Using static/meta information
There are some features such as the Acorn group, whether dynamic pricing is enabled, and so on, that are specific to a household, which will help the model learn patterns specific to these groups. Naturally, including that information makes intuitive sense. But as we discussed in Chapter 10, Global Forecasting Models, categorical features do not play well with machine learning models because they aren’t numerical. In that chapter, we discussed a few ways of encoding categorical features into numerical representations. We can use any of those in a deep learning model as well. But there is one way of handling categorical features that is unique to deep learning models – embedding vectors.
One-hot encoding and why it is not ideal
One of the ways of converting categorical features to numerical representation is one-hot encoding. It encodes the categorical features in a higher dimension, placing the categorical values equally distant in...