Spike: Improve Generics for Return Types in Primitives

[gsheni]

Problem

• There are certain primitives where the return_type depends on the input_type, such as AddNumeric, MultiplyNumeric, GreaterThan, GreaterThanEqualTo, LessThan

    input_types = [ColumnSchema(semantic_tags={'numeric'}), ColumnSchema(semantic_tags={'numeric'})]
    return_type = ColumnSchema(semantic_tags={'numeric'})

• The following situations can happen
  • float + float = float
  • float + int = float
  • int + int = int
• However, since we can't define primitive return types that depend on the input types, this leads to a situation where after calculate_feature_matrix, we have to re-run inference. This is expensive, should not be necessary.

Request

• This spike is to create a design document to possible solutions to this problem.