You are building a linear regression model on BigQuery ML to predict a customer's likelihood...

One-hot encoding is a technique that converts categorical variables into numerical variables by creating dummy variables for each possible category. Each dummy variable has a value of 1 if the original variable belongs to that category, and 0 otherwise1. One-hot encoding can help linear regression models to capture the effect of different categories on the target variable without imposing any ordinal relationship among them2. Dataprep is a service that allows you to explore, clean, and transform your data for analysis and machine learning. You can use Dataprep to apply one-hot encoding to your city name variable and make each city a column with binary values3. This way, you can prepare your data using the least amount of coding while maintaining the predictive variables. Therefore, using Dataprep to transform the state column using a one-hot encoding method is the best option for this use case.

References:

One Hot Encoding: A Beginner’s Guide

One-Hot Encoding in Linear Regression Models

Dataprep documentation