Categorical

machine learning algorithms can’t handle categorical variables. But decision trees (DTs) can. Classification trees don’t require a numerical goal either. Below is an illustration of a tree that classifies a subset of Cyrillic...

DATA PREPROCESSINGSix ways of matchmaking categories and numbers10 min read·19 hours agoAh, categorical data — the colourful characters in our datasets that machines just can’t seem to grasp. That is where “red” becomes 1,...

We do the model comparison using the the loo package (9, 10) for leave-one-out cross validation. For an alternate approach using the WAIC criteria (11) I suggest you read this post also published by...

Why we are able to’t arbitrarily encode categorical featuresIt’s well-known that many machine learning models can’t process categorical features natively. While there are some exceptions, it’s normally as much as the practitioner to come...