No, there isn’t. Somebody’s working on this and the patch might be merged into mainline some day, but right now there’s no support for categorical variables in scikit-learn except dummy (one-hot) encoding.
I recommend using the dummyVars function in the caret package: example source You apply the same procedure to both the training and validation sets.
I have a machine learning classification problem with 80% categorical variables. Must I use one hot encoding if I want to use some classifier for the classification? Can i pass the data to a classifier without the encoding? I am trying to do the following for feature selection: I read the train file:num_rows_to_read = 10000 … Read more