Dummy variables

Dummy variables are categorical independent variables used in regression analysis. It is also known as a Boolean, indicator, qualitative, categorical, and binary variable. Dummy variables convert a categorical variable with N distinct values into N–1 dummy variables. It only takes the 1 and 0 binary values, which are equivalent to existence and nonexistence.

pandas offers the get_dummies() function to generate the dummy values. Let's understand the get_dummies() function through an example:

# Import pandas module
import pandas as pd

# Create pandas DataFrame
data=pd.DataFrame({'Gender':['F','M','M','F','M']})

# Check the top-5 records
data.head()

This results in the following output:

	Gender
0	F
1	M
2	M
3	F
4	M

In the preceding code block, we have created the DataFrame with the Gender column and generated the dummy variable using the get_dummies() function...