"How to change role for attributes specified by regex?"

keith

I have a group of attributes I want to change to a custom "donotuse" role.  This is for data that should not be used in the model, isn't the ID column, but that I want to still keep associated with the predictions and results for other purposes.

What I've tried to do is specify a regular expression that identifies the attributes, and have a single ChangeAttributeRole nested inside.  The FeatureIterator seemed like the right choice:

        <operator name="FeatureIterator" class="FeatureIterator" expanded="yes">
            <parameter key="filter"	value="(name|address|city|state|zip)"/>
            <operator name="ChangeAttributeRole" class="ChangeAttributeRole">
                <parameter key="name"	value="%{loop_feature}"/>
                <parameter key="target_role"	value="donotuse"/>
            </operator>
        </operator>

But that only changes the role for the duration of that loop iteration.  AttributeSubsetPreprocessing specifically says that role change are not preserved, so that's out.  What's the right way to do it?

Thanks,
Keith

steffen

Hello

Just a few remarks:
First: I tried to do this using the AttributeSubsetPreprocessing...which worked

<operator name="Root" class="Process" expanded="yes">
    <operator name="ExampleSource" class="ExampleSource">
        <parameter key="attributes"	value="\golf.aml"/>
    </operator>
    <operator name="AttributeSubsetPreprocessing" class="AttributeSubsetPreprocessing" expanded="yes">
        <parameter key="attribute_name_regex"	value="Outlook|Temperature"/>
        <parameter key="deliver_inner_results"	value="true"/>
        <operator name="ChangeAttributeRole" class="ChangeAttributeRole">
            <parameter key="name"	value="Outlook"/>
            <parameter key="target_role"	value="donotuse"/>
        </operator>
        <operator name="ChangeAttributeRole (2)" class="ChangeAttributeRole">
            <parameter key="name"	value="Temperature"/>
            <parameter key="target_role"	value="donotuse2"/>
        </operator>
    </operator>
</operator>

I admit that AttributSubsetProcessing is useless here...
However, giving the both roles the same name, did not work (change "donotuse2" to "donotuse" in the setup above). I guess it is a rule that a role can occur just once in an ExampleSet. In this case we need a special-default role, indeed or a switchon-switchoff-operator

Second: It is possible to build a workaround with ParameterIteration, ExampleSetJoin etc ( I love the modelling abilities of RM)... but in this case you are better of changing every attribute "manually"

greetings

Steffen