Can dissimilarity matrix be used instead of data frame when we have both categorical and continuous variables?

Question

I'm new to RI have a data frame which has both continuous and categorical variables,My questions is: can I use dissimilarity matrix instead of data frame when in some functions just numeric matrix or data frames are accepted?For example when I want to use lofactor() which is the function for LOF algorithm and can be applied just on numeric data while my data has some categorical variables,Can I use the dissimilarity matrix of my data which is numeric?

Any little help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The DMwR lofactor implementation is slow and too limited.

But the Local Outlier Factor LOF allows any dissimilarity to be used.

You probably just have to write the code yourself , or use a better implementation such as ELKI instead of DMwR.