Categorical attribute

[zhuoc]

Hi,

The dataset I selected contained a lot of categorical attributes (e.g. occupation, marital status). I'm wondering if I can treat one categorical attribute as N (N is the number of choices for this attribute) new attributes, where each of them is binary meaning it is or isn't choice i. (i = 1,...,N) Will it work for both NB and knn?

Thanks,

Zhuo 

[premkumar]

Hi,
Thats how I did and it worked. I suppose the categories are only for simpler representation of the data while the values they can take are in fact the true attributes.

Prem

[Leila Wehbe]

This might work but don't forget that the N attributes (for marital status for example) will be dependent (because you have only one of the attributes = 1 at once). This will reduce the performance of the naive bayes classifier.

We ask that there are at least 10 dimensions in the data, so you could disregard some of the categorical dimensions that have a high number of attributes if you want.

Leila

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