Scenario: Testing

You must produce multiple partitions of a dataset based on sampling using the Partition and Sample module in Azure Machine Learning Studio.

Box 1: Assign to folds

Use Assign to folds option when you want to divide the dataset into subsets of the data. This option is also useful when you want to create a custom number of folds for cross-validation, or to split rows into several groups.

Not Head: Use Head mode to get only the first n rows. This option is useful if you want to test a pipeline on a small number of rows, and don't need the data to be balanced or sampled in any way.

Not Sampling: The Sampling option supports simple random sampling or stratified random sampling. This is useful if you want to create a smaller representative sample dataset for testing.

Box 2: Partition evenly

Specify the partitioner method: Indicate how you want data to be apportioned to each partition, using these options:

Partition evenly: Use this option to place an equal number of rows in each partition. To specify the number of output partitions, type a whole number in the Specify number of folds to split evenly into text box.

Box 1: Floating point

Need floating point for Median values.

Scenario: An initial investigation shows that the datasets are identical in structure apart from the MedianValue column. The smaller Paris dataset contains the MedianValue in text format, whereas the larger London dataset contains the MedianValue in numerical format.

Box 2: Unchanged

Note: Select the Categorical option to specify that the values in the selected columns should be treated as categories.

For example, you might have a column that contains the numbers 0,1 and 2, but know that the numbers actually mean "Smoker", "Non smoker" and "Unknown". In that case, by flagging the column as categorical you can ensure that the values are not used in numeric calculations, only to group data.