[FIXED] Using Scikit-Learn OneHotEncoder with a Pandas DataFrame

Issue

I'm trying to replace a column within a Pandas DataFrame containing strings into a one-hot encoded equivalent using Scikit-Learn's OneHotEncoder. My code below doesn't work:

from sklearn.preprocessing import OneHotEncoder
# data is a Pandas DataFrame

jobs_encoder = OneHotEncoder()
jobs_encoder.fit(data['Profession'].unique().reshape(1, -1))
data['Profession'] = jobs_encoder.transform(data['Profession'].to_numpy().reshape(-1, 1))

It produces the following error (strings in the list are omitted):

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-91-3a1f568322f5> in <module>()
      3 jobs_encoder = OneHotEncoder()
      4 jobs_encoder.fit(data['Profession'].unique().reshape(1, -1))
----> 5 data['Profession'] = jobs_encoder.transform(data['Profession'].to_numpy().reshape(-1, 1))

/usr/local/anaconda3/envs/ml/lib/python3.6/site-packages/sklearn/preprocessing/_encoders.py in transform(self, X)
    730                                        copy=True)
    731         else:
--> 732             return self._transform_new(X)
    733 
    734     def inverse_transform(self, X):

/usr/local/anaconda3/envs/ml/lib/python3.6/site-packages/sklearn/preprocessing/_encoders.py in _transform_new(self, X)
    678         """New implementation assuming categorical input"""
    679         # validation of X happens in _check_X called by _transform
--> 680         X_int, X_mask = self._transform(X, handle_unknown=self.handle_unknown)
    681 
    682         n_samples, n_features = X_int.shape

/usr/local/anaconda3/envs/ml/lib/python3.6/site-packages/sklearn/preprocessing/_encoders.py in _transform(self, X, handle_unknown)
    120                     msg = ("Found unknown categories {0} in column {1}"
    121                            " during transform".format(diff, i))
--> 122                     raise ValueError(msg)
    123                 else:
    124                     # Set the problematic rows to an acceptable value and

ValueError: Found unknown categories ['...', ..., '...'] in column 0 during transform

Here's some sample data:

data['Profession'] =

0         unkn
1         safe
2         rece
3         unkn
4         lead
          ... 
111988    indu
111989    seni
111990    mess
111991    seni
111992    proj
Name: Profession, Length: 111993, dtype: object

What exactly am I doing wrong?

Solution

So turned out that Scikit-Learns LabelBinarizer gave me better luck in converting the data to one-hot encoded format, with help from Amnie's solution, my final code is as follows

import pandas as pd
from sklearn.preprocessing import LabelBinarizer

jobs_encoder = LabelBinarizer()
jobs_encoder.fit(data['Profession'])
transformed = jobs_encoder.transform(data['Profession'])
ohe_df = pd.DataFrame(transformed)
data = pd.concat([data, ohe_df], axis=1).drop(['Profession'], axis=1)

Answered By - dd.