Data Types and Machine Learning Algorithms in Sklearn
<p>Does anyone know if the data type of a variable plays a (negative) role when running a machine learning algorithm in ski kit learn? </p>

<p>Here's a little background that may influence responses to this question: I have a 299 variable dataset where the output variable is a dummy variable. This will be a classification problem and I would like to try different options like logistic regression and tree based models. When I imported my dataset with pandas, I noticed that some of the variables were assigned a data type of int64 when, in fact, they are categorical variables. Is this going to be a problem for the machine learning algorithm? Please forgive me if this is a silly question...I am still relatively new to the machine learning world and while I have not seen anything in the literature on this topic, I did want to make sure I don't go off track before I even start.</p>