When it comes to trees, the API for handling categoricals is simpler than
the implementation. Traditionally, tree-based models' handling of
categorical variables differs from both ordinal and one-hot encoding, while
both of those will work reasonably well for many problems. We are working
on implem
That's an excellent discussion! I've always wondered how other tools like R
handled naturally categorical variables or not. LightGBM has a scikit-learn
API which handles categorical features by inputting their columns names (or
indexes):
```
import lightgbm
lgb=lightgbm.LGBMClassifier()
lgb.fit(*X*
