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There can be occasions when the fdl.ModelSchema object generated by fdl.Model.from_data infers a column’s data type differently than the type intended by the model developer. In these cases you can modify the ModelSchema columns as needed prior to creating the model in Fiddler. Let’s walk through an example of how to do this.
Suppose you’ve loaded in a dataset as a pandas DataFrame.
Below is an example of what is displayed upon inspection. Tabular view of CSV data.
You then create a fdl.Model object by inferring the column schema details from this DataFrame.
Below is an example of what is displayed upon inspection of model.schema. Raw output of the ModelSchema object properties.
Upon inspection you may notice that a few things are off:
  1. The value range of output_column is set to [0.01, 0.99], when it should really be [0.0, 1.0].
  2. There are no possible values set for feature_3.
  3. The data type of feature_3 is set to DataType.STRING, when it should really be DataType.CATEGORY.
  4. The histogram bins for a numerical column may need to be adjusted for better distribution analysis (e.g., quantile-based instead of uniform).
What’s the downside of not making sure that ranges and categories are reviewed and properly set? A production traffic event that encodes a number outside of the specified value range or a category value that is not in the set of valid category values will further down the line be flagged as a so-called Data Integrity violation. Depending on the alerting config, this may result in an alert. It’s also worth noting however that an event which has a violation in its columns is still processed, and metrics that can be generated are still generated. The below examples demonstrate how to address each of the issues noted:

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Modifying the Value Range

Let’s say we want to modify the range of output_column in the above fdl.Model object to be [0.0, 1.0]. You can do this by setting the min and max of the output_column column.

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Modifying the Histogram Bins

By default, Fiddler auto-generates 10 uniform bins for numerical columns based on the column’s min and max values. You can customize these bins to better represent your data distribution — for example, using quantile-based bins or domain-specific ranges.
Custom bins must:
  • Be strictly monotonically increasing
  • Start at the column’s min value
  • End at the column’s max value
  • Have at least 2 and at most 16 boundary values (1 to 15 bins)
Custom bins affect how feature distributions and drift metrics (PSI, JSD) are computed. Bins are used for histogram bucketing in data drift calculations.

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Modifying the Possible Values

Let’s say we want to modify the possible values of feature_3 to be [‘Yes’, ‘No’]. You can do this by setting the categories of the feature_3 column.

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Modifying the Data Type

Let’s say we want to modify the data type of feature_3 to be DataType.CATEGORY. You can do this by setting the data_type of the feature_3 column.
Note: when converting a column to a CATEGORY, you must also set the list of unique possible values:
Note: if converting a column from numeric (integer or float) to a category, you must also remove the min/max numeric range values and bins that were automatically calculated from the sample data.
A complete example might look like this: