I am trying to pre-process a small dataset. I don't understand why I am not supposed to do the thing I explained below:
For example, say we have an attribute that describes the temperature of the weather in a set of 3 nominal values: Hot, mild and cold. I understand these definitions may have derived from numerical values while summarising.
But why would we summarise such values that are on a scale, and lose the scale in the process?
Would it not help to have the algorithm(any classification algorithm) realise that the difference between hot and cold is twofold of the difference between hot and mild by representing hot, mild and cold as integers 1, 2 and 3 respectively?