How to work with predictor variables which are all categorical but the target variable is an integer? I have historical data with time (hour, day, etc.) and region code linked to number of events in the integer format. I was starting to build a model in R to predict number of events given time and region. I explored SVM in R but seems like it is a non-starter with categorical variables. Any other approach which might of use here. Thanks for your response.
I think you need to create a dummy variables from your categorical variables. Almost all machine learning algorithms can't work with categorical variables.