{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/automatic-discovery-of-the-statistical-types","title":"Automatic Discovery of the Statistical Types of Variables in a Dataset","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2017-08-01","proceeding":"ICML 2017 8","authors":["Isabel Valera","Zoubin Ghahramani"],"abstract":"\n    A common practice in statistics and machine learning is to assume that the statistical data types (e.g., ordinal, categorical or real-valued) of variables, and usually also the likelihood model, is known. However, as the availability of real-world data increases, this assumption becomes too restrictive. Data are often heterogeneous, complex, and improperly or incompletely documented. Surprisingly, despite their practical importance, there is still a lack of tools to automatically discover the statistical types of, as well as appropriate likelihood (noise) models for, the variables in a dataset. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing a Bayesian method, which accurately discovers the statistical data types in both synthetic and real data.\n  ","url_abs":"https://icml.cc/Conferences/2017/Schedule?showEvent=541","url_pdf":"http://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/valera17a/valera17a.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"automatic-discovery-of-the-statistical-types","repo_url":"https://github.com/ivaleraM/DataTypes","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}