How to deal with an SVM with categorical attributes？

原文链接：http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/52915/how-to-deal-with-an-svm-with-categorical-attributes

Q:

I have a space of 35 dimensions (attributes). My analytic problem is a simple classification one.

Out of 35 dimensions, more than 25 are categorical and each attribute takes more than 50+ types of values.

In that scenario, introducing a dummy variable also will not work for me.

How can I run an SVM on a space which has a lot of categorical attributes?

A:

up vote down vote

If you are sure the categorical attribute is actually ordinal, then just treat it as numerical attribute. If not, use some coding trick to turn it into numerical attribute. According to the suggestion by the author of libsvm, one can simply use 1-of-K coding. For instance, suppose a 1-dimensional category attribute taking value from  {A,B,C} . Just turn it into 3-dimensional numbers such that  A=(1,0,0) ,  B=(0,1,0) ,  C=(0,0,1) . Of course, this will incur significantly additional dimensions in your problem, but I think that is not a serious problem for modern SVM solver (no matter Linear type or Kernel type you adopt).