Overview

RDT (Reversible Data Transforms) is a Python library that transforms raw data into fully numerical data, ready for data science. The transforms are reversible, allowing you to convert from numerical data back into your original format.

Install

Install RDT using pip or conda. We recommend using a virtual environment to avoid conflicts with other software on your device.

pip install rdt

conda install -c conda-forge rdt

For more information about using reversible data transformations, visit the RDT Documentation.

Quickstart

In this short series of tutorials we will guide you through a series of steps that will help you getting started using RDT to transform columns, tables and datasets.

Load the demo data

After you have installed RDT, you can get started using the demo dataset.

from rdt import get_demo

customers = get_demo()

This dataset contains some randomly generated values that describe the customers of an online marketplace.

  last_login email_optin credit_card  age  dollars_spent
0 2021-06-26       False        VISA   29          99.99
1 2021-02-10       False        VISA   18            NaN
2        NaT       False        AMEX   21           2.50
3 2020-09-26        True         NaN   45          25.00
4 2020-12-22         NaN    DISCOVER   32          19.99

Let's transform this data so that each column is converted to full, numerical data ready for data science.

Creating the HyperTransformer & config

The HyperTransformer is capable of transforming multi-column datasets.

from rdt import HyperTransformer

ht = HyperTransformer()

The HyperTransformer needs to know about the columns in your dataset and which transformers to apply to each. These are described by a config. We can ask the HyperTransformer to automatically detect it based on the data we plan to use.

ht.detect_initial_config(data=customers)

This will create and set the config.

Config:
{
    "sdtypes": {
        "last_login": "datetime",
        "email_optin": "boolean",
        "credit_card": "categorical",
        "age": "numerical",
        "dollars_spent": "numerical"
    },
    "transformers": {
        "last_login": "UnixTimestampEncoder()",
        "email_optin": "BinaryEncoder()",
        "credit_card": "FrequencyEncoder()",
        "age": "FloatFormatter()",
        "dollars_spent": "FloatFormatter()"
    }
}

The sdtypes dictionary describes the semantic data types of each of your columns and the transformers dictionary describes which transformer to use for each column. You can customize the transformers and their settings. (See the Transformers Glossary for more information).

Fitting & using the HyperTransformer

The HyperTransformer references the config while learning the data during the fit stage.

ht.fit(customers)

Once the transformer is fit, it's ready to use. Use the transform method to transform all columns of your dataset at once.

transformed_data = ht.transform(customers)

   last_login.value  email_optin.value  credit_card.value  age.value  dollars_spent.value
0      1.624666e+18                0.0                0.2         29                99.99
1      1.612915e+18                0.0                0.2         18                36.87
2      1.611814e+18                0.0                0.5         21                 2.50
3      1.601078e+18                1.0                0.7         45                25.00
4      1.608595e+18                0.0                0.9         32                19.99

The HyperTransformer applied the assigned transformer to each individual column. Each column now contains fully numerical data that you can use for your project!

When you're done with your project, you can also transform the data back to the original format using the reverse_transform method.

original_format_data = ht.reverse_transform(transformed_data)

  last_login email_optin credit_card  age  dollars_spent
0        NaT       False        VISA   29          99.99
1 2021-02-10       False        VISA   18            NaN
2        NaT       False        AMEX   21            NaN
3 2020-09-26        True         NaN   45          25.00
4 2020-12-22       False    DISCOVER   32          19.99

What's Next?

To learn more about reversible data transformations, visit the RDT Documentation.

---

The Synthetic Data Vault Project was first created at MIT's Data to AI Lab in 2016. After 4 years of research and traction with enterprise, we created DataCebo in 2020 with the goal of growing the project. Today, DataCebo is the proud developer of SDV, the largest ecosystem for synthetic data generation & evaluation. It is home to multiple libraries that support synthetic data, including:

• 🔄 Data discovery & transformation. Reverse the transforms to reproduce realistic data.
• 🧠 Multiple machine learning models -- ranging from Copulas to Deep Learning -- to create tabular, multi table and time series data.
• 📊 Measuring quality and privacy of synthetic data, and comparing different synthetic data generation models.

Get started using the SDV package -- a fully integrated solution and your one-stop shop for synthetic data. Or, use the standalone libraries for specific needs.

History

1.9.0 - 2023-11-14

This release adds a parameter to the UnixTimestampEncoder and OptimizedTimestampEncoder, called enforce_min_max_values. When this is set to True, it clips all values in the reverse transformed data to the min and max datetimes seen in the fitted data.

This release also internally adds support for multi-column transformers!

New Features

• Support multi-column transformers - Issue #683 by @R-Palazzo
• Improve user warnings and logic for update_sdtype - Issue #684 by @R-Palazzo
• Improve user warnings and logic for update_transformers and update_transformers_by_sdtype - Issue #685 by @R-Palazzo
• Improve user warnings and logic for remove_transformers and remove_transformers_by_sdtype - Issue #686 by @R-Palazzo
• Add enforce_min_max_values to datetime transformers - Issue #740 by @R-Palazzo

Internal

• Support multi-column transformers - Issue #683 by @R-Palazzo

Bugs Fixed

• Multi column transformers crash when assigned to single column - Issue #734 by @R-Palazzo

1.8.0 - 2023-10-31

This release adds the 'random' missing value replacement strategy, which uses random values of the dataset to fill in missing values. Additionally users are now able to use the UniformUnivariate distribution within the Gaussian Normalizer with this update.

This release contains fixes for the ClusterBasedNormalizer which crashes in the reverse transform caused by values being out of bounds and a patch for the randomization issue dealing with different values after applying reset_randomization.

Anonymization has been moved into RDT library from SDV as it was found to self contained module for RDT and would reduce dependencies needed in SDV.

Features

• Make the default missing value imputation 'mean' - Issue#730 by @R-Palazzo
• When no rounding scheme is detected, log the info instead of showing a warning - Issue#709 by @frances-h
• The GaussianNormalizer should accept distribution names that are consistent with scipy - Issue#656 by @fealho
• The GaussianNormalizer should accept uniform distributions - Issue#655 by @fealho
• Remove psutil - Issue#615 by @fealho
• Consider deprecating the FrequencyEncoder - Issue#614 by @fealho
• Replace missing values with variable (random) values from the dataset - Issue#606

Bugs

• RDT Uniform Encoder creates nan Value bug - Issue#719 by @lajohn4747
• HyperTransformer transforms while fitting and messes up the random seed - Issue#716 by @pvk-developer
• Resolve locales warning for specific sdtype/locale combos (eg. en_US with postcode) - Issue#701 by @pvk-developer
• The OrderedLabelEncoder should not accept duplicate categories - Issue#673 by @frances-h
• ClusterBasedNormalizer crashes on reverse transform (IndexError) - Issue#672 by @fealho
• Unnecessary warning in OneHotEncoder when there are nan values - Issue#616 by @fealho

Maintenance

• Remove performance tests - Issue#707 by @fealho
• ClusterBasedNormalizer code cleanup - Issue#696 by @fealho
• Switch default branch from master to main - Issue#687 by @amontanez24

Deprecations

• The frequencyEncoder transformer will no longer be supported in future versions of RDT. Please use the UniformEncoder transformer instead.
• GaussianNormalizer distribution option names have been updated to be consistent with scipy. gaussian -> norm, student_t-> t, and truncated_gaussian -> truncnorm

1.7.0 - 2023-08-22

This release adds 3 new transformers:

1. UniformEncoder - A categorical and boolean transformer that converts the column into a uniform distribution.
2. OrderedUniformEncoder - The same as above, but the order for the categories can be specified, changing which range in the uniform distribution each category belongs to.
3. IDGenerator- A text transformer that drops the input column during transform and returns IDs during reverse transform. The IDs all take the form <prefix><number><suffix> and can be configured with a custom prefix, suffix and starting point.

Additionally, the AnonymizedFaker is enhanced to support the text sdtype.

Deprecations

• The get_input_sdtype method is being deprecated in favor of get_supported_sdtypes.

New Features

• Create IDGenerator transformer - Issue #675 by @R-Palazzo
• Add UniformEncoder (and its ordered version) - Issue #678 by @R-Palazzo
• Allow me to use AnonymizedFaker with sdtype text columns - Issue #688 by @amontanez24

Maintenance

• Deprecate get_input_sdtype - Issue #682 by @R-Palazzo

1.6.1 - 2023-08-02

This release updates the default transformers used for certain sdtypes. It also enables the AnonymizedFaker and PseudoAnonymizedFaker to work with any sdtype besides boolean, categorical, datetime, numerical or text.

Bugs

• [Enterprise Usage] Unable to assign generic PII transformers (eg. AnonymizedFaker) - Issue #674 by @amontanez24

New Features

• Update the default transformers that HyperTransformer assigns to each sdtype - Issue #664 by @amontanez24

1.6.0 - 2023-07-12

This release adds the ability to generate missing values to the AnonymizedFaker. Users can now provide the missing_value_generation parameter during initialization. They can set it to None to not generate any missing values, or 'random' to generate random missing values in the same proportion as the fitted data.

Additionally, this release improves the NullTransformer by allowing nulls to be replaced on the forward transform even if missing_value_generation is set to None. It also fixes a bug that was causing the UnixTimestampEncoder to return a different dtype than the input on reverse_transform. This was particularly problematic when datetime columns are represented as ints.

New Features

• AnonymizedFaker should be able to model and generate missing values - Issue #660 by @R-Palazzo

Bugs

• The datetime transformers don't give me back the same dtype sometimes - Issue #657 by @frances-h
• RDT NullTransformer doesn't replace nulls if missing_value_generation is None - Issue #658 by @amontanez24

Maintenance

• Remove python 3.7 builds - Issue #663 by @amontanez24
• Drop support for Python 3.7 - Issue #666 by @amontanez24

Internal

• Add add-on modules to sys.modules - Issue #653 by @amontanez24

1.5.0 - 2023-06-01

This release adds a new parameter called missing_value_generation to the initialization of certain transformers to specify how missing values should be created. The parameter can be used in the FloatFormatter, BinaryEncoder, UnixTimestampEncoder, OptimizedTimestampEncoder, GaussianNormalizer and ClusterBasedNormalizer. Additionally, it fixes a bug that was causing every column that had nulls to generate them in the same place.

Deprecations

• The model_missing_values parameter is being deprecated in favor of the new missing_value_generation parameter.

Bugs

• Fix randomization when creating null values - Issue #639 by @fealho

New Features

• Allow a no-op handling strategy for missing values (nulls) - Issue #644 by @pvk-developer
• Add add-on detection for premium transformers - Issue #646 by @frances-h

Maintenance

• Performance tests still fragile - Issue #641 by @fealho
• Investigate removing quality tests - Issue #642 by @amontanez24

1.4.2 - 2023-05-02

This release fixes a bug that caused datetime and numerical transformers to crash if a column was all NaNs. Additionally, it adds support for Pandas 2.0!

Bugs

• Numerical & datetime transformers crash if the entire column is null - Issue #637 by @fraces-h

Maintenance

• Remove upper bound for pandas - Issue #633 by @pvk-developer

1.4.1 - 2023-04-25

This release patches an issue that prevented the RegexGenerator from working with regexes that had a very large number of possible combinations.

Bugs

• RegexGenerator continues to have problems if there are too many possibilities - Issue #635 by @pvk-developer

1.4.0 - 2023-04-13

This release adds a couple of new features including adding the OrderedLabelEncoder and deprecating the CustomLabelEncoder. It also adds a change that makes all generator type transformers in the HyperTransformer use a different random seed.

Additionally, bugs were patched in the RegexGenerator that caused it to crash or take too long in certain cases. Finally, this release improved the detection of Faker functions in the AnonymizedFaker.

Bugs

• Find nested Faker provider submodules - PR #630 by @frances-h
• RegexGenerator fails to generate values if there are too many possibilities - Issue #623 by @R-Palazzo
• RegexGenerator takes too much time and runs out of memory if there are too many possibilities - Issue #624 by @R-Palazzo

New Features

• Choose a different seed for each transformer - Issue #619 by @fealho
• Rename CustomLabelEncoder to OrderedLabelEncoder - Issue #621 by @R-Palazzo
• Add functionality to find version add-on - Issue #620 by @frances-h

1.3.0 - 2023-01-18

This release makes changes to the way that individual transformers are stored in the HyperTransformer. When accessing the config via HyperTransformer.get_config(), the transformers listed in the config are now the actual transformer instances used during fitting and transforming. These instances can now be accessed and used to examine their properties post fitting. For example, you can now view the mapping for a PseudoAnonymizedFaker instance using PseudoAnonymizedFaker.get_mapping() on the instance retrieved from the config.

Additionally, the output of reverse_tranform no longer appends the .value suffix to every unnamed output column. Only output columns that are created from context extracted from the input columns will have suffixes (eg. .normalized in the ClusterBasedNormalizer).

The AnonymizedFaker and RegexGenerator now have an enforce_uniqueness parameter, which controls whether the data returned by reverse_transform should be unique. The HyperTransformer now has a method called create_anonymized_columns that can be used to generate columns that are matched with anonymizing transformers like AnonymizedFaker and RegexGenerator. The method can be used as follows: HyperTransformer.create_anonymized_columns(num_rows=5, column_names=['email_optin', 'credit_card'])

Another major change in this release is the ability to control randomization. Every time a HyperTransformer is initialized, its randomness will be reset to the same seed, and it will yield the same results for reverse_transform if given the same input. Every subsequent call to reverse_transform yields a different result. If a user desires to reset the seed, they can call HyperTransformer.reset_randomization.

Finally, this release adds support for Python 3.10 and drops support for 3.6.

Bugs

• The reset_randomization should also apply to fit and transform - Issue #608 by @amontanez24
• Cannot print CustomLabelEncoder: ValueError - Issue #607 by @amontanez24
• Float formatter learn_rounding_scheme doesn't work on all digits - Issue #556 by @fealho
• Warnings not showing on update_transformers_by_sdtype - Issue #582 by @amontanez24
• OneHotEncoder doesn't work with boolean sdtype - Issue #583 by @pvk-developer
• Setting config on HyperTransformer does not read supported_sdtypes - Issue #560 by @pvk-developer
• https://github.com/sdv-dev/RDT/issues/545 - Issue #545 by @pvk-developer
• Add error to NullTransformer when data only contains nans - PR #567 by @fealho
• Update update_transformers validation - PR #563 by @fealho

Maintenance

• Support Python 3.10 - Issue #593 by @pvk-developer
• RDT 1.3 Package Maintenance Updates - Issue #594 by @pvk-developer

New Features

• Update errors - Issue #599 by @amontanez24
• Add ability to control randomness - Issue #584 by @amontanez24
• Printing and error improvements - Issue #581 by @amontanez24
• Make RegexGenerator not to reset itself - Issue #558 by @pvk-developer
• Add a reset_anonymization method - Issue #559 by @pvk-developer
• Don't copy instances of tranformer - Issue #541 by @fealho
• Remove '.value' suffix - Issue #533 by @fealho
• Change the NEXT_TRANSFORMERS logic - Issue #557 by @fealho
• Add utility functions to AnonymizedFaker - Issue #561 by @pvk-developer
• Update API for update_transformers_by_sdtype to be more explicit about instances vs. copies - Issue #540 by @fealho
• Add create_anonymized_columns method to anonymize data from scratch - Issue #546 by @pvk-developer
• Add parameter to AnonymizedFaker() and RegexGenerator() to generate only unique values - Issue #542 by @pvk-developer

1.2.1 - 2022-9-12

This release fixes a bug that caused the UnixTimestampEncoder to return data with the incorrect datetime format. It also fixes a bug that caused the null column not to be reverse transformed when using the UnixTimestampEncoder when the missing_value_replacement was not set.

Bugs

• Inconsistency in date format after reverse transform - Issue #515 by @pvk-developer
• Fix calling null_transformer with model_missing_values. - PR #550 by @pvk-developer

1.2.0 - 2022-8-17

This release adds a new transformer called the PseudoAnonymizedFaker. This transformer enables the pseudo-anonymization of your data by mapping all of a column's original values to fake values that get returned during the reverse transformation process. Each original value is always mapped to the same fake value.

Additionally, this release enables the HyperTransformer to use categorical transformers on boolean columns. It also introduces a new parameter called computer_representation to the FloatFormatter that will allow for values to be clipped to certain bounds based on the computer type used for a numerical column.

Finally, this release patches a bug that caused unpredicatable results from the reverse_transform method of the FrequencyEncoder when add_noise is enabled.

New Features

• Add PseudoAnonymizedFaker transformer - Issue #517 by @pvk-developer
• Boolean columns should be able to use any of the categorical transformers - Issue#527 by @pvk-developer
• Update FloatFormatter with parameters for the computer representation - Issue#521 by @fealho

Bugs

• Unpredictable results for FrequencyEncoder(add_noise=True) - Issue #528 by @fealho

Internal

• Performance Tests update - Issue #524 by @pvk-developer

1.1.0 - 2022-6-9

This release adds multiple new transformers: the CustomLabelEncoder and the RegexGenerator. The CustomLabelEncoder works similarly to the LabelEncoder, except it allows users to provide the order of the categories. The RegexGenerator allows users to specify a regex pattern and will generate values that match that pattern.

This release also improves current transformers. The LabelEncoder now has a parameter called order_by that allows users to specify the ordering scheme for their data (eg. order numerically or alphabetically). The LabelEncoder also now has a parameter called add_noise that allows users to specify whether or not uniform noise should be added to the transformed data. Performance enhancements were made for the GaussianNormalizer by removing an unnecessary distribution search and the FloatFormatter will no longer round values to any place higher than the ones place by default.

New Features

• Add noise parameter to LabelEncoder - Issue #500 by @fealho
• Remove parameters related to distribution search and change default for GaussianNormalizer - Issue #499 by @amontanez24
• Add order_by parameter to LabelEncoder - Issue #510 by @amontanez24
• Only round to decimal places in FloatFormatter - Issue #508 by @fealho
• Add CustomLabelEncoder transformer - Issue #507 by @amontanez24
• Add RegexGenerator Transformer - Issue #505 by @pvk-developer

1.0.0 - 2022-4-25

The main update of this release is the introduction of a config, which describes the sdtypes and transformers that will be used by the HyperTransformer for each column of the data, where sdtype stands for the semantic or statistical meaning of a datatype. The user can interact with this config through the newly created methods update_sdtypes, get_config, set_config, update_transformers, update_transformers_by_sdtype and remove_transformer_by_sdtype.

This release also included various new features and updates, including:

• Users can now transform subsets of the data using its own methods, transform_subset and reverse_transform_subset.
• User validation was added for the following methods: transform, reverse_transform, update_sdtypes, update_transformers, set_config.
• Unnecessary warnings were removed from GaussianNormalizer.fit and FrequencyEncoder.transform.
• The user can now set a transformers as None.
• Transformers that cannot work with missing values will automatically fill them in.
• Added support for additional datetime formats.
• Setting model_missing_values = False in a transformer was updated to keep track of the percentage of missing values, instead of producing data containing NaN's.
• All parameters were removed from the HyperTransformer.
• The demo dataset get_demo was improved to be more intuitive.

Finally, a number of transformers were redesigned to be more user friendly. Among them, the following transformers have also been renamed:

• BayesGMMTransformer -> ClusterBasedNormalizer
• GaussianCopulaTransformer -> GaussianNormalizer
• DateTimeRoundedTransformer -> OptimizedTimestampEncoder
• DateTimeTransformer -> UnixTimestampEncoder
• NumericalTransformer -> FloatFormatter
• LabelEncodingTransformer -> LabelEncoder
• OneHotEncodingTransformer -> OneHotEncoder
• CategoricalTransformer -> FrequencyEncoder
• BooleanTransformer -> BinaryEncoder
• PIIAnonymizer -> AnonymizedFaker

New Features

• Fix using None as transformer when update_transformers_by_sdtype - Issue #496 by @pvk-developer
• Rename PIIAnonymizer --> AnonymizedFaker - Issue #483 by @pvk-developer
• User validation for reverse_transform - Issue #480 by @amontanez24
• User validation for transform - Issue #479 by @fealho\
• User validation for set_config - Issue #478 by @fealho
• User validation for update_transformers_by_sdtype - Issue #477 by @amontanez24
• User validation for update_transformers - Issue #475 by @fealho
• User validation for update_sdtypes - Issue #474 by @fealho
• Allow columns to not have a transformer - Issue #473 by @pvk-developer
• Create methods to transform a subset of the data (& reverse transform it) - Issue #472 by @amontanez24
• Throw a warning if you use set_config on a HyperTransformer that's already fit - Issue #466 by @amontanez24
• Update README for RDT 1.0 - Issue #454 by @amontanez24
• Issue with printing PIIAnonymizer in HyperTransformer - Issue #452 by @pvk-developer
• Pretty print get_config - Issue #450 by @pvk-developer
• Silence warning for GaussianNormalizer.fit - Issue #443 by @pvk-developer
• Transformers that cannot work with missing values should automatically fill them in - Issue #442 by @amontanez24
• More descriptive error message in PIIAnonymizer when provider_name and function_name don't align - Issue #440 by @pvk-developer
• Can we support additional datetime formats? - Issue #439 by @pvk-developer
• Update FrequencyEncoder.transform so that pandas won't throw a warning - Issue #436 by @pvk-developer
• Update functionality when model_missing_values=False - Issue #435 by @amontanez24
• Create methods for getting and setting a config - Issue #418 by @amontanez24
• Input validation & error handling in HyperTransformer - Issue #408 by @fealho and @amontanez24
• Remove unneeded params from HyperTransformer - Issue #407 by @pvk-developer
• Rename property: _valid_output_sdtypes - Issue #406 by @amontanez24
• Add pii as a new sdtype in HyperTransformer - Issue #404 by @pvk-developer
• Update transformers by data type (in HyperTransformer) - Issue #403 by @pvk-developer
• Update transformers by column name in HyperTransformer - Issue #402 by @pvk-developer
• Improve updating field_data_types in HyperTransformer - Issue #400 by @amontanez24
• Create method to auto detect HyperTransformer config from data - Issue #399 by @fealho
• Update HyperTransformer default transformers - Issue #398 by @fealho
• Add PIIAnonymizer - Issue #397 by @pvk-developer
• Improve the way we print an individual transformer - Issue #395 by @amontanez24
• Rename columns parameter in fit for each individual transformer - Issue #376 by @fealho and @pvk-developer
• Create a more descriptive demo dataset - Issue #374 by @fealho
• Delete unnecessary transformers - Issue #373 by @fealho
• Update NullTransformer to make it user friendly - Issue #372 by @pvk-developer
• Update BayesGMMTransformer to make it user friendly - Issue #371 by @amontanez24
• Update GaussianCopulaTransformer to make it user friendly - Issue #370 by @amontanez24
• Update DateTimeRoundedTransformer to make it user friendly - Issue #369 by @amontanez24
• Update DateTimeTransformer to make it user friendly - Issue #368 by @amontanez24
• Update NumericalTransformer to make it user friendly - Issue #367 by @amontanez24
• Update LabelEncodingTransformer to make it user friendly - Issue #366 by @fealho
• Update OneHotEncodingTransformer to make it user friendly - Issue #365 by @fealho
• Update CategoricalTransformer to make it user friendly - Issue #364 by @fealho
• Update BooleanTransformer to make it user friendly - Issue #363 by @fealho
• Update names & functionality for handling missing values - Issue #362 by @pvk-developer

Bugs

• Checking keys of config as set - Issue #497 by @amontanez24
• Only update transformer used when necessary for update_sdtypes - Issue #469 by @amontanez24
• Fix how get_config prints transformers - Issue #468 by @pvk-developer
• NullTransformer reverse_transform alters input data due to not copying - Issue #455 by @amontanez24
• Attempting to transform a subset of the data should lead to an Error - Issue #451 by @amontanez24
• Detect_initial_config isn't detecting sdtype "numerical" - Issue #449 by @pvk-developer
• PIIAnonymizer not generating multiple locales - Issue #447 by @pvk-developer
• Error when printing ClusterBasedNormalizer and GaussianNormalizer - Issue #441 by @pvk-developer
• Datetime reverse transform crashes if datetime_format is specified - Issue #438 by @amontanez24
• Correct datetime format is not recovered on reverse_transform - Issue #437 by @pvk-developer
• Use numpy NaN values in BinaryEncoder - Issue #434 by @pvk-developer
• Duplicate _output_columns during fitting - Issue #423 by @fealho

Internal Improvements

• Making methods that aren't part of API private - Issue #489 by @amontanez24
• Fix columns missing in config and update transformers to None - Issue #495 by @pvk-developer

0.6.4 - 2022-3-7

This release fixes multiple bugs concerning the HyperTransformer. One is that the get_transformer_tree_yaml method no longer crashes on every call. Another is that calling the update_field_data_types and update_default_data_type_transformers after fitting no longer breaks the transform method.

The HyperTransformer now sorts its outputs for both transform and reverse_transform based on the order of the input's columns. It is also now possible to create transformers that simply drops columns during transform and don't return any new columns.

New Features

• Support dropping a column trough a transformer - Issue #393 by @pvk-developer
• HyperTransformer should sort columns after transform and reverse_transform - Issue #405 by @fealho

Bugs

• get_transformer_tree_yaml fails - Issue #389 by @amontanez24
• HyperTransformer _unfit method not working correctly - Issue #390 by @amontanez24
• Blank dataframe after updating the data types - Issue #401 by @amontanez24

0.6.3 - 2022-2-4

This release adds a new module to the RDT library called performance. This module can be used to evaluate the speed and peak memory usage of any transformer in RDT. This release also increases the maximum acceptable version of scikit-learn to make it more compatible with other libraries in the SDV ecosystem. On top of that, it fixes a bug related to a new version of pandas.

New Features

• Move profiling functions into RDT library - Issue #353 by @amontanez24

Housekeeping

• Increase scikit-learn dependency range - Issue #351 by @amontanez24
• pandas 1.4.0 release causes a small error - Issue #358 by @fealho

Bugs

• Performance tests get stuck on Unix if multiprocessing is involved - Issue #337 by @amontanez24

0.6.2 - 2021-12-28

This release adds a new BayesGMMTransformer. This transformer can be used to convert a numerical column into two columns: a discrete column indicating the selected component of the GMM for each row, and a continuous column containing the normalized value of each row based on the mean and std of the selected component. It is useful when the column being transformed came from multiple distributions.

This release also adds multiple new methods to the HyperTransformer API. These allow for users to access the specfic transformers used on each input field, as well as view the entire tree of transformers that are used when running transform. The exact methods are:

• BaseTransformer.get_input_columns() - Return list of input columns for a transformer.
• BaseTransformer.get_output_columns() - Return list of output columns for a transformer.
• HyperTransformer.get_transformer(field) - Return the transformer instance used for a field.
• HyperTransformer.get_output_transformers(field) - Return dictionary mapping output columns of a field to the transformers used on them.
• HyperTransformer.get_final_output_columns(field) - Return list of all final output columns related to a field.
• HyperTransformer.get_transformer_tree_yaml() - Return YAML representation of transformers tree.

Additionally, this release fixes a bug where the HyperTransformer was incorrectly raising a NotFittedError. It also improved the DatetimeTransformer by autonomously detecting if a column needs to be converted from dtype object to dtype datetime.

New Features

• Cast column to datetime if specified in field transformers - Issue #321 by @amontanez24
• Add a BayesianGMM Transformer - Issue #183 by @fealho
• Add transformer tree structure and traversal methods - Issue #330 by @amontanez24

Bugs fixed

• HyperTransformer raises NotFittedError after fitting - Issue #332 by @amontanez24

0.6.1 - 2021-11-10

This release adds support for Python 3.9! It also removes unused document files.

Internal Improvements

• Add support for Python 3.9 - Issue #323 by @amontanez24
• Remove docs - PR #322 by @pvk-developer

0.6.0 - 2021-10-29

This release makes major changes to the underlying code for RDT as well as the API for both the HyperTransformer and BaseTransformer. The changes enable the following functionality:

• The HyperTransformer can now apply a sequence of transformers to a column.
• Transformers can now take multiple columns as an input.
• RDT has been expanded to allow for infinite data types to be added instead of being restricted to pandas.dtypes.
• Users can define acceptable output types for running HyperTransformer.transform.
• The HyperTransformer will continuously apply transformations to the input fields until only acceptable data types are in the output.
• Transformers can return data of any data type.
• Transformers now have named outputs and output types.
• Transformers can suggest which transformer to use on any of their outputs.

To take advantage of this functionality, the following API changes were made:

• The HyperTransformer has new initialization parameters that allow users to specify data types for any field in their data as well as specify which transformer to use for a field or data type. The parameters are:
  • field_transformers - A dictionary allowing users to specify which transformer to use for a field or derived field. Derived fields are fields created by running transform on the input data.
  • field_data_types - A dictionary allowing users to specify the data type of a field.
  • default_data_type_transformers - A dictionary allowing users to specify the default transformer to use for a data type.
  • transform_output_types - A dictionary allowing users to specify which data types are acceptable for the output of transform. This is a result of the fact that transformers can now be applied in a sequence, and not every transformer will return numeric data.
• Methods were also added to the HyperTransformer to allow these parameters to be modified. These include get_field_data_types, update_field_data_types, get_default_data_type_transformers, update_default_data_type_transformers and set_first_transformers_for_fields.
• The BaseTransformer now requires the column names it will transform to be provided to fit, transform and reverse_transform.
• The BaseTransformer added the following method to allow for users to see its output fields and output types: get_output_types.
• The BaseTransformer added the following method to allow for users to see the next suggested transformer for each output field: get_next_transformers.

On top of the changes to the API and the capabilities of RDT, many automated checks and tests were also added to ensure that contributions to the library abide by the current code style, stay performant and result in data of a high quality. These tests run on every push to the repository. They can also be run locally via the following functions:

• validate_transformer_code_style - Checks that new code follows the code style.
• validate_transformer_quality - Tests that new transformers yield data that maintains relationships between columns.
• validate_transformer_performance - Tests that new transformers don't take too much time or memory.
• validate_transformer_unit_tests - Checks that the unit tests cover all new code, follow naming conventions and pass.
• validate_transformer_integration - Checks that the integration tests follow naming conventions and pass.

New Features

• Update HyperTransformer API - Issue #298 by @amontanez24
• Create validate_pull_request function - Issue #254 by @pvk-developer
• Create validate_transformer_unit_tests function - Issue #249 by @pvk-developer
• Create validate_transformer_performance function - Issue #251 by @katxiao
• Create validate_transformer_quality function - Issue #253 by @amontanez24
• Create validate_transformer_code_style function - Issue #248 by @pvk-developer
• Create validate_transformer_integration function - Issue #250 by @katxiao
• Enable users to specify transformers to use in HyperTransformer - Issue #233 by @amontanez24 and @csala
• Addons implementation - Issue #225 by @pvk-developer
• Create ways for HyperTransformer to know which transformers to apply to each data type - Issue #232 by @amontanez24 and @csala
• Update categorical transformers - PR #231 by @fealho
• Update numerical transformer - PR #227 by @fealho
• Update datetime transformer - PR #230 by @fealho
• Update boolean transformer - PR #228 by @fealho
• Update null transformer - PR #229 by @fealho
• Update the baseclass - PR #224 by @fealho

Bugs fixed

• If the input data has a different index, the reverse transformed data may be out of order - Issue #277 by @amontanez24

Documentation changes

• RDT contributing guide - Issue #301 by @katxiao and @amontanez24

Internal improvements

• Add PR template for new transformers - Issue #307 by @katxiao
• Implement Quality Tests for Transformers - Issue #252 by @amontanez24
• Update performance test structure - Issue #257 by @katxiao
• Automated integration test for transformers - Issue #223 by @katxiao
• Move datasets to its own module - Issue #235 by @katxiao
• Fix missing coverage in rdt unit tests - Issue #219 by @fealho
• Add repo-wide automation - Issue #309 by @katxiao

Other issues closed

• DeprecationWarning: np.float is a deprecated alias for the builtin float - Issue #304 by @csala
• Add pip check to CI workflows - Issue #290 by @csala
• Should Transformers subclasses exist for specific configurations? - Issue #243 by @fealho

0.5.3 - 2021-10-07

This release fixes a bug with learning rounding digits in the NumericalTransformer, and includes a few housekeeping improvements.

Issues closed

• Update learn rounding digits to handle all nan data - Issue #244 by @katxiao
• Adapt to latest PyLint housekeeping - Issue #216 by @fealho

0.5.2 - 2021-08-16

This release fixes a couple of bugs introduced by the previous release regarding the OneHotEncodingTransformer and the BooleanTransformer.

Issues closed

• BooleanTransformer.reverse_transform sometimes crashes with TypeError - Issue #210 by @katxiao
• OneHotEncodingTransformer causing shape misalignment in CopulaGAN, CTGAN, and TVAE - Issue #208 by @sarahmish
• Boolean.transformer.reverse_transform modifies the input data - Issue #211 by @katxiao

0.5.1 - 2021-08-11

This release improves the overall performance of the library, both in terms of memory and time consumption. More specifically, it makes the following modules more efficient: NullTransformer, DatetimeTransformer, LabelEncodingTransformer, NumericalTransformer, CategoricalTransformer, BooleanTransformer and OneHotEncodingTransformer.

It also adds performance-based testing and a script for profiling the performance.

Issues closed

• Add performance-based testing - Issue #194 by @amontanez24
• Audit the NullTransformer - Issue #192 by @amontanez24
• Audit DatetimeTransformer - Issue #189 by @sarahmish
• Audit the LabelEncodingTransformer - Issue #184 by @amontanez24
• Audit the NumericalTransformer - Issue #181 by @fealho
• Audit CategoricalTransformer - Issue #180 by @katxiao
• Audit BooleanTransformer - Issue #179 by @katxiao
• Auditing OneHotEncodingTransformer - Issue #178 by @sarahmish
• Create script for profiling - Issue #176 by @amontanez24
• Create folder structure for performance testing - Issue #174 by @amontanez24

0.5.0 - 2021-07-12

This release updates the NumericalTransformer by adding a new rounding argument. Users can now obtain numerical values with precision, either pre-specified or automatically computed from the given data.

Issues closed

• Add rounding argument to NumericalTransformer - Issue #166 by @amontanez24 and @csala
• NumericalTransformer rounding error with infinity - Issue #169 by @amontanez24
• Add min and max arguments to NumericalTransformer - Issue #106 by @amontanez24

0.4.2 - 2021-06-08

This release adds a new method to the CategoricalTransformer to solve a bug where the transformer becomes unusable after being pickled and unpickled if it had NaN values in the data which it was fit on.

It also fixes some grammar mistakes in the documentation.

Issues closed

• CategoricalTransformer with NaN values cannot be pickled bug - Issue #164 by @pvk-developer and @csala

Documentation changes

• docs: fix typo - PR #163 by @sbrugman

0.4.1 - 2021-03-29

This release improves the HyperTransformer memory usage when working with a high number of columns or a high number of categorical values when using one hot encoding.

Issues closed

• Boolean, Datetime and LabelEncoding transformers fail with 2D ndarray - Issue #160 by @pvk-developer
• HyperTransformer: Memory usage increase when reverse_transform is called - Issue #156 by @pvk-developer and @AnupamaGangadhar

0.4.0 - 2021-02-24

In this release a change in the HyperTransformer allows using it to transform and reverse transform a subset of the columns seen during training.

The anonymization functionality which was deprecated and not being used has also been removed along with the Faker dependency.

Issues closed

• Allow the HyperTransformer to be used on a subset of the columns - Issue #152 by @csala
• Remove faker - Issue #150 by @csala

0.3.0 - 2021-01-27

This release changes the behavior of the HyperTransformer to prevent it from modifying any column in the given DataFrame if the transformers dictionary is passed empty.

Issues closed

• If transformers is an empty dict, do nothing - Issue #149 by @csala

0.2.10 - 2020-12-18

This release adds a new argument to the HyperTransformer which gives control over which transformers to use by default for each dtype if no specific transformer has been specified for the field.

This is also the first version to be officially released on conda.

Issues closed

• Add dtype_transformers argument to HyperTransformer - Issue #148 by @csala
• Makes Copulas an optional dependency - Issue #144 by @fealho

0.2.9 - 2020-11-27

This release fixes a bug that prevented the CategoricalTransformer from working properly when being passed data that contained numerical data only, without any strings, but also contained None or NaN values.

Issues closed

• KeyError: nan - CategoricalTransformer fails on numerical + nan data only - Issue #142 by @csala

0.2.8 - 2020-11-20

This release fixes a few minor bugs, including some which prevented RDT from fully working on Windows systems.

Thanks to this fixes, as well as a new testing infrastructure that has been set up, from now on RDT is officially supported on Windows systems, as well as on the Linux and macOS systems which were previously supported.

Issues closed

• TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for: 'NoneType' and 'int' - Issue #132 by @csala
• Example does not work on Windows - Issue #114 by @csala
• OneHotEncodingTransformer producing all zeros - Issue #135 by @fealho
• OneHotEncodingTransformer support for lists and lists of lists - Issue #137 by @fealho

0.2.7 - 2020-10-16

In this release we drop the support for the now officially dead Python 3.5 and introduce a new feature in the DatetimeTransformer which reduces the dimensionality of the generated numerical values while also ensuring that the reverted datetimes maintain the same level as time unit precision as the original ones.

• Drop Py35 support - Issue #129 by @csala
• Add option to drop constant parts of the datetimes - Issue #130 by @csala

0.2.6 - 2020-10-05

• Add GaussianCopulaTransformer - Issue #125 by @csala
• dtype category error - Issue #124 by @csala

0.2.5 - 2020-09-18

Miunor bugfixing release.

Bugs Fixed

• Handle NaNs in OneHotEncodingTransformer - Issue #118 by @csala
• OneHotEncodingTransformer fails if there is only one category - Issue #119 by @csala
• All NaN column produces NaN values enhancement - Issue #121 by @csala
• Make the CategoricalTransformer learn the column dtype and restore it back - Issue #122 by @csala

0.2.4 - 2020-08-08

General Improvements

• Support Python 3.8 - Issue #117 by @csala
• Support pandas >1 - Issue #116 by @csala

0.2.3 - 2020-07-09

• Implement OneHot and Label encoding as transformers - Issue #112 by @csala

0.2.2 - 2020-06-26

Bugs Fixed

• Escape column_name in hypertransformer - Issue #110 by @csala

0.2.1 - 2020-01-17

Bugs Fixed

• Boolean Transformer fails to revert when there are NO nulls - Issue #103 by @JDTheRipperPC

0.2.0 - 2019-10-15

This version comes with a brand new API and internal implementation, removing the old metadata JSON from the user provided arguments, and making each transformer work only with pandas.Series of their corresponding data type.

As part of this change, several transformer names have been changed and a new BooleanTransformer and a feature to automatically decide which transformers to use based on dtypes have been added.

Unit test coverage has also been increased to 100%.

Special thanks to @JDTheRipperPC and @csala for the big efforts put in making this release possible.

Issues

• Drop the usage of meta - Issue #72 by @JDTheRipperPC
• Make CatTransformer.probability_map deterministic - Issue #25 by @csala

0.1.3 - 2019-09-24

New Features

• Add attributes NullTransformer and col_meta - Issue #30 by @ManuelAlvarezC

General Improvements

• Integrate with CodeCov - Issue #89 by @csala
• Remake Sphinx Documentation - Issue #96 by @JDTheRipperPC
• Improve README - Issue #92 by @JDTheRipperPC
• Document RELEASE workflow - Issue #93 by @JDTheRipperPC
• Add support to Python 3.7 - Issue #38 by @ManuelAlvarezC
• Create way to pass HyperTransformer table dict - Issue #45 by @ManuelAlvarezC

0.1.2

• Add a numerical transformer for positive numbers.
• Add option to anonymize data on categorical transformer.
• Move the col_meta argument from method-level to class-level.
• Move the logic for missing values from the transformers into the HyperTransformer.
• Removed unreacheble lines in NullTransformer.
• Numbertransfomer to set default value to 0 when the column is null.
• Add a CLA for collaborators.
• Refactor performance-wise the transformers.

0.1.1

• Improve handling of NaN in NumberTransformer and CatTransformer.
• Add unittests for HyperTransformer.
• Remove unused methods get_types and impute_table from HyperTransformer.
• Make NumberTransformer enforce dtype int on integer data.
• Make DTTransformer check data format before transforming.
• Add minimal API Reference.
• Merge rdt.utils into HyperTransformer class.

0.1.0

• First release on PyPI.