[R] Remove enable_categorical
as parameter
#10018
Merged
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ref #9810
The Python DMatrix class introduced a parameter
enable_categorical
which needs to be manually changed from its default value in order to auto-detect categorical features in data frames.From earlier comments, I understand the idea behind this parameter was to ensure backwards compatibility with processing of data frames in previous versions of xgboost for python, which used to be accepted but with all columns taken as numerical.
In R, there hasn't been any release of xgboost where data frames would have been accepted by DMatrix constructors, so there is no historical compatibility issue that would call for having this parameter.
This PR removes it, making categorical column detection always trigger for data frames. Note that the user can still override it by manually passing
feature_types
, just like in the python interface.