lmcinnes / lmcinnes/umap

How to handle categorical variables in Parametric UMAP?

Open
#873 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
8.3k
Forks
871
Avg merge
1d 13h
Merged PRs (30d)
5

Description

First of all, thank you so much for releasing the Parametric UMAP it works like dream. now I am able to project the unseen data in just a sec and it really helps with my use case.

Currently, I have a mixed dataset and I simply use the one-hot for categorical variables, I have read some old posts before parametric UMAP is available, the approach is to separate the numerical and categorical features into two and one use jaccard/dice distance metrics then combine together. I am wondering if that's still the best way to go with the Parametric UMAP. or if there is a way that we can fit the embedding through umap_loss.

thanks in advance!

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the Parametric UMAP entry point and the umap_loss mentioned in the issue, then check the existing handling of mixed numerical and categorical data. The issue does not name files or tests; done would require a decided, documented approach for categorical variables in Parametric UMAP.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
machine-learning
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.