Columns and DataType Not Explicitly Set on line 133 of data_retrieval.py

[CodeSmileBot]

Hello!

I found an AI-Specific Code smell in your project.
The smell is called: Columns and DataType Not Explicitly Set

You can find more information about it in this paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3522664.3528620.

According to the paper, the smell is described as follows:

Problem	If the columns are not selected explicitly, it is not easy for developers to know what to expect in the downstream data schema. If the datatype is not set explicitly, it may silently continue the next step even though the input is unexpected, which may cause errors later. The same applies to other data importing scenarios.
Solution	It is recommended to set the columns and DataType explicitly in data processing.
Impact	Readability

Example:

### Pandas Column Selection
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('data.csv')
+ df = df[['col1', 'col2', 'col3']]

### Pandas Set DataType
import pandas as pd
- df = pd.read_csv('data.csv')
+ df = pd.read_csv('data.csv', dtype={'col1': 'str', 'col2': 'int', 'col3': 'float'})

You can find the code related to this smell in this link:

PyShortTextCategorization/shorttext/data/data_retrieval.py

Lines 123 to 143 in 1d1a67a

	if not (txt_col in ['PROJECT_TITLE', 'ABSTRACT_TEXT']):
	raise KeyError('Undefined text column: '+txt_col+'. Must be PROJECT_TITLE or ABSTRACT_TEXT.')
	if not (label_col in ['FUNDING_ICs', 'IC_NAME']):
	raise KeyError('Undefined label column: '+label_col+'. Must be FUNDING_ICs or IC_NAME.')
	zfile = zipfile.ZipFile(get_or_download_data('nih_full.csv.zip',
	'https://shorttext-data-northernvirginia.s3.amazonaws.com/trainingdata/nih_full.csv.zip',
	asbytes=True),
	'r',
	zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED)
	nih = pd.read_csv(zfile.open('nih_full.csv'), na_filter=False, usecols=[label_col, txt_col], encoding='cp437')
	zfile.close()
	nb_data = len(nih)
	sample_size = nb_data if sample_size==None else min(nb_data, sample_size)
	classdict = defaultdict(lambda : [])
	for rowidx in np.random.randint(nb_data, size=min(nb_data, sample_size)):
	label = nih.iloc[rowidx, nih.columns.get_loc(label_col)]
	if label_col=='FUNDING_ICs':
	if label=='':

.

I also found instances of this smell in other files, such as:

File: https://github.com/stephenhky/PyShortTextCategorization/blob/master/shorttext/classifiers/embed/nnlib/VarNNEmbedVecClassification.py#L238-L248 Line: 243
.

I hope this information is helpful!

[stephenhky]

Since this function is too flexible, it is hard to know what the column types for the developers want. Thanks for the recommendation though, as it is a real concern.

Close without changing.