Can I force One AI to select a specific column or feature in a model? Can I force One AI drop/exclude a specific column from a model?

Answer:

Force Select

The short answer is that there is not a direct way to force a model to select a specific column or feature. One AI goes through several steps to only select the best features that result in strong performance and fit. However, there are a couple of things you can do to achieve this: 

• If the column you want your model to select is being automatically dropped due violating a global setting, it will appear on your EDA report with a red dropped label and a a grey label explaining why it was automatically dropped. You can either adjust the global setting in a way that the column will not be automatically dropped (just keep in mind that the change will impact the entire model); or you can perform a per column intervention. From the augmentations page, go to the Per Column Interventions section of the One AI configuration and select override. Then, use the dropdown list under ‘Add Column Intervention’ and add in the columns you don't want automatically dropped due to global settings. Under each column, where it says ‘droppable’, use the dropdown menu to select not droppable. This means that regardless of global settings, the model will try this column. If it results in higher performance and fit, it will be selected. 

• Alternatively, you could select the None scope in the One AI query builder screen (One AI >Edit > Configure One AI Recipe > Core Attributes Step) and manually select which columns you want the model to try. Then, you could configure the model's dimensionality reduction (One AI >Edit > One AI Configuration) so that the Filter methods "Num Features" and the Wrapper Methods "Min Features" are the number of columns you manually selected. The Filter method Num features is the maximum features the model can select and the Wrapper Methods Min Features is the minimum number of features the model can select. Please keep in mind that doing so may lead to some features having a feature importance of 0. 

None Scope

Dimensionality Reduction Configuration

Force Exclude

You can force One AI to exclude columns from the recipe screen in the “Which core attributes do you want to use in your prediction?” section (One AI >Edit > Configure One AI Recipe > Core Attributes Step). Simply click the X next to each column you wish to exclude and save. The model will not try any columns in the excluded columns or unavailable tables section of this step. 

Excluding Columns