I have about 3,000,000 samples and each sample is described by a list of size about 20. Some elements in this list are categorical, for example name of cities, day of week, etc. (some categories have a large number of options, for example one category is url with more than 700,000 unique elements in my dataset!). Also some elements have real values, for example for time of day.My data is labelled (2 categories,) and I need to train a classifier for test data. I am inclined towards decision tree or random forest since they seem to be a good choice for this type of problem.Now my questions are:1) How do I pre-process categorical data? one-hot-encoding seem to be the right choice but given that some of my categories have huge number of possible values, one hot encoder will produce very long words! am I correct?2) How do I combine data from different categories? For example data from category 'cities' with data from 'urls', since they have different lengths. Do I simply concatenate them?3) How can I combine categorical data with real valued data, for example 'name of cities' with 'time of day' to produce one matrix that can then be passed to decision tree classifier?4) Are there any special normalisation, etc. that I have to do before passing data to classifier?I plan to use python and Scikit for this task.Many thanks for your help.
decision trees on mix of categorical and real value parameters
bigdata;scikit learn;decision trees;categorical data