examples/preprocessing/plot_target_encoder.py - main - githubmirror/scikit-learn

examples/preprocessing/plot_target_encoder.py
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achyuthan.s
DOC: Clarify recommended usage of fit_transform() vs fit().transform() in TargetEncoder (#32347)
23 окт 2025, 18:15
23 окт 2025, 18:15eaab848
"""
============================================
Comparing Target Encoder with Other Encoders
============================================

.. currentmodule:: sklearn.preprocessing

The :class:`TargetEncoder` uses the value of the target to encode each
categorical feature. In this example, we will compare three different approaches
for handling categorical features: :class:`TargetEncoder`,
:class:`OrdinalEncoder`, :class:`OneHotEncoder` and dropping the category.

.. note::
    `fit(X, y).transform(X)` does not equal `fit_transform(X, y)` because a
    cross fitting scheme is used in `fit_transform` for encoding. See the
    :ref:`User Guide <target_encoder>` for details.
"""

# Authors: The scikit-learn developers
# SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause

# %%
# Loading Data from OpenML
# ========================
# First, we load the wine reviews dataset, where the target is the points given
# be a reviewer:
from sklearn.datasets import fetch_openml

wine_reviews = fetch_openml(data_id=42074, as_frame=True)

df = wine_reviews.frame
df.head()

# %%
# For this example, we use the following subset of numerical and categorical
# features in the data. The target are continuous values from 80 to 100:
numerical_features = ["price"]
categorical_features = [
    "country",
    "province",
    "region_1",
    "region_2",
    "variety",
    "winery",
]
target_name = "points"

X = df[numerical_features + categorical_features]
y = df[target_name]

_ = y.hist()

# %%
# Training and Evaluating Pipelines with Different Encoders
# =========================================================
# In this section, we will evaluate pipelines with
# :class:`~sklearn.ensemble.HistGradientBoostingRegressor` with different encoding
# strategies. First, we list out the encoders we will be using to preprocess
# the categorical features:
from sklearn.compose import ColumnTransformer
from sklearn.preprocessing import OneHotEncoder, OrdinalEncoder, TargetEncoder

categorical_preprocessors = [
    ("drop", "drop"),
    ("ordinal", OrdinalEncoder(handle_unknown="use_encoded_value", unknown_value=-1)),
    (
        "one_hot",
        OneHotEncoder(handle_unknown="ignore", max_categories=20, sparse_output=False),
    ),
    ("target", TargetEncoder(target_type="continuous")),
]

# %%
# Next, we evaluate the models using cross validation and record the results:
from sklearn.ensemble import HistGradientBoostingRegressor
from sklearn.model_selection import cross_validate
from sklearn.pipeline import make_pipeline

n_cv_folds = 3
max_iter = 20
results = []


def evaluate_model_and_store(name, pipe):
    result = cross_validate(
        pipe,
        X,
        y,
        scoring="neg_root_mean_squared_error",
        cv=n_cv_folds,
        return_train_score=True,
    )
    rmse_test_score = -result["test_score"]
    rmse_train_score = -result["train_score"]
    results.append(
        {
            "preprocessor": name,
            "rmse_test_mean": rmse_test_score.mean(),
            "rmse_test_std": rmse_train_score.std(),
            "rmse_train_mean": rmse_train_score.mean(),
            "rmse_train_std": rmse_train_score.std(),
        }
    )


for name, categorical_preprocessor in categorical_preprocessors:
    preprocessor = ColumnTransformer(
        [
            ("numerical", "passthrough", numerical_features),
            ("categorical", categorical_preprocessor, categorical_features),
        ]
    )
    pipe = make_pipeline(
        preprocessor, HistGradientBoostingRegressor(random_state=0, max_iter=max_iter)
    )
    evaluate_model_and_store(name, pipe)


# %%
# Native Categorical Feature Support
# ==================================
# In this section, we build and evaluate a pipeline that uses native categorical
# feature support in :class:`~sklearn.ensemble.HistGradientBoostingRegressor`,
# which only supports up to 255 unique categories. In our dataset, the most of
# the categorical features have more than 255 unique categories:
n_unique_categories = df[categorical_features].nunique().sort_values(ascending=False)
n_unique_categories

# %%
# To workaround the limitation above, we group the categorical features into
# low cardinality and high cardinality features. The high cardinality features
# will be target encoded and the low cardinality features will use the native
# categorical feature in gradient boosting.
high_cardinality_features = n_unique_categories[n_unique_categories > 255].index
low_cardinality_features = n_unique_categories[n_unique_categories <= 255].index
mixed_encoded_preprocessor = ColumnTransformer(
    [
        ("numerical", "passthrough", numerical_features),
        (
            "high_cardinality",
            TargetEncoder(target_type="continuous"),
            high_cardinality_features,
        ),
        (
            "low_cardinality",
            OrdinalEncoder(handle_unknown="use_encoded_value", unknown_value=-1),
            low_cardinality_features,
        ),
    ],
    verbose_feature_names_out=False,
)

# The output of the of the preprocessor must be set to pandas so the
# gradient boosting model can detect the low cardinality features.
mixed_encoded_preprocessor.set_output(transform="pandas")
mixed_pipe = make_pipeline(
    mixed_encoded_preprocessor,
    HistGradientBoostingRegressor(
        random_state=0, max_iter=max_iter, categorical_features=low_cardinality_features
    ),
)
mixed_pipe

# %%
# Finally, we evaluate the pipeline using cross validation and record the results:
evaluate_model_and_store("mixed_target", mixed_pipe)

# %%
# Plotting the Results
# ====================
# In this section, we display the results by plotting the test and train scores:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd

results_df = (
    pd.DataFrame(results).set_index("preprocessor").sort_values("rmse_test_mean")
)

fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(
    1, 2, figsize=(12, 8), sharey=True, constrained_layout=True
)
xticks = range(len(results_df))
name_to_color = dict(
    zip((r["preprocessor"] for r in results), ["C0", "C1", "C2", "C3", "C4"])
)

for subset, ax in zip(["test", "train"], [ax1, ax2]):
    mean, std = f"rmse_{subset}_mean", f"rmse_{subset}_std"
    data = results_df[[mean, std]].sort_values(mean)
    ax.bar(
        x=xticks,
        height=data[mean],
        yerr=data[std],
        width=0.9,
        color=[name_to_color[name] for name in data.index],
    )
    ax.set(
        title=f"RMSE ({subset.title()})",
        xlabel="Encoding Scheme",
        xticks=xticks,
        xticklabels=data.index,
    )

# %%
# When evaluating the predictive performance on the test set, dropping the
# categories perform the worst and the target encoders performs the best. This
# can be explained as follows:
#
# - Dropping the categorical features makes the pipeline less expressive and
#   underfitting as a result;
# - Due to the high cardinality and to reduce the training time, the one-hot
#   encoding scheme uses `max_categories=20` which prevents the features from
#   expanding too much, which can result in underfitting.
# - If we had not set `max_categories=20`, the one-hot encoding scheme would have
#   likely made the pipeline overfitting as the number of features explodes with rare
#   category occurrences that are correlated with the target by chance (on the training
#   set only);
# - The ordinal encoding imposes an arbitrary order to the features which are then
#   treated as numerical values by the
#   :class:`~sklearn.ensemble.HistGradientBoostingRegressor`. Since this
#   model groups numerical features in 256 bins per feature, many unrelated categories
#   can be grouped together and as a result overall pipeline can underfit;
# - When using the target encoder, the same binning happens, but since the encoded
#   values are statistically ordered by marginal association with the target variable,
#   the binning use by the :class:`~sklearn.ensemble.HistGradientBoostingRegressor`
#   makes sense and leads to good results: the combination of smoothed target
#   encoding and binning works as a good regularizing strategy against
#   overfitting while not limiting the expressiveness of the pipeline too much.