How does xgboost handle one hot encoded data?

hi,

i have dummy encoded my coluomn ‘country’, so i get 10 different columns from xgboost, when i looked at my feature importance the most important one was one of my countries ‘france’.

how does xgboost split on the column france? it is just a series of 0s and 1s

Binary dummies are treated as real values.

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