To One-Hot-Encode or not to One-Hot-Encode?
An intuitive explanation, why we should encode categorical features, is that otherwise there will be absolutely another sense of "closeness" between features of the same type. The model will treat this features as continuous and as a result if you have two points in your feature space (p1 with CountryCode 61 and p2 CountryCode 962) and then you add the third point p3 with CountryCode 81, then model will miss out, that it can't evaluate distances between 61, 962 and 81.