[scikit-learn] Why does sklearn require one-hot-encoding for categorical features? Can we have a "factor" data type?

[Joel Nothman]

When it comes to trees, the API for handling categoricals is simpler than
the implementation. Traditionally, tree-based models' handling of
categorical variables differs from both ordinal and one-hot encoding, while
both of those will work reasonably well for many problems. We are working
on implementing categorical handling in trees (
https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/issues/15550,
https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/pull/12866)...
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