Feature Hashing on multiple categorical features(columns)

Hashing (Update)

Assuming that new categories might show up in some of the features, hashing is the way to go. Just 2 notes:

• Be aware of the possibility of collision and adjust the number of features accordingly
• In your case, you want to hash each feature separately

One Hot Vector

In case the number of categories for each feature is fixed and not too large, use one hot encoding.

I would recommend using either of the two:

1. sklearn.preprocessing.OneHotEncoder
2. pandas.get_dummies

---

Example

import pandas as pd
from sklearn.compose import ColumnTransformer
from sklearn.feature_extraction import FeatureHasher
from sklearn.preprocessing import OneHotEncoder

df = pd.DataFrame({'feature_1': ['A', 'G', 'T', 'A'],
                   'feature_2': ['cat', 'dog', 'elephant', 'zebra']})

# Approach 0 (Hashing per feature)
n_orig_features = df.shape[1]
hash_vector_size = 6
ct = ColumnTransformer([(f't_{i}', FeatureHasher(n_features=hash_vector_size, 
                        input_type='string'), i) for i in range(n_orig_features)])

res_0 = ct.fit_transform(df)  # res_0.shape[1] = n_orig_features * hash_vector_size

# Approach 1 (OHV)
res_1 = pd.get_dummies(df)

# Approach 2 (OHV)
res_2 = OneHotEncoder(sparse=False).fit_transform(df)

res_0 :

array([[ 0.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  1.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  1., -1.,  0., -1.],
       [ 0.,  0.,  0.,  1.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  2., -1.,  0.,  0.,  0.],
       [ 0., -1.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  0., -2.,  2.,  2., -1.,  0., -1.],
       [ 0.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  1.,  0.,  0.,  2.,  1., -1.,  0., -1.]])

res_1 :

   feature_1_A  feature_1_G  feature_1_T  feature_2_cat  feature_2_dog  feature_2_elephant  feature_2_zebra
0            1            0            0              1              0                   0                0
1            0            1            0              0              1                   0                0
2            0            0            1              0              0                   1                0
3            1            0            0              0              0                   0                1

res_2 :

array([[1., 0., 0., 1., 0., 0., 0.],
       [0., 1., 0., 0., 1., 0., 0.],
       [0., 0., 1., 0., 0., 1., 0.],
       [1., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 1.]])