Is RandomForestRegressor predict() fundamentally slow? - python

I can only make 2-3 predictions per second with this model which is super slow.
When using LinearRegression model I can easily achieve 40x speedup.
I'm using scikit-learn python package with a very simple dataset containing 3 columns (day, hour and result) so basically 2 features.
day and hour are categorical variables.
Naturally there are 7 day and 24 hour categories.
Training sample is relatively small (cca 5000 samples).
It takes just a dew seconds to train it.
But when I go on predicting something it's very slow.
So my question is: is this fundamental characteristic of RandomForrestRegressor or I can actually do something about it?
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestRegressor
model = RandomForestRegressor(n_estimators=100,
max_features='auto',
oob_score=True,
n_jobs=-1,
random_state=42,
min_samples_leaf=2)

Here are some steps to optimize a RandomForest with sklearn
Do batch predictions by passing multiple datapoints to predict(). This reduces Python overhead.
Reduce the depth of trees. Using something like min_samples_leaf or min_samples_split to avoid having lots of small decision nodes. To use 5% percent of training set, use 0.05.
Reduce the number of trees. With somewhat pruned trees, RF can often perform OK with as little as n_estimators=10.
Use an optimized RF inference implementation like emtrees. Last thing to try, also dependent on prior steps to perform well.
The performance of the optimized model must be validated, using cross-validation or similar. Steps 2 and 3 are related, so one can do a grid-search to find the combination that best preserves model performance.

Related

Setting exact number of iterations for Logistic regression in 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

SciKit One-class SVM classifier training time increases exponentially with size of training data

I am using the Python SciKit OneClass SVM classifier to detect outliers in lines of text. The text is converted to numerical features first using bag of words and TF-IDF.
When I train (fit) the classifier running on my computer, the time seems to increase exponentially with the number of items in the training set:
Number of items in training data and training time taken:
10K: 1 sec, 15K: 2 sec, 20K: 8 sec, 25k: 12 sec, 30K: 16 sec, 45K: 44 sec.
Is there anything I can do to reduce the time taken for training, and avoid that this will become too long when training data size increases to a couple of hundred thousand items ?
Well scikit's SVM is a high-level implementation so there is only so much you can do, and in terms of speed, from their website, "SVMs do not directly provide probability estimates, these are calculated using an expensive five-fold cross-validation."
You can increase your kernel size parameter based on your available RAM, but this increase does not help much.
You can try changing your kernel, though your model might be incorrect.
Here is some advice from http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/svm.html#tips-on-practical-use: Scale your data.
Otherwise, don't use scikit and implement it yourself using neural nets.
Hope I'm not too late. OCSVM, and SVM, is resource hungry, and the length/time relationship is quadratic (the numbers you show follow this). If you can, see if Isolation Forest or Local Outlier Factor work for you, but if you're considering applying on a lengthier dataset I would suggest creating a manual AD model that closely resembles the context of these off-the-shelf solutions. By doing this then you should be able to work either in parallel or with threads.
For anyone coming here from Google, sklearn has implemented SGDOneClassSVM, which "has a linear complexity in the number of training samples". It should be faster for large datasets.

sklearn: Naive Bayes classifier gives low accuracy

I have a dataset which includes 200000 labelled training examples.
For each training example I have 10 features, including both continuous and discrete.
I'm trying to use sklearn package of python in order to train the model and make predictions but I have some troubles (and some questions too).
First let me write the code which I have written so far:
from sklearn.naive_bayes import GaussianNB
# data contains the 200 000 examples
# targets contain the corresponding labels for each training example
gnb = GaussianNB()
gnb.fit(data, targets)
predicted = gnb.predict(data)
The problem is that I get really low accuracy (too many misclassified labels) - around 20%.
However I am not quite sure whether there is a problem with the data (e.g. more data is needed or something else) or with the code.
Is this the proper way to implement a Naive Bayes classifier given a dataset with both discrete and continuous features?
Furthermore, in Machine Learning we know that the dataset should be split into training and validation/testing sets. Is this automatically performed by sklearn or should I fit the model using the training dataset and then call predict using the validation set?
Any thoughts or suggestions will be much appreciated.
The problem is that I get really low accuracy (too many misclassified labels) - around 20%. However I am not quite sure whether there is a problem with the data (e.g. more data is needed or something else) or with the code.
This is not big error for Naive Bayes, this is extremely simple classifier and you should not expect it to be strong, more data probably won't help. Your gaussian estimators are probably already very good, simply Naive assumptions are the problem. Use stronger model. You can start with Random Forest since it is very easy to use even by non-experts in the field.
Is this the proper way to implement a Naive Bayes classifier given a dataset with both discrete and continuous features?
No, it is not, you should use different distributions in discrete features, however scikit-learn does not support that, you would have to do this manually. As said before - change your model.
Furthermore, in Machine Learning we know that the dataset should be split into training and validation/testing sets. Is this automatically performed by sklearn or should I fit the model using the training dataset and then call predict using the validation set?
Nothing is done automatically in this manner, you need to do this on your own (scikit learn has lots of tools for that - see the cross validation pacakges).

GridsearchCV with big dataset

I am trying to build a classifier with GridSearchCV with a huge dataset (2M records * 500 features and growing, expecting at least 15M in total). However, I find that GridSearchCV.fitdoesn't take generator for X and Y. The problem is I don't have all the memory space for the task. The classifier I use is SGDClassifier (which supports partial_fit).
Before this I would use a much smaller subset of the dataset for the GridSearchCV, and then retrain the best classifier with the whole dataset. Is this the right way to use GridSearchCV?

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.

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