What is a categorical column?
Each value of a categorical column represents a certain category. For example, categorical is a column that contains only “Male” or “Female” as its values. Typically, the number of different values in a categorical column is much less than the number of records. Categorical data should be encoded in a special way to be suitable for a neural network. You may manually mark a column as categorical in Expert Mode (using Details button at Data Analysis Progress step). This feature may be beneficial for some cases. For example, your data has a column “Model” that has values “1”, “2”, “3”. By default, this column will be considered as a numeric, but it will be more beneficial to encode it as a categorical one.
