WupQ5 - Q4 - Ordinal Encoder

[jujuForum]

Dear scikit learn teachers,
I’m not sure why we are supposed to use Ordinal encoder for categorical data this time?
Using one hot encoder returned poor results (~0.71)
Thanks for your help and tremendous work!
best,
Julien

[tanh_lines]

I have the same question! I am not too sure why OrdinalEncoder is used here. I don’t see any ordinal categories? Does OHE perform poorly because of an explosion of columns/high dimensionality in this dataset, given there are 40+ categorical columns?

[ThomasLoock]

Hi, the same question was already answered in this thread:

OrdinalEncoder and decision tree model?

To what I have gathered tree models are not affected by One hot encoding the values of the categorical variables, then why is OrdinalEncoder used in the first lecture? Except for the handling of unknown_values.