Help users modify their metadata file

[choisant]

It is not easy to work with the metadata files. I have been thinking about a small program that would go like this:

Give path to datafile -> buildmetadata()
If metadata file already exists, ask if you want to remake. Y/N
Outputs preliminary-meta-datafile.csv 
Reads preliminary-meta-datafile.csv

loop over all variates {
1. print the name of the variate
2. Do you want to keep this variate? Y/N (No, go to next variate, Yes continue)
3. This looks like a _ <- best guess at broad (binary, categorical, numerical) variate type. Is that correct? Y/N
4. If relevant, plot the variate KDE/histogram
5. Ask detailed questions like max/min value, number of categories etc (specific to each variate) and updates relevant lines of text.
}

Save the updated metadata file as meta-datafile.csv

It would not be hard to make, although it would take some time and testing, but it is also not an urgent feature.

[pglpm]

@choisant It sounds good. I think some users would like the interactive approach very much. We could also have a "verbose" version that gives some statistical explanations to the user! One could even add some way to let the user plot what kind of distribution is expected, that could be used as prior (internally it would set some hyperparameters to appropriate values).

Other users may not like this, also because they may have to implement this in some kind of script.

We could have two functions for the two user cases?

[choisant]

I think it sounds amazing, but we might have to think about the user base here. Are we making it for R users, or are we making it for non-programmers? If we want to make it very fancy, it should maybe be a separate program completely (so definitely a master thesis in software/app development, maybe two). In the case of making it for direct use as part of the package, are there examples of this kind of interactivity in other R packages?

[choisant]

Most fancy solution -> large language model interface!