I wanted to implement a classification algorithm using NN but some columns have complex alphanumeric strings, so I just chose only the simpler columns to check. Here is an example with few elements of the columns I chose... Few Elements of the COL
As you can see these columns have A,G,C or T..etc. Some had combinations of the 4 letters but I removed it for now. My plan was to map each of these letters to values like 1,2,3 and 4 and then feed them to the NN.
Is this mapping acceptable for feeding into a dense NN?? Or is there any better method for doing this
I would not map it to integers like 1, 2, 3 etc because you are mistakenly giving them a certain order or rank which the NN may capture as important, although this ranking does not truly exist.
If you do not have high cardinality (many unique values) then you can apply One-Hot Encoding. If the cardinality is high, then you should use other encoding techniques, otherwise one-hot encoder will introduce a lot of dimensionality to your data and sparsity, which are not welcomed. You can find here some other interesting methods to encode categorical variables.
