added functionality to predict using categorical features and definin…

[szaman769]

Added possibility to provide constant values with a dictionary so that we can specify which parameters shouldn't change and if any additional values outside raster values can be used.

[stevenpawley]

Thanks for the contribution and this sounds like an interesting addition. I haven't needed constant categorical features in any of my models before, so I'm not familiar with using the const argument in raster or terra.

A couple of questions -

• This doesn't sound like it is specific to catboost models(?). Would the same apply for any model is your estimator is a pipeline containing a transformer with one hot encoding?
• I would also think that the same 'const' argument could apply to the predict_proba method and also for multioutput cases?

[RichardScottOZ]

Off the top of my head yes, I would think so?