Setting exact number of iterations for Logistic regression in python - python

I'm creating a model to perform Logistic regression on a dataset using Python. This is my code:
from sklearn import linear_model
my_classifier2=linear_model.LogisticRegression(solver='lbfgs',max_iter=10000)
Now, according to Sklearn doc page, max_iter is maximum number of iterations taken for the solvers to converge. How do I specifically state that I need 'N' number of iterations ?
Any kind of help would be really appreciated.

I’m not sure, but, Do you want to know the optimal number of iterations for your model? If so, you are better off utilizing GridSearchCV that scan tune hyper parameter like max_iter.
Briefly,
Split your data into two groups: train/test data with train_test_split or KFold that can be imported from sklean
Set your parameter, for instance para=[{‘max_iter’:[1,10,100,100]}]
Instance, for example clf=GridSearchCV(LogisticRegression, param_grid=para, cv=5, scoring=‘r2’)
Implement with using train data like this: clf.fit(x_train, y_train)
You can also fetch the best number of iterations with RandomizedSearchCV or BayesianOptimization.

About the GridSearchCV of the max_iter parameter, the fitted LogisticRegression models have and attribute n_iter_ so you can discover the exact max_iter needed for a given sample size and regarding features:
n_iter_: ndarray of shape (n_classes,) or (1, )
Actual number of iterations for all classes. If binary or multinomial, it
returns only 1 element. For liblinear solver, only the maximum number of
iteration across all classes is given.
Scanning very short intervals, like 1 by 1, is a waste of resources that could be used for more important LogisticRegression fit parameters such as the combination of solver itself, its regularization penalty and the inverse of the regularization strength C which contributes for a faster convergence within a given max_iter.
Setting a very high max_iter could be also a waste of resources if you haven't previously did a minimal feature preprocessing, at least, feature scaling or maybe imputation, outlier clipping and a dimensionality reduction (e.g. PCA).
Things can become worse: a tunned max_iter could be ok for a given sample size but not for a bigger sample size, for instance, if you are developing a cross-validated learning curve, which by the way is imperative for optimal machine learning.
It becomes even worse if you increase a sample size in a pipeline that generates feature vectors such as n-grams (NLP): more rows will generate more (sparse) features for the LogisticRegression classification.
I think it's important to observe if different solvers converges or not on given sample size, generated features and max_iter.
Methods that help a faster convergence which eventually won't demand increasing max_iter are:
Feature scaling
Dimensionality Reduction (e.g. PCA) of scaled features
There's a nice sklearn example demonstrating the importance of feature scaling

Related

Does sklearn LogisticRegressionCV use all data for final model

I was wondering how the final model (i.e. decision boundary) of LogisticRegressionCV in sklearn was calculated. So say I have some Xdata and ylabels such that
Xdata # shape of this is (n_samples,n_features)
ylabels # shape of this is (n_samples,), and it is binary
and now I run
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegressionCV
clf = LogisticRegressionCV(Cs=[1.0],cv=5)
clf.fit(Xdata,ylabels)
This is looking at just one regularization parameter and 5 folds in the CV. So clf.scores_ will be a dictionary with one key with a value that is an array with shape (n_folds,1). With these five folds you can get a better idea of how the model performs.
However, I'm confused about what you get from clf.coef_ (and I'm assuming the parameters in clf.coef_ are the ones used in clf.predict). I have a few options I think it could be:
The parameters in clf.coef_ are from training the model on all the data
The parameters in clf.coef_ are from the best scoring fold
The parameters in clf.coef_ are averaged across the folds in some way.
I imagine this is a duplicate question, but for the life of me I can't find a straightforward answer online, in the sklearn documentation, or in the source code for LogisticRegressionCV. Some relevant posts I found are:
GridSearchCV final model
scikit-learn LogisticRegressionCV: best coefficients
Using cross validation and AUC-ROC for a logistic regression model in sklearn
Evaluating Logistic regression with cross validation
You are mistaking between hyper-parameters and parameters. All scikit-learn estimators which have CV in the end, like LogisticRegressionCV, GridSearchCV, or RandomizedSearchCV tune the hyper-parameters.
Hyper-parameters are not learnt from training on the data. They are set prior to learning assuming that they will contribute to optimal learning. More information is present here:
Hyper-parameters are parameters that are not directly learnt within
estimators. In scikit-learn they are passed as arguments to the
constructor of the estimator classes. Typical examples include C,
kernel and gamma for Support Vector Classifier, alpha for Lasso, etc.
In case of LogisticRegression, C is a hyper-parameter which describes the inverse of regularization strength. The higher the C, the less regularization is applied on the training. Its not that C will be changed during training. It will be fixed.
Now coming to coef_. coef_ contains coefficient (also called weights) of the features, which are learnt (and updated) during the training. Now depending on the value of C (and other hyper-parameters present in contructor), these can vary during the training.
Now there is another topic on how to get the optimum initial values of coef_, so that the training is faster and better. Thats optimization. Some start with random weights between 0-1, others start with 0, etc etc. But for the scope of your question, that is not relevant. LogisticRegressionCV is not used for that.
This is what LogisticRegressionCV does:
Get the values of different C from constructor (In your example you passed 1.0).
For each value of C, do the cross-validation of supplied data, in which the LogisticRegression will be fit() on training data of the current fold, and scored on the test data. The scores from test data of all folds are averaged and that becomes the score of the current C. This is done for all C values you provided, and the C with the highest average score will be chosen.
Now the chosen C is set as the final C and LogisticRegression is again trained (by calling fit()) on the whole data (Xdata,ylabels here).
Thats what all the hyper-parameter tuners do, be it GridSearchCV, or LogisticRegressionCV, or LassoCV etc.
The initializing and updating of coef_ feature weights is done inside the fit() function of the algorithm which is out of scope for the hyper-parameter tuning. That optimization part is dependent on the internal optimization algorithm of the process. For example solver param in case of LogisticRegression.
Hope this makes things clear. Feel free to ask if still any doubt.
You have the parameter refit=True by default. On the docs you can read:
If set to True, the scores are averaged across all folds, and the
coefs and the C that corresponds to the best score is taken, and a
final refit is done using these parameters. Otherwise the coefs,
intercepts and C that correspond to the best scores across folds are
averaged.
So if refit=True the CV model is retrained using all the data.
When it says the final refit is done using these parameters it is talking about the C regularization parameter. So it uses the C that gives the best
average score across the K folds.
When refit=False it retrieves you the best model in cross validation.
So if you trained 5 folds, you will get the model (coeff + C + intercept), trained on 4 folds of data, which gave the best score on its fold test set.
I agree that the documetation here is not very clear but averaging C values and coefficients does not really make much sense
I just took a look at the source code. It seems for refit = True, they just selected the best hyperparameter (C and l1_ratio) and retrain the model with all the data.
for refit = False:
It seems they do average the hyperparameters, see the blow source code:
best_indices = np.argmax(scores, axis=1)
...
best_indices_C = best_indices % len(self.Cs_)
self.C_.append(np.mean(self.Cs_[best_indices_C]))

Imbalanced Dataset - Binary Classification Python

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.

random_state parameter in classification models

Can someone explain why does the random_state parameter affects the model so much?
I have a RandomForestClassifier model and want to set the random_state (for reproducibility pourpouses), but depending on the value I use I get very different values on my overall evaluation metric (F1 score)
For example, I tried to fit the same model with 100 different random_state values and after the training ad testing the smallest F1 was 0.64516129 and the largest 0.808823529). That is a huge difference.
This behaviour also seems to make very hard to compare two models.
Thoughts?
If the random_state affects your results it means that your model has a high variance. In case of Random Forest this simply means that you use too small forest and should increase number of trees (which due to bagging - reduce variance). In scikit-learn this is controlled by n_estimators parameters in the constructor.
Why this happens? Each ML method tries to minimize the error, which from matematial perspective can be usually decomposed to bias and variance [+noise] (see bias variance dillema/tradeoff). Bias is simply how far from true values your model has to end up in the expectation - this part of an error usually comes from some prior assumptions, such as using linear model for nonlinear problem etc. Variance is how much your results differ when you train on different subsets of data (or use different hyperparameters, and in case of randomized methods random seed is a parameter). Hyperparameters are initialized by us and Parameters are learnt by the model itself in the training process. Finally - noise is not reducible error coming from the problem itself (or data representation). Thus, in your case - you simply encountered model with high variance, decision trees are well known for their extremely high variance (and small bias). Thus to reduce variance, Breiman proposed the specific bagging method, known today as Random Forest. The larger the forest - stronger the effect of variance reduction. In particular - forest with 1 tree has huge variance, forest of 1000 trees is nearly deterministic for moderate size problems.
To sum up, what you can do?
Increase number of trees - this has to work, and is well understood and justified method
treat random_seed as a hyperparameter during your evaluation, because this is exactly this - a meta knowledge you need to fix before hand if you do not wish to increase size of the forest.

SVM: Choosing Support Vector Machine regression termination criterion tolerence in sklearn

I am using sklearn.svr with the RBF kernel on an 80k-size dataset with 20+ variables. I was wondering how to choose the termination parameter tol. I ask because the regression does not seem to converge for certain combinations of C and gamma (2+ days before I give up). Interestingly, it converges after less than 10 minutes for certain combinations with an average run-time of approximately an hour.
Is there some sort of rule of thumb for setting this parameter? Perhaps a relationship to the standard deviation or expected value of the forecast?
Mike's answer is correct: subsampling for grid searching parameter is probably the best strategy to train SVR on medium-ish dataset sizes. SVR is not scalable so don't waste your time doing a grid search on the full dataset. Try on 1000 random sub samples, then 2000 and then 4000. Each time find the optimal values for C and gamma and try to guess how they evolve whenever you double the size of the dataset.
Also you can approximate the true SVR solution with the Nystroem kernel approximation and a linear regressor model such as SGDRegressor, LinearRegression, LassoCV or ElasticNetCV. RidgeCV is likely not to improve upon LinearRegression in the n_samples >> n_features regime.
Finally, do not forget to scale your input data by putting a MinMaxScaler or a StandardScaler before the SVR model in a Pipeline.
I would also try GradientBoostingRegressor models (although completely unrelated to SVR).
You really shouldn't use SVR on large data sets: its training algorithm takes between quadratic and cubic time. sklearn.linear_model.SGDRegressor can fit a linear regression on such datasets without trouble, so try that instead. If linear regression won't hack it, transform your data with a kernel approximation before feeding it to SGDRegressor to get a linear-time approximation of an RBF-SVM.
You may have seen the scikit learn documentation for the RBF function. Considering what C and gamma actually do and the fact that the SVR training time is at worst quadratic in the number of samples, I would try training first on a small subset of the data. By first getting a result for all parameter settings and then scaling up the amount of training data used, you might find you actually only need a small sample of the data to get results very close to the full set.
This is the advice I was given by my MSc project supervisor recently, as I had the exact same problem. I found that out of a set of 120k examples with 250 features I only needed around 3000 samples to get within 2% of the error of the full set models.
Sorry this isn't answering your question directly, but I thought it might help.

How to speed up sklearn SVR?

I am implementing SVR using sklearn svr package in python. My sparse matrix is of size 146860 x 10202. I have divided it into various sub-matrices of size 2500 x 10202. For each sub matrix, SVR fitting is taking about 10 mins.
What could be the ways to speed up the process? Please suggest any different approach or different python package for the same.
Thanks!
You can average the SVR sub-models predictions.
Alternatively you can try to fit a linear regression model on the output of kernel expansion computed with the Nystroem method.
Or you can try other non-linear regression models such as ensemble of randomized trees or gradient boosted regression trees.
Edit: I forgot to say: the kernel SVR model itself is not scalable as its complexity is more than quadratic hence there is no way to "speed it up".
Edit 2: Actually, often scaling the input variables to [0, 1] or [-1, 1] or to unit variance using StandardScaler can speed up the convergence by quite a bit.
Also it is very unlikely that the default parameters will yield good results: you have to grid search the optimal value for gamma and maybe also epsilon on a sub samples of increasing sizes (to check the stability of the optimal parameters) before fitting to large models.

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