KNN classification with categorical data

Question

I'm busy working on a project involving k-nearest neighbour regression. I have mixed numerical and categorical fields. The categorical values are ordinal (e.g. bank name, account type). Numerical types are, for e.g. salary and age. There are also some binary types (e.g., male, female).

How do I go about incorporating categorical values into the KNN analysis?

As far as I'm aware, one cannot simply map each categorical field to number keys (e.g. bank 1 = 1; bank 2 = 2, etc.), so I need a better approach for using the categorical fields. I have heard that one can use binary numbers - is this a feasible method? Advice would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You need to find a distance function that works for your data. The use of binary indicator variables solves this problem implicitly. This has the benefit of allowing you to continue your probably matrix based implementation with this kind of data, but a much simpler way - and appropriate for most distance based methods - is to just use a modified distance function.

There is an infinite number of such combinations. You need to experiment which works best for you. Essentially, you might want to use some classic metric on the numeric values (usually with normalization applied; but it may make sense to also move this normalization into the distance function), plus a distance on the other attributes, scaled appropriately.

In most real application domains of distance based algorithms, this is the most difficult part, optimizing your domain specific distance function. You can see this as part of preprocessing: defining similarity.

There is much more than just Euclidean distance. There are various set theoretic measures which may be much more appropriate in your case. For example, Tanimoto coefficient, Jaccard similarity, Dice's coefficient and so on. Cosine might be an option, too.

There are whole conferences dedicated to the topics of similarity search - nobody claimed this is trivial in anything but Euclidean vector spaces (and actually, not even there): http://www.sisap.org/2012

Answer 2

The most straight forward way to convert categorical data into numeric is by using indicator vectors. See the reference I posted at my previous comment.