Opening Alfa

Navigate to the directory where ALFA was downloaded

Windows

Double click on the file named ALFA_WIN

Linux/macOS

Open terminal and type the following commands

conda activate Alfarvis
python ./alfa_gui.py

Key Components of GUI

Screen shot of Alfa GUI showing main components of GUI

The components of the GUI are as follows:

Component Label Description
Chat box A shows a history of user inputs and responses from Alfa
Visualization window B visualizes plots requested by the user
Table section C displays any tabular information printed by user
User input D entry point for sending commands to Alfa
Ground truth E shows the current reference variable/ground truth set by user
Row label F row label set by the user
Filter G filter applied by the user

Basic Workflow

Once you open ALFA, the chat box will show a default help message describing the basic help commands. The figure and table windows will be empty since we did not load any data.

Loading Data

You can ask Alfa to load a data file by using the load command. Alfa has a flexible syntax. For example, all the commands below produce the same result:

load tumor
load tumoor data
open tumor data
Please load tumor csv file

Once the data is loaded, the table box shows the columns in the csv file along with the type of column and the range of data present in the column.

Load command supports more files than just csv files. You can load an image file using the same procedure

 load phone image

will load an image from database and display it in the visualization window.

Getting Help

If you want to get help about using any particular commands supported by Alfa, you can ask for help using the help command. You can list all available commands using list commands. This should print a list of all available commands. If you want to know more about a specific command, you can ask help command [command name]. Alfa will search for the command and provide command specific help.

Basic commands

Some basic commands you can try

Command Description
list Can list columns in a csv, or list variables/files etc in history
load load data files/models/images/figures into history
show images in window
summary A summary of the data i.e mean, stdev, max etc for each column

Quick Tips and Links

  1. ALFA provides autocomplete functionality using tab command
    You can either autocomplete a variable or a command.
  2. ALFA also provides a double click functionality. You can double click on a variable to add it to your command
  3. Previous command is accessible using up arrow key
  4. To learn more about ALFA and its functionalities, visit our wiki
  5. Checkout some of the ALFA notebooks demonstrating different functionalities of ALFA on example datasets here
  6. Checkout a video demonstrating different features of ALFA on an example breast cancer dataset here