Add Non-negative and Positive constraints across multiple columns

[dyuliu]

Problem Description

When we are handling single tabular data, it is very common to see some constraints that require the values of some numeric columns to be Positive (>0) and the values of some numeric columns to be non-negative (>=0).

Expected behavior

I would expect some constraint class to be integrated in the library like this:

from sdv.constraints import Positives

multiple_columns_constraint = Positives(
    columns=['col1', 'col2', 'col3'],
    handling_strategy='reject_sampling'
)

Or maybe have even more general design like this:

from sdv.constraints import GreatThan

multiple_columns_constraint = GreatThan(
    columns=['col1', 'col2', 'col3'],
    constant=0,
    handling_strategy='reject_sampling'
)

[kveerama]

Thanks @dyuliu Both are good options.

@npatki and I were discussing that we can have general design, and perhaps we expose multiple constraints with specific names like ispositive and is-nonnegative but the underlying call will use the general purpose greaterthan. It may give better usability, and interpretability. [minor item]

[npatki]

+1 We'll at least need to support greater_than, greater_than_or_equal_to, less_than, and less_than_or_equal_to as base cases to cover all possibilities. Doing this will allow us to layer additional functionality for ease-of-use. We can prioritize based on usage but I assume we'll at least want to have:

• is_positive for >0
• is_non_negative for >=0
• between(X,Y) for >X and <Y(see Add Between values constraint #367)
• between_including(X,Y) for >=X and <=Y (may want different phrasing for this)

[Timbimjim]

Hey, having above mentioned features would be very valuable. Very often datasets contain columns which from an engineering view would always have to be >0 or bigger than any chosen number.

Iam actually solving this at the moment, with just generating a lot of synth data and then filtering the data for rows with values only > 0.

I am not 100% sure if this approach will keep the overall quality of the synth data intact?