How to handle categorical features in K-means?
Label encoding is not a good idea if the nature of categories are not ordinal (it is actually not my favorite anyways). Use one-hot encoding and see how it works. You may apply a feature extraction on top of it, e.g. PCA, to reduce the noise coming from sparsity. The other idea is to label categories by their fraction in the feature, for example:
[a,b,b,c,a,a] --&gt; [3/6, 2/6, 2/6, 1/6, 3/6, 3/6]