Nominal categorical variable with two levels: Label Encoding or One Hot encoding? For a nominal categorical variable that has two levels, e.g. Gender (levels = Male,Female), is it feasible to use label encoding instead of One Hot encoding ? If it is, are there any implications of using one encoding method over the other, for such a categorical variable ?
If you use one-hot here, you're just adding an unnecessary variable that is perfectly correlated with another variable in your model. Rather than thinking of it as a label encoding of gender where "0=male, 1=female", think of it as a binary flag for is_female, where "0=false, 1=true".