How to properly use the Tile Tool?

[jaipersr]

Hi I am having an issue with the Tile Tool. I have looked at the examples that come with Alteryx but, I am still having a problem. I am using the Equal Sum option to group records into tiles with equal sums. I have made an example case. Lets say I have a column with the following records in the following order:

 x

10

20 

30

40

50

60

70

80

Using 4 tiles my expectation would for the output using the x column as my sum field would be as follows. This makes sense to me since the sum of each tile is 90:

 x   Tile_Num  Tile_SequenceNum  

10         1                     1

80         1                     2

20         2                     1

70         2                     2

30         3                     1

60         3                     2       

40         4                     1

50         4                     2

However, in the output is actually as follows The sums for tiles 1, 2, 3, and 4 are 100, 50, 130, and 80, respectively. Any reason for this?:

 x   Tile_Num  Tile_SequenceNum  

10         1                     1

20         1                     2

30         1                     3

40         1                     4

50         2                     1

60         3                     1       

70         3                     2

80         4                     1

[PhilipMannering]

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[DavidP]

Hi @jaipersr 

I'm a bit of a fan of the Tile tool myself, which is why your post caught my eye.

You're right, it does look like the equal sum option doesn't work at all.

The bit that's misleading in the explanation text in the example is underlined below:

In this output, the stores are tiled randomly and formed so that the sum of each tile's average sale columns should be equal to each other (this calculation comes as close as possible without breaking any rows).

It suggests that records would be paired in the most optimal way to produce X number of tiles with an equal sum, but as you duly found, this does not happen - records are tiled in sequential order.

The main problem with your dataset is that it's way too small. The result you got was the Tile tool's best effort at producing tiles of equal sum (in sequential order), and, it's fair to say that the results are a little disappointing.

To illustrate that I'm not making it all up, let's look at an example of 1000 records with values 1-1000 and do the same. With the help of the Summarize tool here are the results of the 4 tiles.

As you can see, the sums are pretty close and also note that the first 500 records are in Tile 1, the next 207 in Tile 2, 159 in Tile 3 and 134 in Tile 4.

[jaipersr]

Hi Thank you! That was my thought as well. I just wanted someone to confirm. Now I know to pay attention to the size of my dataset and that the Tile Tool groups records sequentially.

[ak2018]

Not entirely related to the question, I want to use the tile tool to create bins, I have values that I need to put into bins and therefore I use the Manual option in the Tile Tool where I specify the lower limit for a bin. 

The Tile Tool does its job just fine identifying the value and its bin. However, I want to assign labels without having to manually use the SWITCH or IF statements. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to achieve this?  TIA.