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I am trying to do clustering with a bunch (24) of categorical features. I have done some research and found a lot of people recommending something such as K-Modes. I tried running K-Modes on my data and the best run had a cost of 27069.0, which seems pretty high.

Some of my features have only a few values, such as P, O, C, T, so I thought I could encode them. But others have many different values. Any tips on a clustering algorithm or some other approach? I would like to use Python.

EDIT: What about using Gower distance on the data and then using K-Means on that?

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You can one-hot encode all your features, first. Then, you will face with a sparse feature space. To resolve this issue, you can use an auto-encoder to encode all these values to a low-dimensional and more dense space. Then run one of your clustering methods such as k-means.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks! Any recommendations on how to do the auto-encoding part? $\endgroup$
    – formicaman
    Commented Mar 16, 2020 at 18:48
  • $\begingroup$ What if I use OneHotEncoder and then my resulting matrix is not sparse? $\endgroup$
    – formicaman
    Commented Mar 18, 2020 at 17:09
  • $\begingroup$ @formicaman as you described the data, after the encoding, it will be sparse. For the auto encoding, use an auto encoder : ) $\endgroup$
    – OmG
    Commented Mar 18, 2020 at 17:22
  • $\begingroup$ I used 'scipy.sparse.issparse(X_encoded)' and it returned 'False'. But I am looking at blog.keras.io/building-autoencoders-in-keras.html for auto-encoding. $\endgroup$
    – formicaman
    Commented Mar 18, 2020 at 17:47
  • $\begingroup$ @formicaman oops! You are in the wrong way! scipy.sparse.issparse is for the type of the variable, not about the concept of matrix sparsity! $\endgroup$
    – OmG
    Commented Mar 18, 2020 at 18:08

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