Recommender Exclude Parameter Not Working

[TobyRoseman]

The exclude parameter for recommend does not seem to work:

import turicreate
sf = turicreate.SFrame({'user_id': ["0", "0", "0", "1", "1", "2", "2", "2"],
                       'item_id': ["a", "b", "c", "a", "b", "b", "c", "d"],
                       'rating': [1, 3, 2, 5, 4, 1, 4, 3]})
m = turicreate.recommender.create(sf, target='rating')

recs1 = m.recommend(users=[1])
print(recs1) # correctly recommending 'c' to 1

exclude = turicreate.SFrame({'item_id': ['c'], 'user_id': [1]})
rec2 = m.recommend(users=[1], exclude=exclude)
print(rec2)  # still recommending 'c' to 1

[hoytak]

This is because the user_id specified in the exclude frame is a numeric 1, whereas the one in the users column of the original data is a string. It appears that some of the casting logic is inconsistent.

[TobyRoseman]

@hoytak - could you share some more details about how you determined it's a casting logic inconsistency? Where in the code base is the relevant casting logic (i.e. is it in Cython or ML data)?