Default value of nominal attributes

Schalkekid
Schalkekid New Altair Community Member
edited November 2024 in Community Q&A
Hi there,
as I am working with nominal attributes very often, I found out that the default value of nominal attributes (also polynominal and binominal ones) is set to 0.0d in the AbstractAttribute-class.
If you are using the default-value-check in the Tools-class a nominal attribute containing the value mapped on first position in the nominal mapping will be marked as containing a default value. This might lead to the ban of the attribute in special cases (for instance in the creation of SVMExamples).
I don't think that this is a problem in everyday work but perhaps it's remarkable for some users.
Unfortunately, I don't have a really good idea how to overcome that problem!

I wrote an SVM-kernel for processing nominal values, and I had to manually check for nominal attributes to be put into the attribute map in any case, also if they are containing "default values".

Best,
Felix
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Answers

  • land
    land New Altair Community Member
    Hi,
    actually this default value is needed for sparse attributes. Otherwise they won't work. I don't think we can change that anyway in the current data core. But you might add a feature request for that. We then can take this into account when designing the new column based core.

    Greetings,
    Sebastian
  • Schalkekid
    Schalkekid New Altair Community Member
    Hi Sebastian,
    thank you!

    Best,
    Felix

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