Auto.ML Regression Experiment throwing Exception when culture is pl-PL

[ptelman]

System information

• OS version/distro: Windows 10
• .NET Version (eg., dotnet --info): 3.1.300-preview-015135
• Auto.ML Version: v0.17.0-preview2

Issue

• What did you do?
  AutoML experiment using Boston houses dataset, RegressionExperiment and pl-PL culture
• What happened?
  Exception was thrown after ~3 minutes of experiment - float.Parse could not parse string.
• What did you expect?
  Exception should not be thrown.

Source code / logs

Call stack:

Unhandled exception. System.OverflowException: Value was either too large or too small for a Decimal.
at System.Number.ThrowOverflowOrFormatException(ParsingStatus status, TypeCode type)
at System.Single.Parse(String s)
at Microsoft.ML.AutoML.SweeperProbabilityUtils.ParameterSetAsFloatArray(IValueGenerator[] sweepParams, ParameterSet ps, Boolean expandCategoricals)
at Microsoft.ML.AutoML.SmacSweeper.FitModel(IEnumerable1 previousRuns) at Microsoft.ML.AutoML.SmacSweeper.ProposeSweeps(Int32 maxSweeps, IEnumerable1 previousRuns)
at Microsoft.ML.AutoML.PipelineSuggester.SampleHyperparameters(MLContext context, SuggestedTrainer trainer, IEnumerable1 history, Boolean isMaximizingMetric) at Microsoft.ML.AutoML.PipelineSuggester.GetNextInferredPipeline(MLContext context, IEnumerable1 history, DatasetColumnInfo[] columns, TaskKind task, Boolean isMaximizingMetric, CacheBeforeTrainer cacheBeforeTrainer, IEnu
merable1 trainerWhitelist) at Microsoft.ML.AutoML.Experiment2.Execute()
at Microsoft.ML.AutoML.ExperimentBase2.ExecuteCrossVal(IDataView[] trainDatasets, ColumnInformation columnInfo, IDataView[] validationDatasets, IEstimator1 preFeaturizer, IProgress1 progressHandler) at Microsoft.ML.AutoML.ExperimentBase2.Execute(IDataView trainData, UInt32 numberOfCVFolds, ColumnInformation columnInformation, IEstimator1 preFeaturizer, IProgress1 progressHandler)
at Playground.Program.AutoMl() in C:\GIT\ML\dotnet\AI\Playground\Program.cs:line 37
at Playground.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\GIT\ML\dotnet\AI\Playground\Program.cs:line 19

Manual setting culture using Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US"); solves issue.

[justinormont]

Related:

• Exception while auto-train with regression task machinelearning-modelbuilder#363 (Exception while auto-train with regression task)
• Sweepable Parameter can't handle Russia Format #4634 (Sweepable Parameter can't handle Russia Format)
• Previous PR to fix Culture in Sweeping: Using invariance culture when converting to string #4635

[ptelman]

@justinormont #5163 this fixes the issue.

[antoniovs1029]

Out of curiosity, were you able to determine what was the exact string that caused this exception?