one-hot encoding

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A sparse vector in which:

• One element is set to 1.
• All other elements are set to 0.

One-hot encoding is commonly used to represent strings or identifiers that have a finite set of possible values. For example, suppose a given botany dataset chronicles 15,000 different species, each denoted with a unique string identifier. As part of feature engineering, you’ll probably encode those string identifiers as one-hot vectors in which the vector has a size of 15,000.