Implementation_notes.md

Set up user-specifed variable types

• Pipeline
  1. Read and save user-specified variable types.
  2. Automatically determine all variable types. If some decisions conflict with 1), go with 1).
  3. Save the final variable type decision into the dict attribute.
• All user specified variable types should be passed to the class method store_var_type().
  • store_var_type() is only called in fit() and fit_transform().
  • The accepted variable types are: 'continuous', 'ordinal', 'lower_truncated', 'upper_truncated', 'twosided_truncated'.
• store_var_type() parses all input variable types into the class attribute dict var_type_dict. var_type_dict may also be set up in automatic variable type specification method set_indices().
  • set_indices() relies on the method get_vartype_indices(), which returns a list of variable types (one of five mentioned above). When its returned decisions conflicts with user-specified types, the latter will be used with a reminder output.
• var_type_dict is used for the following tasks:
  • To be referenced and resolve conflicts with automatic decision, in set_indices()
  • Determine the marginal estimation method for each variable in get_cdf_estimation_type() method. This method is called after set_indices() to locate truncated variable types.
  • Determine if there is a truncated varaible, in has_truncation() method.
  • Output variable types in get_vartypes().