So I have this dataset I need to perform several techniques on as part of a data mining/machine learning project of some sort in PYTHON. There are a couple of features however, that have me very worried as I don't know whether I whould handle them as Categorical (ordinal to be precise) or as numeric.
- The first feature takes integer values from 0 to 9 and it's supposed to represent population percentage of a certain religion (so 0 is 0%, 1 is 1-10%, 9 is 100%)
- The second feature represents contibution (money) and also takes values from 0-9 depending on how big the contribution is (so 0 is.. well, 0 , 1 is 1-49 , 9 is 20000+).
How should I handle these features? Are they interval data? Should I one-hot-encode them into dummies or should I leave them as they are now?
I am going to have to perform some clustering and classification techniques on the dataset. Thank you in advance!