openml / openml/OpenML

Request: metadata indicating number of targets

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Description

First, THANK YOU for such an awesome project! OpenML has already saved me days and days of work -- it is amazing.

I'm going through lots of datasets doing binary classification with the Python API, predicting the default target attribute with

X, y, categorical = dataset.get_data(target=dataset.default_target_attribute, return_categorical_indicator=True)

The only issue is this fails if default_target_attribute contains multiple targets, i.e., for multi-target (multi-label, multi-output) tasks. For example, for the image dataset (id 40592), default_target_attribute is "desert,mountains,sea,sunset,trees", meaning the problem has five targets.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any metadata field to filter out such datasets; a field indicating the number of targets would be great.

I work around it (and also filter out datasets with a null default_target_attribute) with this test:

dataset.default_target_attribute in (f.name for f in dataset.features.values())

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Research direction

Start with the Python API usage of dataset.default_target_attribute and dataset.features, using dataset ID 40592 as the multi-target example. Trace how dataset metadata is represented and filtered, then add or expose a target-count field that distinguishes single-target, multi-target, and null-target datasets.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
machine-learning
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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