How can the issue of converting strings (names) into numbers for input in an artificial neural network be addressed in PHP?

Converting strings (names) into numbers for input in an artificial neural network can be addressed by using techniques like one-hot encoding or word embeddings. One-hot encoding involves creating a binary vector where each element represents a unique string value. Word embeddings use a dense vector representation to capture semantic relationships between words. 

// Example of using one-hot encoding to convert strings into numbers
$names = ['John', 'Jane', 'Alice', 'Bob'];
$unique_names = array_unique($names);
$encoded_names = [];
foreach ($names as $name) {
    $encoded_name = array_fill(0, count($unique_names), 0);
    $encoded_name[array_search($name, $unique_names)] = 1;
    $encoded_names[] = $encoded_name;
}

print_r($encoded_names);

Keywords

string conversion numerical input artificial neural network PHP functions data preprocessing

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