What are the machine learning classifiers that can handle directly categorical data

SA_H

What are the machine learning classifiers, rather than DT, that can handle both numerical variables and categorical predictors (without converting them to numerical data).

tftemme

Hi @summer_helmi,

We (RapidMiner) have a helpful model selection app, for exactly this kind of questions: https://mod.rapidminer.com/#app
You can select some properties of your data (for example the data types you have) and it provides you with a selection of applicable machine learning algorithms. Please also have a look at the Docs of the algorithms.

If you are already running RapidMiner, you can also press F1 on a machine learning operator to see the Capabilities of an operator.

Best regards,
Fabian

varunm1

Hello @summer_helmi

Most of the tree based algorithms and Naive bayes will deal with categorical data. There is also a variant of KNN that can handle this type of data.