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Given a shallow or deep neural network, how would one go about using both continuous numerical input features and categorical features?

For example, given a network that receives a set of 100 continuous numerical values between 0 and 1 representing monetary value, how would I also include a time component? I would suspect one would have to discretize/translate intraday hours and minutes, e.g. 21:35 into bins of say 1 hour. This would yield a one-hot vector that I would then append to my input data that flows into the network. Would this be a valid approach?

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  • $\begingroup$ What is your definition of a neural network? As far as I remember, the input does not have to be categorial, you can also have neurons accepting continuous data. $\endgroup$ – Stefan Feb 7 at 18:19
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I refer the book Introduction to Machine Learning with Python (Müller and Guido) translated from French: "The neural networks are expecting all features to vary/change in a similar way, ideally a mean of 0 and a variance of 1". So I do not think to use a discretisation is a good idea, so to avoid bins feature or one-hot encoding is wise I guess.

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