ODM : View Transformations generated by Automatic Data Prepreparation

A very powerful feature of Oracle Data Mining and one that I think does not get enough notice is called Automatic Data Preparation.

Data Preparation is one of the most time consuming, repetitive and boring parts of the work that a Data Miner or Data Scientist performs as part of their daily tasks. Apart from gathering the data, integrating the data, getting the data into the required formation the most interesting part of the work is with feature engineering.

Then you have all the other boring data preparation tasks of how to handle missing data, type conversion, binning, normalization, outlier treatment etc.

With Automatic Data Preparation (ADP) in Oracle Data Mining you can let Oracle work all of these things out for you and to perform all the necessary coding and to store all of this coding as part of the in-database data mining model.

This is Fantastic. This ADP feature can same you hours and in some cases days of effort.

But (there is always a but :-) ) what if you are a bit unsure if the transformations that are being performed are exactly what you would wanted. Maybe you would like to see what Oracle is doing and depending on this you can do it a different way.

The first step is to examine the transformations that are generated by stored as part of the in-database data mining model. The DBMS_DATA_MINING package has a function called GET_MODEL_TRANSFORMATIONS. When you query this function, passing in the name of the data mining model, you will get returned the list of transformations that have been applied to each model.

In the following example a GLM model was created using the Oracle Data Miner tool (that is part of SQL Developer). When you use Oracle Data Miner, ADP is automatically turned on.

The following query calls the GET_MODEL_TRANSFORMATIONS function with the data mining model called CLAS_GLM_1_59/.

SELECT * FROM TABLE(DBMS_DATA_MINING.GET_MODEL_TRANSFORMATIONS('CLAS_GLM_1_59'));

The following image contains the output generated by this query.

When you look at the data under the EXPRESSION column we get to see what the ADP did to the data. In most of the cases there are just some simple data clean-up being performed and formatting for getting the data ready for input into the algorithm.

If we now look at the Naive Bayes model for the same data set we get a very different sent of transformations being listed under the EXPRESSION column.

SELECT * FROM TABLE(DBMS_DATA_MINING.GET_MODEL_TRANSFORMATIONS('CLAS_NB_1_59'));

Now we get to see some of the data binning that ADP performs and is required for input to the Naive Bayes algorithm. You will also notices that we also have some transformations in the REVERSE_EXPRESSION column. These are the inverse or reverse of the transformation that was generated in the EXPRESSION column.

I will let you explore the data transformations that are produced by ADP for the SVM and Decision Tree algorithms.

I will show you how you change the reverse expression in my next blog post, as there are times when you might want the data to be presented slightly differently after the model has been run to score your data.

To get more details of what Automatic Data Preparation is performed for each data mining algorithm you can check out this link in the 11g documentaion. This section seems to be missing from the online 12c documentation.