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Hi Sandeep, Bharad,
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<div>The Tribuo mailing list is monitored, but I can’t see the email you sent to the list in the moderator console nor the archives, did you get a bounceback from the mailserver? It may be configured only to accept emails from people who have joined the mailing
list. Anyway, the Tribuo development team have their email addresses listed in the pom file visible on Github.</div>
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<div>As to the question of feature support, in Tribuo all features are converted to numerical values during the data loading step. Categoricals can be encoded as one hot features or directly as doubles by choosing an index, and ordinals can be encoded as doubles.
Very few ML algorithms directly support categorical variables without one hot-encoding or vectorization, I think of the popular ones the only kind that do are trees. Tribuo’s tree package doesn’t currently have specializations for categoricals though there
is enough information in the feature domain to support that if we do add the algorithmic support. In tree algorithms ordinals are naturally supported as the splits don’t care about the distance between any feature values, only their relative ordering (or at
least all the splitting algorithms we have in Tribuo are of that kind). You can see how to perform featurization into doubles in a number of ways in the Columnar Data (<a href="https://tribuo.org/learn/4.3/tutorials/columnar-tribuo-v4.html">https://tribuo.org/learn/4.3/tutorials/columnar-tribuo-v4.html</a>)
and Document Classification (<a href="https://tribuo.org/learn/4.3/tutorials/document-classification-tribuo-v4.html">https://tribuo.org/learn/4.3/tutorials/document-classification-tribuo-v4.html</a>) tutorials.</div>
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<div>Thanks,</div>
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<div>Adam</div>
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<div>--<br>
Adam Pocock<br>
Principal Member of Technical Staff<br>
Machine Learning Research Group<br>
Oracle Labs, Burlington, MA</div>
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<div>On 16 Jun 2023, at 00:13, Sikka, Sandeep <sandeep.sikka@staples.com> wrote:</div>
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<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Adding a few individual emails on the project from Github. The devel email list doesn’t appear to have any activity.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Thanks<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(203, 0, 10);">Sandeep Sikka</span></b><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(100, 100, 100);">Distinguished Engineer</span></b><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(100, 100, 100);">500 Staples Dr., Framingham MA</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(100, 100, 100);">508.253.7977</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><a href="mailto:sandeep.sikka@staples.com">sandeep.sikka@staples.com</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 3pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(100, 100, 100);"> </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><sub><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(100, 100, 100);"><img alt="image001.png" src="cid:image001.png@01D99FE7.6C2FBD30"></span></sub><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 3pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(100, 100, 100);"> </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><a name="_Hlk3999959"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(100, 100, 100);"><img alt="image002.png" src="cid:image002.png@01D99FE7.6C2FBD30"><img alt="image003.png" src="cid:image003.png@01D99FE7.6C2FBD30"> <img alt="image004.png" src="cid:image004.png@01D99FE7.6C2FBD30"> <img alt="image005.png" src="cid:image005.png@01D99FE7.6C2FBD30"></span></a><span></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div>
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<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">From:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">"Parthasarathy, Bharadwaj" <<a href="mailto:bharadwaj.parthasarathy@staples.com">bharadwaj.parthasarathy@staples.com</a>><br>
<b>Date:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Thursday, June 15, 2023 at 2:46 PM<br>
<b>To:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>"<a href="mailto:tribuo-devel@oss.oracle.com">tribuo-devel@oss.oracle.com</a>" <<a href="mailto:tribuo-devel@oss.oracle.com">tribuo-devel@oss.oracle.com</a>><br>
<b>Cc:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>"Sikka, Sandeep" <<a href="mailto:Sandeep.Sikka@Staples.com">Sandeep.Sikka@Staples.com</a>>, "Kumar, Navdeep" <<a href="mailto:navdeep.kumar@staples.com">navdeep.kumar@staples.com</a>><br>
<b>Subject:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Tribuo Non Numerical Features Support<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0in;">Hi,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in;">This is Bharadwaj from one of Staples' Engineering teams. We are exploring Tribuo java framework for one of our use cases. We are trying to use Tribuo for runtime inferencing with a regressor model.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in;">We have non numerical features that we are trying to integrate with Tribuo. However, all the classes or samples for regressor points us to passing feature values as only double. Feature names as String and Feature Values as Double
is what we see.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in;">Does Tribuo support non numerical features<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><u>(categorical and ordinal features)</u><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>such as String, Boolean etc or is it strictly only double values?
How can we train and infer supervised models that consume categorical and ordinal features?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in;">I am not sure if we are missing something here, it would be helpful if you can provide your inputs.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Regards,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Bharad</div>
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