

Short answer:

• Using sklearn: Label encode
• Using deep learning: one hot encode

Answer 2

Logistic regression is used for a binary response (two categories). Here are some things that you may consider doing:

1) If your target variables is normally distributed use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and manually choose cutoffs for your categories (i.e. 0-25 = 1, 26-50 = 2, 51-75 = 3, 76-100 = 4, or similar)

2) Otherwise, you should consider multinomial logistic regression. Here is a great summary of multinomial logistic regression in R: https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/r/dae/multinomial-logistic-regression/

Answer 3

You can try fitting one model for each of the 4 labels you have (so you need to do fit/predict 4 times). This way you'll have probabilities for each class separately. E.g. [0.1, 0.5, 0.45, 0.7], in this case 0.7 is the maximum so prediction would be "very high" (4th class).