Overview for Make Indicator Variables

Use Make Indicator Variables to create columns of 0s and 1s from a categorical variable. Minitab creates a new column for each unique value in the original column. The value 1 means that the observation belongs in that category, and the value 0 means that it does not.

For example, an engineer makes indicator variables for the categorical variable Gender. Minitab produces one indicator variable for female (Gender_female) and one indicator variable for male (Gender_male). For each observation (row), Minitab stores the value of 1 for true and 0 for false.