def identifyCategoricalFeatures(x_data,categorical_cutoff):
    """ Takes a dataframe (of independent variables) with column labels and returns a list of column names identified as
    being categorical based on user defined cutoff. """
    categorical_variables = []
    for each in x_data:
        if x_data[each].nunique() <= categorical_cutoff:
            categorical_variables.append(each)
    return categorical_variables