I'm trying to do some preprocessing of my dataset with mlpack one hot encoding. My dataset includes categorical feature values and I'm seeing the following error when feeding the data to preprocess_one_hot_encoding():
ValueError: could not convert string to float: 'abc'

If I first convert the categorical (string) values to numerical values then preprocess_one_hot_encoding() works. Generally, one hot encoding is a technique that takes string values and encodes it to numerical values. Does mlpack preprocess_one_hot_encoding() support string values?