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...