Using Categorical Features for Segmentation Analysis

Often, we find datasets where there are a mix of continuous and categorical fields. In such cases, we can learn about our data and find patterns by segmenting the continuous variables with the categorical fields.

 As a specific example, imagine you are evaluating the return on investment from an ad campaign. The data you have access to contain measures of some calculated return on investment (ROI) metric. These values were calculated and recorded daily and you are analyzing data from the previous year. You have been tasked with finding data-driven insights on ways to improve the ad campaign. Looking at the ROI daily time series, you see a weekly oscillation in the data.

Segmenting by day of the week, you find the following ROI distributions (where 0 represents the first day of the week and 6 represents the last).

As a specific example, imagine you are evaluating the return on investment from an ad campaign. The data you have access to contain measures of some calculated return on investment (ROI) metric. These values were calculated and recorded daily and you are analyzing data from the previous year. You have been tasked with finding data-driven insights on ways to improve the ad campaign. Looking at the ROI daily time series, you see a weekly oscillation in the data. Segmenting by day of the week, you find the following ROI distributions (where 0 represents the first day of the week and 6 represents the last).

Since we don't have any categorical fields in the Boston housing dataset we are working with, we'll create one by effectively discretizing a continuous field. In our case, this will involve binning the data into "low", "medium", and "high" categories. It's important to note that we are not simply creating a categorical data field to illustrate the data analysis concepts in this section. As will be seen, doing this can reveal insights from the data that would otherwise be difficult to notice or altogether unavailable.