Can sklearn random forest directly handle categorical features?

Question

Say I have a categorical feature, color, which takes the values

[\'red\', \'blue\', \'green\', \'orange\'],

and I want to use it to predict something in a ra

Answer 1

No, there isn't. Somebody's working on this and the patch might be merged into mainline some day, but right now there's no support for categorical variables in scikit-learn except dummy (one-hot) encoding.