Entity attributes cannot be compared using less than or equals

Hi, 

I have some issues with Catalog and inclusion rules comparisons in adobe target recommendations. 

I am trying to use " is less than or equal to" to compare same entity attribute values that are numeric and it looks like adobe thinks of the attribute values as strings , so only when using "equals" I get a correct entity match.

For example, entity.hoursSinceUpdate = 358 is returned when searching/filtering for hoursSinceUpdate is less than or equal to 72

What could be causing this issue? 

Should I delete entities from the catalog or try updating them instead? 

Any suggestions are appreciated, thanky you