How Data and String are treated in graphlab

Question

I am having large date set in which some of columns are Date and other are categorical Data like Status, Department Name, Country Name.

So how this data is treated in graphlab when i call the graphlab.linear_regression.create method, does i have to pre-process this data and convert them into numbers or can directly provide to graphlab.

Answer 1

Graphlab is mostly used for computing tabular and graph based datasets, and have high scalability and performance. In graphlab.linear_regression.create, graphlab have inbuilt feature of understanding the type of data and giving most suitable method of linear regression for optimizing results. For Example, for numeric data of target and feature both, most of the time, graphlab takes Newtons Method of linear regression. Similarly, depending on the dataset, understands the need and gives method accordingly.

Now, about preprocessing, graphlab only takes SFrame for learning that need to be parsed correctly before any learning. While creating an SFrame, unprocessed and error creating data are always reflected and throws an error. So, in order to go through any learning, you need to have a clean data. If SFrame accepts the data, and also your chosen target and feature for learning that you want, you are good to go but pre-processing and cleaning data is always recommended. Also, its always a good practice to do feature engineering before any learning algorithm, and redefining data types before learning is always recommended for accuracy.

About your point on how data is treated in Graphlab, I would say, it depends!. Some datasets are tabular and are treated accordingly and some in graph structure. Graphlab performs very well when comes to regression tree and boosted classifiers which follows decision tree concept and are quite time and resource consuming in other libraries than graphlab.

For me, graphlab performed very well while creating recommendation engine where I had dataset of nodes and edges and boosted tree classifier with 18 iterations too worked flawless in quite scalable time and I must say, even for tree structured data, graphlab performs very well. I hope this answer helps.