Great article, just one small nitpick: sklearn actually does support encoding text labels. I just tested with your dataset to reconfirm, sklearn.preprocessing.L

Great article, just one small nitpick: sklearn actually does support encoding text labels. I just tested with your dataset to reconfirm, sklearn.preprocessing.LabelEncoder() has no problem encoding labels correctly. It probably makes little difference if you use map or LabelEncoder but I tend to prefer LabelEncoder to avoid typos and make it more concise (those dicts can become very long if we have a lot of labels).