Feature Engineering Lists\Vectors as values in dataframe
I think a good starting point is what you have mentioned. For every element in a list, create a feature for that element. If that element is present in the list for a data point, then the element is denoted as a 1 in your feature vector. If it is not present in the list, then it is denoted by 0. This is very much a bag-of-words type way to create features. You could limit the number of features by only taking the top k occurring elements, where you determine k. Another variant is using counts of frequencies, if an element appears multiple times in a list, but it doesn't sound like that is the case.