You must choose features that you think will inform the predictions. Distil will use the chosen features to automatically generate models that predict the target.

Select the features to model

To choose the features that your model should use in its predictions:
  1. Click Add under the features you think may influence the target:
    • Actor1
    • Actor2
    • Assoc_Actor_1
    • Assoc_Actor_2
    • Inter1
    • Inter2
    • Country
    • Latitude
    • Longitude
    • Interaction
    • Fatalities
    Add actors to features to model

    Distil adds the selected features to the list of Features to Model. You can filter or change the type  of any of the features to model.

    Main Actor and Other Main Actor added as features that inform the prediction made by the model
    Click Remove under the feature name in the Features to Model pane or click Remove All above the list of features.
    Remove feature from the features to model
  2. Click show more on the Actor1 card to see more values.
  3. Click Protestors (Iran) to view samples that match the value in the Samples to Model From table.
  4. To exclude these samples from the model, click Exclude.
    Omit records with a specific categorical value
  5. Click Excluded Samples to review the records you removed.
  6. Click to see where those records are located.

Depending on your task, next you can:

  • Join a dataset to find and incorporate other datasets that may contain additional features that could help improve your models.
  • Generate the models to predict Event_Type using the selected features.

Generate the models

If your task is to build a predictive model, you can now begin the model generation. Based on your selections, Distil:

  1. Automatically determines the number and type of models to predict your target feature.
  2. Uses a subset of the actual data to train the models to predict the target using the features selected in this step.
  3. Applies the trained models to the rest of the actual data to predict the target feature value in each record.
To begin the model generation with the current feature selections:
  • Click Create Models.
Create models

In this example, Distil will try to predict the Event_Type based on the selected features for a subset of the dataset.

Next steps

Search for datasets to join to the ACLED data.