Topological Machine Learning for Mixed Numeric and Categorical Data
This addresses a common real-world data challenge for machine learning practitioners, though it appears incremental as it adapts existing topological methods to a new data type.
The paper tackles the problem of classifying mixed numeric and categorical data by proposing a novel topological machine learning method, and demonstrates that it outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms on a real-world heart disease dataset.
Topological data analysis is a relatively new branch of machine learning that excels in studying high dimensional data, and is theoretically known to be robust against noise. Meanwhile, data objects with mixed numeric and categorical attributes are ubiquitous in real-world applications. However, topological methods are usually applied to point cloud data, and to the best of our knowledge there is no available framework for the classification of mixed data using topological methods. In this paper, we propose a novel topological machine learning method for mixed data classification. In the proposed method, we use theory from topological data analysis such as persistent homology, persistence diagrams and Wasserstein distance to study mixed data. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by experiments on a real-world heart disease dataset. Experimental results show that our topological method outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms in the prediction of heart disease.