Target encoding categoricals risks leakage unless:

Question

Accepted Answer

You compute encodings inside CV using only training folds (and regularization/smoothing) — Target encoding must be fold-safe with smoothing — full-data encoding leaks.

Answer

You encode using full-data including validation labels freely

Answer

You replace targets with random noise always

Answer

You avoid any validation

Target encoding categoricals risks leakage unless:

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Full Explanation