How to pass values for a "shap_baseline" if we have categorical values (string values) as features in classsagemaker.clarify.SHAPConfig method.

Thanks for your question

There is some guidance and information about selecting a proper baseline from here that may help: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/clarify-feature-attribute-shap-baselines.html

if I am passing a single row as input to shap_baseline parameter, the schedule is failing by concatenating 2 rows

For this, you may want to open a ticket via AWS Support in the AWS console so we can take a better look at this internally, and include your processing job details if possible (such as your analysis configurations, Job ARN, etc.)

If i ignore the shap_baseline (as it is optional), the schedule is taking forever to run

There is a num_clusters parameter in the SHAPConfig which you can explicitly set to reduce the size of the baseline dataset that is generated. A lower number (low single digits) will generally provide faster runtime