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How Should the F-16's Ailerons Move?

Given the aircraft's current state, what aileron command would the pilot give next? Learning that mapping from flight data is a classic test for building autopilot assistance.

Use caseEngineeringPredictionModel evaluation

The table

Readings from a simulated F-16 in flight, with 33 attributes describing the aircraft's state and the aileron control action taken. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Ailerons Control Problem, 13,750 rows by 34 columns, licensed Public. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.83. At 13,750 rows and 33 features the table is larger than the model limits allow, so the walkthrough evaluates and fits on a seeded sample of 4,000 rows. TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium compete.

Walkthrough

  1. Load it from the catalogue

    Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.

    import pandas as pd
    from welt import Client
    
    with Client() as client:
        item = client.research_datasets(q="ailerons", limit=1)["items"][0]
        info = client.research_dataset(item["id"])
        data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"])
    
    target = info["targets"][0]
    target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target
    print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)
  2. Pick the rows

    Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end. The models learn from a seeded sample of 4,000 of the rest, the most this table's width allows.

    known = data.dropna(subset=[target])
    new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1)
    table = known.drop(new_rows.index).sample(4000, random_state=7)
  3. Compare the models and predict

    The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. RMSE and MAE are average errors in the target's own units, so lower is better. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.

    with Client() as client:
        evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="regression", seed=7,
                                     models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"])
        model = evaluation.fit()
    
    print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "rmse_mean", "mae_mean"]])
    features = new_rows.drop(columns=target)
    print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features)}))

What you get

A predicted control actionA number for each flight state.
A strong signalThe catalogue measures a high signal, so expect a tight fit.
A classic benchmarkCompare with published results on the same table.

Try it

Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "ailerons", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".