I think that sklearn is unable to deal with pure categorical data, so if using that library, you do need to encode categorical data even for decision trees etc. There are other libraries, I think maybe one called H20 which does deal with categorical correctly.
I think that sklearn is unable to deal with pure categorical data, so if using that library, you do need to encode categorical data even for decision trees etc. There are other libraries, I think maybe one called H20 which does deal with categorical correctly.