Are categorical variables getting lost in your random forests?

I’ve been one-hot encoding categorical variables for as long as I have been using sci-kit learn. It turns out that you can lose a lot of predictive power this way, and that alternatives do exist.

Decision tree models can handle categorical variables without one-hot encoding them. However, popular implementations of decision trees (and random forests) differ as to whether they honor this fact. We show that one-hot encoding can seriously degrade tree-model performance. Our primary comparison is between H2O (which honors categorical variables) and scikit-learn (which requires them to be one-hot encoded).

(via Are categorical variables getting lost in your random forests? )