Delve Utilities A Suite of utilities for manipulating Delve datasets, and evaluating method performance in a consistent manner.

Overview

To ensure consistent use of the Delve datasets, we supply a suite of utilities for manipulating datasets and evaluating method performance. The utilities allow you to:

get information about the Delve datasets you have installed on your system.
get information about what methods have been run on those datasets.
extract training and testing cases from the dataset file so you can run your method on it.
calculate losses given the predictions your method made for the testing data.
calculate summary statistics about its performance, and compare it to other methods.

Before you can use Delve, you must install the utilities.

System Requirements

1. A Unix operating system. We have only tested Delve on a small number of Unix varieties (eg Irix, Sun OS, Solaris). It probably will work under others
2. A "C" compiler
3. Tcl (Tool Command Language) version 7.3 or higher (see Installation)

Delve Commands

The Delve utility suite includes ten commands. Generally commands that begin with d act on datasets, while commands beginning with a m have to do with learning methods. For a complete description of their use, see Appendix C of the Delve manual.

dinfo

returns information about a Delve dataset, prototask or task.

dls

lists the files used to specify a dataset.

dmore

allows you to view those files.

minfo

returns similar information, but for a method run on the dataset, prototask, or task.

mls

lists the files describing a method's performance on a dataset.

mmore

allows you to view those files.

mgendir

generates a directory hierarchy that will hold the data files for evaluating your method.

mgendata

extracts the training and testing cases from the dataset files and puts them into the directory hierarchy you created with "mgendir".

mloss

calculates the losses for the testing data, given your method's guesses.

mstats

calculates summary statistics about your method, or compares it to other methods

Installation

The source distribution for the current release of the Delve utility suite is available in a single compressed tar file. To build and install the suite you must first have installed Tcl (Tool Command Language) version 7.3 or higher. For more information on Tcl, you can check out The Santa Cruz Operation database of Tcl/Tk Web pages. It has links to just about everything imaginable on the Web that's related to Tcl or Tk, including mirror sites for the Tcl distribution.

Once you have Tcl installed, you can install the Delve utilities as follows: (This illustrates the steps for version 1.1 of the software. For other version replace 1.1 by the version/patch number)

1. Obtain the latest version of the software from our ftp site: Also, please check for the latest patches or previous versions
2. Uncompress and untar the distribution (using the gunzip utility):

    
   gunzip delve-1.1p3.tar.gz
   tar xvf delve-1.1p3.tar
   

3. Run the configuration script:

   cd delve-1.1
   ./configure
   

   or, for systems that don't recognize "#!" in shell scripts:

   cd delve-1.1
   /bin/sh ./configure
   

   By default, the configuration script will set things up to be installed in "/usr/local". You can change this by specifying a different "prefix" in the "configure" command:

   ./configure --prefix=/your/install/path
   

   You can also add options for a particular "cc" compiler and compiler flags:

   ./configure --with-cc=gcc --with-cflags=-g
   

   For a full list of the options "configure" takes, type:

   ./configure --help

   The "configure" script generates new Makefiles from their respective templates (Makefile.in). If "configure" can't find something, you can make changes to the intermediate "config.status" script, and invoke this script to reconfigure the Makefiles:

   vi config.status
   ./config.status
   

   As a last resort, you can edit the Makefiles in the current directory and "doc/" by hand and insert the proper paths.
4. Build the libraries and the executables. From the toplevel directory type:

   make all
   

5. Install the executables, libraries, documentation, and script files. From the top-level directory type:

   make install

   If you have problems with the installation, you can use a subset of the commands:

   make install-binaries
   make install-libraries
   make install-doc
   make install-man