Question

A data scientist is preparing a feature named 'shirt_size' with categories 'S', 'M', 'L', and 'XL' for a gradient-boosted tree model. They want the encoding to preserve the natural order of the sizes while producing a single numeric column. Which feature engineering approach best fits this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Apply ordinal encoding, mapping S=0, M=1, L=2, XL=3 into one integer column

Answer

Apply one-hot encoding to create four separate binary indicator columns

Answer

Apply standard scaling (z-score) directly to the string category values

Answer

Apply equal-width binning to group the categories into numeric ranges