On the documentation page for xgboost for python we see a feature_types https://xgboost.readthedocs.io/en/latest/python/python_api.html parameters but have no idea what are the possible values.
The documentation is really bad.
What are the possible values for feature_types?
The documentation seems poor as you say, searching through the XGBoost source code on Github gives some tests that show these options:
While it is a bit difficult to figure out what these mean, some other sites list some additional information:
Link: another StackOverflow post that mentions the q and i types.
In XGBoosts core.py code you can also find a comment on types:
# use quantitative as default
# {'q': quantitative, 'i': indicator}
Looking at the XGBoost code, from the rest of it, the type parsing goes into the underlying c-based backend code, so that is a bit of a black box still unless you want to go explore it.. :)