While preprocessing the labels for a machine learning classifying task, I need to one hot encode the labels which take string values. It happens that OneHotEncoder from sklearn.preprocessing or to_categorical from kera.np_utils require int inputs. This means that I need to precede the one hot encoder with a LabelEncoder. I have done it by hand with a custom class:

class LabelOneHotEncoder():
    def __init__(self):
        self.ohe = OneHotEncoder()
        self.le = LabelEncoder()
    def fit_transform(self, x):
        features = self.le.fit_transform( x)
        return self.ohe.fit_transform( features.reshape(-1,1))
    def transform( self, x):
        return self.ohe.transform( self.la.transform( x.reshape(-1,1)))
    def inverse_tranform( self, x):
        return self.le.inverse_transform( self.ohe.inverse_tranform( x))
    def inverse_labels( self, x):
        return self.le.inverse_transform( x)

I am confident there must a way of doing it within the sklearn API using a sklearn.pipeline, but when using:

LabelOneHotEncoder = Pipeline( [ ("le",LabelEncoder), ("ohe", OneHotEncoder)])

I get the error ValueError: bad input shape () from the OneHotEncoder. My guess is that the output of the LabelEncoder needs to be reshaped, by adding a trivial second axis. I am not sure how to add this feature though.

It's strange that they don't play together nicely... I'm surprised. I'd extend the class to return the reshaped data like you suggested.

class ModifiedLabelEncoder(LabelEncoder):

    def fit_transform(self, y, *args, **kwargs):
        return super().fit_transform(y).reshape(-1, 1)

    def transform(self, y, *args, **kwargs):
        return super().transform(y).reshape(-1, 1)

Then using the pipeline should work.

pipe = Pipeline([("le", ModifiedLabelEncoder()), ("ohe", OneHotEncoder())])
pipe.fit_transform(['dog', 'cat', 'dog'])

https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/blob/a24c8b46/sklearn/preprocessing/label.py#L39