I encountered a problem while doing my ML project. Hope to get some advice from you!
I fit logistic LASSO on a dataset with only 15 features trying to predict a binary outcome. I know that LASSO is supposed to do feature selection and eliminate the unimportant ones (coefficient = 0), but in my analysis, it has selected all the features and did not eliminate any one of them. My questions are:
Is this because I have too few features, or that the features are not correlated with each other(low co-linearity?)
Is this a bad thing or a good thing for a classification model?
some coefficients of the features LASSO selected are less than 0.1, can I interpret them as non-important or not that important to the model?
p.s. I run the model using the sklearn package in python.
Thank you!
Lasso did not fail to perform feature selection. It just determined that none of the 15 features were unimportant. For the one's where you get coefficients = 0.1 this just means that they are less important when compared to other more important features. So I would not be concerned!
Also 15 features is not a large amount of features for Lasso to determine the important one's. I mean it depends on the data so for some datasets, it can eliminate some features from a dataset of 10 features and sometimes it won't eliminate any from a dataset of 20. It just depends on the data!
Cheers!
Related
I am a beginner in machine learning in python, and I am working on a binary classification problem. I have implemented a logistic regression model with an average accuracy of around 75%. I have tried numerous ways to improve the accuracy of the model, such as one-hot encoding of categorical variables, scaling of the continuous variables, and I did a grid search to find the best parameters. They all failed to improve the accuracy. So, I looked into unsupervised learning methods in order to improve it.
I tried using KMeans clustering, and I set the n_clusters into 2. I trained the logistic regression model using the X_train and y_train values. After that, I tried testing the model on the training data using cross-validation but I set the cross-validation to be against the labels predicted by the KMeans:
kmeans = KMeans(n_clusters = 2)
kmeans.fit(X_train)
logreg = LogisticRegression().fit(X_train, y_train)
cross_val_score(logreg, X_train, kmeans.labels_, cv = 5)
When using the cross_val_score, the accuracy is averaging over 95%. However, when I use the .score() method:
logreg.score(X_train, kmeans.labels_)
, the score is in the 60s. My questions are:
What does the significance (or meaning) of the score that is produced when testing the model against the labels predicted by k-means?
How can I use k-means clustering to improve the accuracy of the model? I tried adding a 'cluster' column that contains the clustering labels to the training data and fit the logistic regression, but it also didn't improve the score.
Why is there a huge discrepancy between the score when evaluated via cross_val_predict and the .score() method?
I'm having a hard time understanding the context of your problem based on the snippet you provided. Strong work for providing minimal code, but in this case I feel it may have been a bit too minimal. Regardless, I'm going to read between the lines and state some relevent ideas. I'll then attempt to answer your questions more directly.
I am working on a binary classification problem. I have implemented a logistic regression model with an average accuracy of around 75%
This only tells a small amount of the story. knowing what data your classifying and it's general form is pretty vital, and accuracy doesn't tell us a lot about how innaccuracy is distributed through the problem.
Some natural questions:
Is one class 50% accurate and another class is 100% accurate? are the classes both 75% accurate?
what is the class balance? (is there more of one class than the other)?
how much overlap do these classes have?
I recommend profiling your training and testing set, and maybe running your data through TSNE to get an idea of class overlap in your vector space.
these plots will give you an idea of how much overlap your two classes have. In essence, TSNE maps a high dimensional X to a 2d X while attempting to preserve proximity. You can then plot your flagged Y values as color and the 2d X values as points on a grid to get an idea of how tightly packed your classes are in high dimensional space. In the image above, this is a very easy classification problem as each class exists in it's own island. The more these islands mix together, the harder classification will be.
did a grid search to find the best parameters
hot take, but don't use grid search, random search is better. (source Artificial Intelligence by Jones and Barlett). Grid search repeats too much information, wasting time re-exploring similar parameters.
I tried using KMeans clustering, and I set the n_clusters into 2. I trained the logistic regression model using the X_train and y_train values. After that, I tried testing the model on the training data using cross-validation but I set the cross-validation to be against the labels predicted by the KMeans:
So, to rephrase, you trained your model to predict an output given some input, then tested how it performed predicting the same data and got 75%. This is called training accuracy (as opposed to validation or test accuracy). A low training accuracy is indicative of one of two things:
there's a lot of overlap between your classes. If this is the case, I would look into feature engineering. Find a vector space which better segregates the two classes.
there's not a lot of overlap, but the front between the two classes is complex. You need a model with more parameters to segregate your two classes.
model complexity isn't free though. See the curse of dimensionality and overfitting.
ok, answering more directly
these accuracy scores mean your model isn't complex enough to learn the problem, or there's too much overlap between the two classes to see a better accuracy.
I wouldn't use k-means clustering to try to improve this. k-means attempts to find cluster information based on location in a vector space, but you already have flagged data y_train so you already know which clusters data should belong in. Try modifying X_train in some way to get better segregation, or try a more complex model. you can use things like k-means or TSNE to check your transformed X_train for better segregation, but I wouldn't use them directly. Obligatory reminder that you need to test and validate with holdout data. see another answer I provided for more info.
I'd need more code to figure that one out.
p.s. welcome to stack overflow! Keep at it.
I have a case where I want to predict columns H1 and H2 which are continuous data with all categorical features in the hope of getting a combination of features that give optimal results for H1 and H2, but the distribution of the categories is uneven, there are some categories which only amount to 1,
Heres my data :
and my information of categories frequency in each column:
what I want to ask:
Does the imbalance of the features of the categories greatly affect the predictions? what is the right solution to deal with the problem?
How do you know the optimal combination? do you have to run a data test simulation predicting every combination of features with the created model?
What analytical technique is appropriate to determine the relationship between features on H1 and H2? So far I'm converting category data using one hot encoding and then calculating the correlation map
What ML model can be applied to my case? until now I have tried the RF, KNN, and SVR models but the RMSE score still high
What keywords that have similar cases and can help me to search for articles on google, this is my first time working on an ML/DS case for a paper.
thank you very much
A prediction based on a single observation won't be too reliable, of course. Binning rare categories into a sort of 'other' category is one common approach.
Feature selection is a vast topic (g: filter methods, embedded methods, wrapper methods). Personally I prefer studying mutual information and variance inflation factor first.
We cannot rely on Pearson's correlation when talking about categorical or binary features. The basic approach would be grouping your dataset by categories and comparing the target distributions for each one, running statistical tests perhaps to check whether the difference is significant. Also g: ANOVA, Kendall rank.
That said, preprocessing your data to get rid of useless or redundant features often yields much more improvement than using more complex models or hyperparameter tuning. Regardless, trying out gradient boosting models never hurts (catboost even provides a robust automatic handling of categorical features). ExtraTreesRegressor is less prone to overfitting than classic RF. Linear models should not be ignored either, especially ones like Lasso with embedded feature selection capability.
I am trying to create a binary classification model for imbalance dataset using Random Forest - 0- 84K, 1- 16K. I have tried using class_weights = 'balanced', class_weights = {0:1, 1:5}, downsampling and oversampling but none of these seem to work. My metrics are usually in the below range:
Accuracy = 66%
Precision = 23%
Recall = 44%
I would really appreciate any help on this! Thanks
there are lots of ways to improve classifier behavior. If you think your data are balanced (or rather, your weight method balances them enough), then consider expanding your forest, either with deeper trees or more numerous trees.
Try other methods like SVM, or ANN, and see how they compare.
Try Stratified sampling for the dataset so that you can get the constant ration being taken in account for both the test and the training dataset. And then use the class weight balanced which you have already used. If you want the accuraccy improved there are tons other ways.
1) First be sure that the dataset being provided is accurate or verified.
2) You can increase the accuracy by playing with threshold of the probability (if in binary classification if its >0.7 confident then do a prediction else wise don't , the draw back in this approach would be NULL values or mostly being not predicting as algorithm is not confident enough, but for a business model its a good approach because people prefer less False Negatives in their model.
3) Use Stratified Sampling to equally divide the training and the testing dataset, so that constant ration is being divided. rather than train_test_splitting : stratified sampling will return you the indexes for training and testing . You can play with the (cross_validation : different iteration)
4) For the confusion matrix, have a look at the precision score per class and see which class is showing more( I believe if you apply threshold limitation it would solve the problem for this.
5) Try other classifiers , Logistic, SVM(linear or with other kernel) : LinearSVC or SVC , NaiveBayes. As per seen in most cases of Binary classification Logistc and SVC seems to be performing ahead of other algorithms. Although try these approach first.
6) Make sure to check the best parameters for the fitting such as choice of Hyper Parameters (using Gridsearch with couple of learning rates or different kernels or class weights or other parameters). If its textual classification are you applying CountVectorizer with TFIDF (and have you played with max_df and stop_words removal) ?
If you have tried these, then possibly be sure about the algorithm first.
I had trained my model on KNN classification algorithm , and I was getting around 97% accuracy. However,I later noticed that I had missed out to normalise my data and I normalised my data and retrained my model, now I am getting an accuracy of only 87%. What could be the reason? And should I stick to using data that is not normalised or should I switch to normalized version.
To answer your question, you first need to understand how KNN works. Here is a simple diagram:
Supposed the ? is the point you are trying to classify into either red or blue. For this case lets assume you haven't normalized any of the data. As you can see clearly the ? is closer to more red dots than blue bots. Therefore, this point would be assumed to be red. Lets also assume the correct label is red, therefore this is a correct match!
Now, to discuss normalization. Normalization is a way of taking data that is slightly dissimilar but giving it a common state (in your case think of it as making the features more similar). Assume in the above example that you normalize the ?'s features, and therefore the output y value becomes less. This would place the question mark below it's current position and surrounded by more blue dots. Therefore, your algo would label it as blue, and it would be incorrect. Ouch!
Now to answer your questions. Sorry, but there is no answer! Sometimes normalizing data removes important feature differences therefore causing accuracy to go down. Other times, it helps to eliminate noise in your features which cause incorrect classifications. Also, just because accuracy goes up for the data set your are currently working with, doesn't mean you will get the same results with a different data set.
Long story short, instead of trying to label normalization as good/bad, instead consider the feature inputs you are using for classification, determine which ones are important to your model, and make sure differences in those features are reflected accurately in your classification model. Best of luck!
That's a pretty good question, and is unexpected at first glance because usually a normalization will help a KNN classifier do better. Generally, good KNN performance usually requires preprocessing of data to make all variables similarly scaled and centered. Otherwise KNN will be often be inappropriately dominated by scaling factors.
In this case the opposite effect is seen: KNN gets WORSE with scaling, seemingly.
However, what you may be witnessing could be overfitting. The KNN may be overfit, which is to say it memorized the data very well, but does not work well at all on new data. The first model might have memorized more data due to some characteristic of that data, but it's not a good thing. You would need to check your prediction accuracy on a different set of data than what was trained on, a so-called validation set or test set.
Then you will know whether the KNN accuracy is OK or not.
Look into learning curve analysis in the context of machine learning. Please go learn about bias and variance. It's a deeper subject than can be detailed here. The best, cheapest, and fastest sources of instruction on this topic are videos on the web, by the following instructors:
Andrew Ng, in the online coursera course Machine Learning
Tibshirani and Hastie, in the online stanford course Statistical Learning.
If you use normalized feature vectors, the distances between your data points are likely to be different than when you used unnormalized features, particularly when the range of the features are different. Since kNN typically uses euclidian distance to find k nearest points from any given point, using normalized features may select a different set of k neighbors than the ones chosen when unnormalized features were used, hence the difference in accuracy.
I need advice choosing a model and machine learning algorithm for a classification problem.
I'm trying to predict a binary outcome for a subject. I have 500,000 records in my data set and 20 continuous and categorical features. Each subject has 10--20 records. The data is labeled with its outcome.
So far I'm thinking logistic regression model and kernel approximation, based on the cheat-sheet here.
I am unsure where to start when implementing this in either R or Python.
Thanks!
Choosing an algorithm and optimizing the parameter is a difficult task in any data mining project. Because it must customized for your data and problem. Try different algorithm like SVM,Random Forest, Logistic Regression, KNN and... and test Cross Validation for each of them and then compare them.
You can use GridSearch in sickit learn to try different parameters and optimize the parameters for each algorithm. also try this project
witch test a range of parameters with genetic algorithm
Features
If your categorical features don't have too many possible different values, you might want to have a look at sklearn.preprocessing.OneHotEncoder.
Model choice
The choice of "the best" model depends mainly on the amount of available training data and the simplicity of the decision boundary you expect to get.
You can try dimensionality reduction to 2 or 3 dimensions. Then you can visualize your data and see if there is a nice decision boundary.
With 500,000 training examples you can think about using a neural network. I can recommend Keras for beginners and TensorFlow for people who know how neural networks work.
You should also know that there are Ensemble methods.
A nice cheat sheet what to use is on in the sklearn tutorial you already found:
(source: scikit-learn.org)
Just try it, compare different results. Without more information it is not possible to give you better advice.