@memberjunction/predictive-studio-core

The shared vocabulary of MemberJunction Predictive Studio — every type the sidecar, engine, UI, and agent agree on, defined exactly once.

What — the type contracts for Predictive Studio (MJ's capability for training predictive models on a client's own data and scoring records with them): the sidecar request/response shapes, the declarative pipeline-spec JSON, the visual FeatureStep DAG, and the Model Development Agent's modeling-plan payload — plus the handful of pure helpers every layer must agree on (zod validators for the modeling plan, the metric-direction predicate). Almost entirely interfaces and union types; the only runtime dependency is zod (for the trust-boundary validators).

Why — four layers (server engine, Python sidecar client, Studio UI, Model Development Agent) must agree on the same shapes. Defining the contract once, here, is what keeps them in lockstep — change a shape and every consumer fails to compile until it's reconciled.

How it fits — it's the bottom of the stack: imported by everything, importing nothing. See How it fits the whole below.

For the full architecture, read the Predictive Studio Guide (§3 covers this package); for the design record, plans/predictive-studio.md.

Install

npm install @memberjunction/predictive-studio-core

It's a workspace package — within the monorepo it's already wired as a dependency of @memberjunction/predictive-studio and @memberjunction/predictive-studio-sidecar.

What's here

| File | Contents | Plan ref | |---|---|---| | sidecar-contract.ts | The Python sidecar /train + /predict HTTP contract: TrainRequest/TrainResponse, PredictRequest/PredictResponse, FeatureSchemaEntry, PreprocessingOp, ValidationConfig, MatrixData, Prediction; scalars FeatureKind, ProblemType, ModelMetrics, FeatureImportance, FittedPreprocessing | §3.2 | | pipeline-spec.ts | The declarative training-pipeline shape: SourceBinding, AsOfStrategy (point-in-time), LeakageGuard, ValidationStrategy | §4.2 / §5 / §6 | | feature-steps.ts | The visual FeatureStep DAG — a discriminated union on Kind (select / impute / standardize / onehot / bin / embedding / llm-derived / flow-agent / vision-llm) + FeatureStepGraph | §4.2 / §5 / §6 | | modeling-plan-spec.ts | ModelingPlanSpec — the Model Development Agent's strongly-typed payload — plus Budget and LeaderboardEntry | §9.2 / §8.4 | | modeling-plan-schema.ts | Runtime (zod) validators for the modeling plan — ModelingPlanSpecSchema, BudgetSchema, and the validateModelingPlanSpec() / validateBudget() guards that prove an untrusted JSON payload (an Action param, an agent-produced plan) well-formed before the deterministic engine executes it | §9.2 | | metrics-util.ts | isErrorMetric() — the single source of truth for a metric's direction (lower-is-better RMSE/MAE/MSE/loss vs. higher-is-better AUC/F1/R²), shared by the experiment leaderboard and the maintenance challenger comparison so the two never disagree on which model is "better" | §8 / §12 |

Usage

import type {
  ModelingPlanSpec,
  TrainRequest,
  PredictRequest,
  FeatureStepGraph,
  AsOfStrategy,
  LeakageGuard,
} from '@memberjunction/predictive-studio-core';

Two contract details worth internalizing (both enforce the system's anti-skew correctness — see the guide §4):

• FittedPreprocessing is an opaque, serialized blob of fitted transform parameters (means/stds/vocabularies/bin edges). It is produced once at /train and round-tripped unchanged into every /predict call — the model never re-fits at inference.
• AsOfStrategy (none / column / offset) drives point-in-time feature assembly so training "as-of-then" and scoring "as-of-now" stay consistent.

At trust boundaries — where untrusted JSON (an Action param or an agent-produced plan) crosses into the deterministic engine — validate it at runtime with the shared zod guard rather than trusting the compile-time type:

import { validateModelingPlanSpec } from '@memberjunction/predictive-studio-core';

const result = validateModelingPlanSpec(rawJson);
if (!result.ok) {
  throw new Error(result.error); // single flattened "path: message; …" string
}
const plan = result.value;        // typed ModelingPlanSpec, proven well-formed

How it fits the whole

predictive-studio-core  (this package — types only)
        │ imported by
        ├── predictive-studio-sidecar   → MLSidecar (train/predict over the contract)
        ├── predictive-studio (Engine)  → FeatureAssemblyExecutor · TrainingEngine ·
        │                                  MLModelInferenceProcessor · ExperimentOrchestrator
        └── ng-dashboards (Studio UI) + the Model Development Agent

Because this is the only place these shapes are defined, import them from here directly (never re-export them through another package — see root CLAUDE.md rule 5).

Build & test

npm run build   # tsc && tsc-alias -f
npm run test    # vitest run