What Hollerith is
How is this different from a large language model?
Hollerith reads a table the way a language model reads a prompt. That is where the resemblance ends. It has no world knowledge to fall back on. Everything in an answer comes from the table you handed it, andx7 and days_since_last_login are the same column to it.
Does it handle time series?
Yes, throughforecast, which is in Beta. Row-wise predict has no notion of time, so a
time-indexed target belongs in Forecast, which never uses a fitted
context.
Getting set up
Do I need a GPU?
No. Inference runs on our GPUs and you reach it over HTTPS. The SDK depends onhttpx,
numpy and pandas only, so nothing on your machine ever loads a model.
What Python version, and what dependencies?
>=3.11,<3.13 — and three dependencies:
httpx>=0.27, numpy>=1.26, pandas>=2.2. Hollerith is not on PyPI; the wheel comes from
your own deployment, and the console Quickstart tab has the URL.
Can I use this from a language other than Python?
Yes, over REST. Python is the only SDK, but every operation is an HTTPS call — see REST API. One gap:quantiles, predictionLength and future are
not request fields, so REST cannot ask for intervals.
Can I run it in my own infrastructure?
No. Self-hosted and in-VPC deployment are not built, and neither are customer-managed encryption keys. What we do with your rows is in Data handling.Your data
Does my data train the model?
No. No gradient update ever runs on anything you send; nothing you upload changes a weight. Your table is read as context while the job runs, then purged when the job ends.What happens to text columns, and to dates?
Both are accepted, and both are ordinal-encoded. The model sees which rows share a value, not what the value means or how the values order.signup_date tells it which customers signed up on the same day, not which came first.
Replace it with a number wherever ordering matters.
Do I need to encode categoricals or impute missing values first?
No, and you should not. String columns are read as labels; missing values are read as missing, which is information. An imputed median tells the model a value was observed when it was not.How big your table has to be
How many rows do I need? Is there a minimum?
There is no minimum.fit needs one labeled row and one feature column beside the target;
evaluate needs two rows to split. The iris sample is 150 rows and returns
Evaluation(accuracy=0.9733, method=kfold, folds=5, rows=150).
How large can a table get before I have to split it?
1,000,000 training rows, 2,000 columns and 100,000,000 cells; a table sits under all three.predict scores at most 200,000 rows per call, so a million rows to score is five calls.
Breaching a ceiling raises dataset_too_large — Limits has the rest.
Calling it
Is prediction deterministic?
Yes, holding the engine fixed. Nothing samples at prediction time and the engine’s seed is pinned, so the same rows scored against the same fitted context return the same predictions. Two things move an answer: a newfit, which creates a new context, and a new engine
version. Store handle.job.engine_version beside any result you may have to explain.
How long does a fit take?
Seconds to minutes, scaling with how much table the model reads. One recorded benchmark, afit of 1,000,000 rows × 30 columns, took 307.9 seconds.
That was measured on a GPU tier other than the live one — the shape of the curve, not a
number to plan against.
What does it cost to score a million rows?
A context-backedpredict bills its rows twice, so 1,000,000 scored rows is 2,000,000
billable rows. On Cloud that is 1,000,000 rows past the included allowance: 500 base. That also spends the whole daily input-row quota —
Usage and billing has the rest.
Fitted contexts
Can I keep a fitted context longer than 7 days?
No. A context lives 7 days from thefit that created it, predicting against it does not
extend the clock, and there is no renewal.
After that a predict raises fitted_context_expired, and the fix is to fit again.
Running Hollerith in production shows the recovery in code.
Can I delete a fitted context?
No. There is no delete endpoint; a context goes when its 7 days lapse, not on request. The rows behind it are already gone, purged when the fit reached a terminal state.Next
- Quickstart — install, key, and a first prediction
- How Hollerith works — why there is no training step
- The model — where it wins, and where it does not
- Limits and quotas — every ceiling and the error you get at it
- Troubleshooting — a symptom, its cause, and the fix