onehotencoder random forest
In theory, categories themselves can be handled in decision trees. However, most python implementations will only work with numbers, so you need to convert them. It looks like you already have. OneHot Encoding is one way to do that, but now that you've done that, it isn't necessary. You may try other schemes to turn them into 1 2 3, if there isn't a logical reason to how you have them this way. This is called Categorical Encoding. One popular way is to order them alphabetically and number them. Another way, in order of their frequency. At the end of the day, it won't matter a whole lot because the random forest will bin the number according to its algorithm. It might make minor differences though, so maybe try different ways. But no, you won't need to OneHot encode your categories because they are already numbers.