From what I read online, there seems to be some confusion regarding the taxonomy and the terms used, so to avoid misunderstanding I’m going to define them here:

Label Encoding – encoding a nominal variable with arbitrary numeric labels.

Ordinal Encoding – encoding an ordinal variable with numeric labels arranged in a specific order.

The course on Machine Learning I’m currently taking compares One-Hot Encoding with Ordinal Encoding. However, during my research online I came to realize that "Ordinal Encoding" is actually a misnomer, and what that course actually demonstrates is called "Label Encoding". Ordinal Encoding is supposed to pertain strictly to ordinal variables, and the dataset in question didn’t even have any ordinal variables.

Where did that misnomer come from? Turns out that it comes from the scikit-learn library that has LabelEncoder and OrdinalEncoder classes. The thing is, OrdinalEncoder class actually does not perform Ordinal Encoding by default. To make it ordinal, you have to specify the order in the ‘categories’ parameter (and its usage is extremely not-user-friendly – dictionary mapping by pandas can do the same way easier). If you don’t, OrdinalEncoder will assign labels alphabetically, just like LabelEncoder does. So the real difference between these two classes is that one encodes only a single column, while the other encodes two or more columns at a time. Perhaps it would be better and much less confusing if these classes were called "LabelEncoder1D" and "LabelEncoder2D".

So that’s where mistakenly calling Label Encoding "Ordinal Encoding" is coming from. But getting back to the question, the course I’m taking advocates the usage of (what I learned to be) Label Encoding for tree-based algorithms, because One-Hot encoding performs much worse for trees (which is ture). However, from what I read online, it appears that other Machine Learning platforms, such as R or H2O, are capable of processing nominal variables for trees without any kind of encoding at all, and the requirement to encode everything into numeric form seems to be exclusively scikit-learn’s problem. And there’s conflicting information as to whether trees perform better with Label Encoding – my course, as well as some responses online, advocate for its usage, but my intuition, as well as some other responses online, seem to indicate that scikit-learn trees will not be able to distinguish these labels as categories, and will mistakenly assume that they are continuous values on a meaningful scale instead. So they recommend using One-Hot Encoding even for trees as the only option despite it being sub-optimal.

So my questions are 1) is it true that Label Encoding will be misinterpreted as a numeric scale by scikit-learn trees? 2) if so, are there any situations at all where arbitrary Label Encoding can be useful? Or does this technique has no use at all unless the variable is ordinal, and a specific labeling order is given?

P.S: I’m asking because my course has a whole lesson dedicated to teaching students "Ordinal" Encoding. At first I wanted to suggest them to rename it to "Label Encoding", but now I suspect that that whole lesson is best removed altogether to avoid teaching students bad practices.