When to do feature encoding with XGBoost, random forest

@pippo This will very much depend on your task. XGBoost and random Forest can handle categorical data themself. Although advanced data preparation can help to improve performance.

More on Data Preparation and Machine Learning you can find here:

There are more advanced preparation techniques like vtreat and other Python packages. Some examples are here (I have some code still on my machine that might get published in the future):

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