Base N Encoding

Data Science, AI and ML
#1

Before diving into BaseN encoding let’s first try to understand what is Base here?

In the numeral system, the Base or the radix is the number of digits or a combination of digits and letters used to represent the numbers. The most common base we use in our life is 10 or decimal system as here we use 10 unique digits i.e 0 to 9 to represent all the numbers. Another widely used system is binary i.e. the base is 2. It uses 0 and 1 i.e 2 digits to express all the numbers.

For Binary encoding, the Base is 2 which means it converts the numerical values of a category into its respective Binary form. If you want to change the Base of encoding scheme you may use Base N encoder. In the case when categories are more and binary encoding is not able to handle the dimensionality then we can use a larger base such as 4 or 8.