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I have a dataset in which the response variable is Sick(1) or not sick (2). As for the variables, there are a few numeric ones (2/14), all the others are variables by levels (example: 1-Abdominal pain, 2-Throat pain...).
I had two questions:
1-Can a multilayer perceptron classify a binary variable? Or can it only return numerical values?
2-Can binary or leveled variables be passed as training to the multilayer perceptron?
Thank you very much.
1 - Yes, a multilayer perceptron can be used for classification and for binary classification too. It will return a probability that an instance belongs to a certain class. In the case of binary classification a multilayer perceptron with one output may be used. Then one class is labeled as 0, the other one as 1. The probability boundary (for example 0.5) separates instances into two classes.
2 - Yes, nominal and ordinal data can be used as inputs in a perceptron. But it is necessary to encode them before use.
