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sklearn LogisticRegression - plot displays too small coefficient

I am attempting to fit a logistic regression model to sklearn's iris dataset. I get a probability curve that looks like it is too flat, aka the coefficient is too small. I would expect a probability over ninety percent by sepal length > 7 :
Is this probability curve indeed wrong? If so, what might cause that in my code?
from sklearn import datasets
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import math
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
data = datasets.load_iris()
#get relevent data
lengths = data.data[:100, :1]
is_setosa = data.target[:100]
#fit model
lgs = LogisticRegression()
lgs.fit(lengths, is_setosa)
m = lgs.coef_[0,0]
b = lgs.intercept_[0]
#generate values for curve overlay
lgs_curve = lambda x: 1/(1 + math.e**(-(m*x+b)))
x_values = np.linspace(2, 10, 100)
y_values = lgs_curve(x_values)
#plot it
plt.plot(x_values, y_values)
plt.scatter(lengths, is_setosa, c='r', s=2)
plt.xlabel("Sepal Length")
plt.ylabel("Probability is Setosa")

If you refer to http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.linear_model.LogisticRegression.html#sklearn.linear_model.LogisticRegression, you will find a regularization parameter C that can be passed as argument while training the logistic regression model.
C : float, default: 1.0 Inverse of regularization strength; must be a
positive float. Like in support vector machines, smaller values
specify stronger regularization.
Now, if you try different values of this regularization parameter, you will find that larger values of C leads to fitting curves that has sharper transitions from 0 to 1 value of the output (response) binary variable, and still larger values fit models that have high variance (try to model the training data transition more closely, i think that's what you are expecting, then you may try to set C value as high as 10 and plot) but at the same time are likely to have the risk to overfit, while the default value C=1 and values smaller than that lead to high bias and are likely to underfit and here comes the famous bias-variance trade-off in machine learning.
You can always use techniques like cross-validation to choose the C value that is right for you. The following code / figure shows the probability curve fitted with models of different complexity (i.e., with different values of the regularization parameter C, from 1 to 10):
x_values = np.linspace(2, 10, 100)
x_test = np.reshape(x_values, (100,1))
C = list(range(1, 11))
labels = map(str, C)
for i in range(len(C)):
lgs = LogisticRegression(C = C[i]) # pass a value for the regularization parameter C
lgs.fit(lengths, is_setosa)
y_values = lgs.predict_proba(x_test)[:,1] # use this function to compute probability directly
plt.plot(x_values, y_values, label=labels[i])
plt.scatter(lengths, is_setosa, c='r', s=2)
plt.xlabel("Sepal Length")
plt.ylabel("Probability is Setosa")
plt.legend()
plt.show()
Predicted probs with models fitted with different values of C

Although you do not describe what you want to plot, I assume you want to plot the separating line. It seems that you are confused with respect to the Logistic/sigmoid function. The decision function of Logistic Regression is a line.

Your probability graph looks flat because you have, in a sense, "zoomed in" too much.
If you look at the middle of a sigmoid function, it get's to be almost linear, as the second derivative get's to be almost 0 (see for example a wolfram alpha graph)
Please note that the value's we are talking about are the results of -(m*x+b)
When we reduce the limits of your graph, say by using
x_values = np.linspace(4, 7, 100), we get something which looks like a line:
But on the other hand, if we go crazy with the limits, say by using x_values = np.linspace(-10, 20, 100), we get the clearer sigmoid:

Producing an MLE for a pair of distributions in python

Ok, so my current curve fitting code has a step that uses scipy.stats to determine the right distribution based on the data,
distributions = [st.laplace, st.norm, st.expon, st.dweibull, st.invweibull, st.lognorm, st.uniform]
mles = []
for distribution in distributions:
pars = distribution.fit(data)
mle = distribution.nnlf(pars, data)
mles.append(mle)
results = [(distribution.name, mle) for distribution, mle in zip(distributions, mles)]
for dist in sorted(zip(distributions, mles), key=lambda d: d[1]):
print dist
best_fit = sorted(zip(distributions, mles), key=lambda d: d[1])[0]
print 'Best fit reached using {}, MLE value: {}'.format(best_fit[0].name, best_fit[1])
print [mod[0].name for mod in sorted(zip(distributions, mles), key=lambda d: d[1])]
Where data is a list of numeric values. This is working great so far for fitting unimodal distributions, confirmed in a script that randomly generates values from random distributions and uses curve_fit to redetermine the parameters.
Now I would like to make the code able to handle bimodal distributions, like the example below:
Is it possible to get a MLE for a pair of models from scipy.stats in order to determine if a particular pair of distributions are a good fit for the data?, something like
distributions = [st.laplace, st.norm, st.expon, st.dweibull, st.invweibull, st.lognorm, st.uniform]
distributionPairs = [[modelA.name, modelB.name] for modelA in distributions for modelB in distributions]
and use those pairs to get an MLE value of that pair of distributions fitting the data?

It's not a complete answer but it may help you to solve your problem. Let say you know your problem is generated by two densities.
A solution would be to use k-mean or EM algorithm.
Initalization.
You initialize your algorithm by affecting every observation to one or the other density. And you initialize the two densities (you initialize the parameters of the density, and one of the parameter in your case is "gaussian", "laplace", and so on...
Iteration.
Then, iterately, you run the two following steps :
Step 1.
Optimize the parameters assuming that the affectation of every point is right. You can now use any optimization solver. This step provide you with an estimation of the best two densities (with given parameter) that fit your data.
Step 2.
You classify every observation to one density or the other according to the greatest likelihood.
You repeat until convergence.
This is very well explained in this web-page
https://people.duke.edu/~ccc14/sta-663/EMAlgorithm.html
If you do not know how many densities have generated your data, the problem is more difficult. You have to work with penalized classification problem, which is a bit harder.
Here is a coding example in an easy case : you know that your data comes from 2 different Gaussians (you don't know how many variables are generated from each density). In your case, you can adjust this code to loop on every possible pair of density (computationally longer, but would empirically work I presume)
import scipy.stats as st
import numpy as np
#hard coded data generation
data = np.random.normal(-3, 1, size = 1000)
data[600:] = np.random.normal(loc = 3, scale = 2, size=400)
#initialization
mu1 = -1
sigma1 = 1
mu2 = 1
sigma2 = 1
#criterion to stop iteration
epsilon = 0.1
stop = False
while not stop :
#step1
classification = np.zeros(len(data))
classification[st.norm.pdf(data, mu1, sigma1) > st.norm.pdf(data, mu2, sigma2)] = 1
mu1_old, mu2_old, sigma1_old, sigma2_old = mu1, mu2, sigma1, sigma2
#step2
pars1 = st.norm.fit(data[classification == 1])
mu1, sigma1 = pars1
pars2 = st.norm.fit(data[classification == 0])
mu2, sigma2 = pars2
#stopping criterion
stop = ((mu1_old - mu1)**2 + (mu2_old - mu2)**2 +(sigma1_old - sigma1)**2 +(sigma2_old - sigma2)**2) < epsilon
#result
print("The first density is gaussian :", mu1, sigma1)
print("The first density is gaussian :", mu2, sigma2)
print("A rate of ", np.mean(classification), "is classified in the first density")
Hope it helps.

gaussian sum filter for irregular spaced points

I have a set of points (x,y) as two vectors
x,y for example:
from pylab import *
x = sorted(random(30))
y = random(30)
plot(x,y, 'o-')
Now I would like to smooth this data with a Gaussian and evaluate it only at certain (regularly spaced) points on the x-axis. lets say for:
x_eval = linspace(0,1,11)
I got the tip that this method is called a "Gaussian sum filter", but so far I have not found any implementation in numpy/scipy for that, although it seems like a standard problem at first glance.
As the x values are not equally spaced I can't use the scipy.ndimage.gaussian_filter1d.
Usually this kind of smoothing is done going through furrier space and multiplying with the kernel, but I don't really know if this will be possible with irregular spaced data.
Thanks for any ideas

This will blow up for very large datasets, but the proper calculaiton you are asking for would be done as follows:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
np.random.seed(0) # for repeatability
x = np.random.rand(30)
x.sort()
y = np.random.rand(30)
x_eval = np.linspace(0, 1, 11)
sigma = 0.1
delta_x = x_eval[:, None] - x
weights = np.exp(-delta_x*delta_x / (2*sigma*sigma)) / (np.sqrt(2*np.pi) * sigma)
weights /= np.sum(weights, axis=1, keepdims=True)
y_eval = np.dot(weights, y)
plt.plot(x, y, 'bo-')
plt.plot(x_eval, y_eval, 'ro-')
plt.show()

I'll preface this answer by saying that this is more of a DSP question than a programming question...
...that being said there, there is a simple two step solution to your problem.
Step 1: Resample the data
So to illustrate this we can create a random data set with unequal sampling:
import numpy as np
x = np.cumsum(np.random.randint(0,100,100))
y = np.random.normal(0,1,size=100)
This gives something like:
We can resample this data using simple linear interpolation:
nx = np.arange(x.max()) # choose new x axis sampling
ny = np.interp(nx,x,y) # generate y values for each x
This converts our data to:
Step 2: Apply filter
At this stage you can use some of the tools available through scipy to apply a Gaussian filter to the data with a given sigma value:
import scipy.ndimage.filters as filters
fx = filters.gaussian_filter1d(ny,sigma=100)
Plotting this up against the original data we get:
The choice of the sigma value determines the width of the filter.

Based on #Jaime's answer I wrote a function that implements this with some additional documentation and the ability to discard estimates far from the datapoints.
I think confidence intervals could be obtained on this estimate by bootstrapping, but I haven't done this yet.
def gaussian_sum_smooth(xdata, ydata, xeval, sigma, null_thresh=0.6):
"""Apply gaussian sum filter to data.
xdata, ydata : array
Arrays of x- and y-coordinates of data.
Must be 1d and have the same length.
xeval : array
Array of x-coordinates at which to evaluate the smoothed result
sigma : float
Standard deviation of the Gaussian to apply to each data point
Larger values yield a smoother curve.
null_thresh : float
For evaluation points far from data points, the estimate will be
based on very little data. If the total weight is below this threshold,
return np.nan at this location. Zero means always return an estimate.
The default of 0.6 corresponds to approximately one sigma away
from the nearest datapoint.
"""
# Distance between every combination of xdata and xeval
# each row corresponds to a value in xeval
# each col corresponds to a value in xdata
delta_x = xeval[:, None] - xdata
# Calculate weight of every value in delta_x using Gaussian
# Maximum weight is 1.0 where delta_x is 0
weights = np.exp(-0.5 * ((delta_x / sigma) ** 2))
# Multiply each weight by every data point, and sum over data points
smoothed = np.dot(weights, ydata)
# Nullify the result when the total weight is below threshold
# This happens at evaluation points far from any data
# 1-sigma away from a data point has a weight of ~0.6
nan_mask = weights.sum(1) < null_thresh
smoothed[nan_mask] = np.nan
# Normalize by dividing by the total weight at each evaluation point
# Nullification above avoids divide by zero warning shere
smoothed = smoothed / weights.sum(1)
return smoothed

statsmodels - plotting the fitted distribution

The following code fits a oversimplified generalized linear model using statsmodels
model = smf.glm('Y ~ 1', family=sm.families.NegativeBinomial(), data=df)
results = model.fit()
This gives the coefficient and a stderr:
coef stderr
Intercept 2.9471 0.120
Now I want to graphically compare the real distribution of the variable Y (histogram) with the distribution that comes from the model.
But I need two parameters r and p to evaluate the stats.nbinom(r,p) and plot it.
Is there a way to retrieve the parameters from the results of the fitting?
How can I plot the PMF?

Generalized linear models, GLM, in statsmodels currently does not estimate the extra parameter of the Negative Binomial distribution. Negative Binomial belongs to the exponential family of distributions only for fixed shape parameter.
However, statsmodels also has Negative Binomial as a Maximum Likelihood Model in discrete_model which estimates all parameters.
The parameterization of the Negative Binomial for count regression is in terms of the mean or expected value, which is different from the parameterization in scipy.stats.nbinom. Actually, there are two different commonly used parameterization for the Negative Binomial count regression, usually called nb1 and nb2
Here is a quickly written script that recovers the scipy.stats.nbinom parameters, n=size and p=prob from the estimated parameters. Once you have the parameters for the scipy.stats.distribution you can use all the available method, rvs, pmf, and so on.
Something like this should be made available in statsmodels.
In a few example runs, I got results like this
data generating parameters 50 0.25
estimated params 51.7167511571 0.256814610633
estimated params 50.0985814878 0.249989725917
Aside, because of the underlying exponential reparameterization, the scipy optimizers have sometimes problems to converge. In those cases, either providing better starting values or using Nelder-Mead as optimization method usually helps.
import numpy as np
from scipy import stats
import statsmodels.api as sm
# generate some data to check
nobs = 1000
n, p = 50, 0.25
dist0 = stats.nbinom(n, p)
y = dist0.rvs(size=nobs)
x = np.ones(nobs)
loglike_method = 'nb1' # or use 'nb2'
res = sm.NegativeBinomial(y, x, loglike_method=loglike_method).fit(start_params=[0.1, 0.1])
print dist0.mean()
print res.params
mu = res.predict() # use this for mean if not constant
mu = np.exp(res.params[0]) # shortcut, we just regress on a constant
alpha = res.params[1]
if loglike_method == 'nb1':
Q = 1
elif loglike_method == 'nb2':
Q = 0
size = 1. / alpha * mu**Q
prob = size / (size + mu)
print 'data generating parameters', n, p
print 'estimated params ', size, prob
#estimated distribution
dist_est = stats.nbinom(size, prob)
BTW: I ran into this before but didn't have time to look at it
https://github.com/statsmodels/statsmodels/issues/106

How to do linear regression, taking errorbars into account?

I am doing a computer simulation for some physical system of finite size, and after this I am doing extrapolation to the infinity (Thermodynamic limit). Some theory says that data should scale linearly with system size, so I am doing linear regression.
The data I have is noisy, but for each data point I can estimate errorbars. So, for example data points looks like:
x_list = [0.3333333333333333, 0.2886751345948129, 0.25, 0.23570226039551587, 0.22360679774997896, 0.20412414523193154, 0.2, 0.16666666666666666]
y_list = [0.13250359351851854, 0.12098339583333334, 0.12398501145833334, 0.09152715, 0.11167239583333334, 0.10876248333333333, 0.09814170444444444, 0.08560799305555555]
y_err = [0.003306749165349316, 0.003818446389148108, 0.0056036878203831785, 0.0036635292592592595, 0.0037034897788415424, 0.007576672222222223, 0.002981084130692832, 0.0034913019065973983]
Let's say I am trying to do this in Python.
First way that I know is:
m, c, r_value, p_value, std_err = scipy.stats.linregress(x_list, y_list)
I understand this gives me errorbars of the result, but this does not take into account errorbars of the initial data.
Second way that I know is:
m, c = numpy.polynomial.polynomial.polyfit(x_list, y_list, 1, w = [1.0 / ty for ty in y_err], full=False)
Here we use the inverse of the errorbar for the each point as a weight that is used in the least square approximation. So if a point is not really that reliable it will not influence result a lot, which is reasonable.
But I can not figure out how to get something that combines both these methods.
What I really want is what second method does, meaning use regression when every point influences the result with different weight. But at the same time I want to know how accurate my result is, meaning, I want to know what are errorbars of the resulting coefficients.
How can I do this?

Not entirely sure if this is what you mean, but…using pandas, statsmodels, and patsy, we can compare an ordinary least-squares fit and a weighted least-squares fit which uses the inverse of the noise you provided as a weight matrix (statsmodels will complain about sample sizes < 20, by the way).
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib as mpl
mpl.rcParams['figure.dpi'] = 300
import statsmodels.formula.api as sm
x_list = [0.3333333333333333, 0.2886751345948129, 0.25, 0.23570226039551587, 0.22360679774997896, 0.20412414523193154, 0.2, 0.16666666666666666]
y_list = [0.13250359351851854, 0.12098339583333334, 0.12398501145833334, 0.09152715, 0.11167239583333334, 0.10876248333333333, 0.09814170444444444, 0.08560799305555555]
y_err = [0.003306749165349316, 0.003818446389148108, 0.0056036878203831785, 0.0036635292592592595, 0.0037034897788415424, 0.007576672222222223, 0.002981084130692832, 0.0034913019065973983]
# put x and y into a pandas DataFrame, and the weights into a Series
ws = pd.DataFrame({
'x': x_list,
'y': y_list
})
weights = pd.Series(y_err)
wls_fit = sm.wls('x ~ y', data=ws, weights=1 / weights).fit()
ols_fit = sm.ols('x ~ y', data=ws).fit()
# show the fit summary by calling wls_fit.summary()
# wls fit r-squared is 0.754
# ols fit r-squared is 0.701
# let's plot our data
plt.clf()
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, facecolor='w')
ws.plot(
kind='scatter',
x='x',
y='y',
style='o',
alpha=1.,
ax=ax,
title='x vs y scatter',
edgecolor='#ff8300',
s=40
)
# weighted prediction
wp, = ax.plot(
wls_fit.predict(),
ws['y'],
color='#e55ea2',
lw=1.,
alpha=1.0,
)
# unweighted prediction
op, = ax.plot(
ols_fit.predict(),
ws['y'],
color='k',
ls='solid',
lw=1,
alpha=1.0,
)
leg = plt.legend(
(op, wp),
('Ordinary Least Squares', 'Weighted Least Squares'),
loc='upper left',
fontsize=8)
plt.tight_layout()
fig.set_size_inches(6.40, 5.12)
plt.show()
WLS residuals:
[0.025624005084707302,
0.013611438189866154,
-0.033569595462217161,
0.044110895217014695,
-0.025071632845910546,
-0.036308252199571928,
-0.010335514810672464,
-0.0081511479431851663]
The mean squared error of the residuals for the weighted fit (wls_fit.mse_resid or wls_fit.scale) is 0.22964802498892287, and the r-squared value of the fit is 0.754.
You can obtain a wealth of data about the fits by calling their summary() method, and/or doing dir(wls_fit), if you need a list of every available property and method.

I wrote a concise function to perform the weighted linear regression of a data set, which is a direct translation of GSL's "gsl_fit_wlinear" function. This is useful if you want to know exactly what your function is doing when it performs the fit
def wlinear_fit (x,y,w) :
"""
Fit (x,y,w) to a linear function, using exact formulae for weighted linear
regression. This code was translated from the GNU Scientific Library (GSL),
it is an exact copy of the function gsl_fit_wlinear.
"""
# compute the weighted means and weighted deviations from the means
# wm denotes a "weighted mean", wm(f) = (sum_i w_i f_i) / (sum_i w_i)
W = np.sum(w)
wm_x = np.average(x,weights=w)
wm_y = np.average(y,weights=w)
dx = x-wm_x
dy = y-wm_y
wm_dx2 = np.average(dx**2,weights=w)
wm_dxdy = np.average(dx*dy,weights=w)
# In terms of y = a + b x
b = wm_dxdy / wm_dx2
a = wm_y - wm_x*b
cov_00 = (1.0/W) * (1.0 + wm_x**2/wm_dx2)
cov_11 = 1.0 / (W*wm_dx2)
cov_01 = -wm_x / (W*wm_dx2)
# Compute chi^2 = \sum w_i (y_i - (a + b * x_i))^2
chi2 = np.sum (w * (y-(a+b*x))**2)
return a,b,cov_00,cov_11,cov_01,chi2
To perform your fit, you would do
a,b,cov_00,cov_11,cov_01,chi2 = wlinear_fit(x_list,y_list,1.0/y_err**2)
Which will return the best estimate for the coefficients a (the intercept) and b (the slope) of the linear regression, along with the elements of the covariance matrix cov_00, cov_01 and cov_11. The best estimate on the error on a is then the square root of cov_00 and the one on b is the square root of cov_11. The weighted sum of the residuals is returned in the chi2 variable.
IMPORTANT: this function accepts inverse variances, not the inverse standard deviations as the weights for the data points.

sklearn.linear_model.LinearRegression supports specification of weights during fit:
x_data = np.array(x_list).reshape(-1, 1) # The model expects shape (n_samples, n_features).
y_data = np.array(y_list)
y_err = np.array(y_err)
model = LinearRegression()
model.fit(x_data, y_data, sample_weight=1/y_err)
Here the sample weight is specified as 1 / y_err. Different versions are possible and often it's a good idea to clip these sample weights to a maximum value in case the y_err varies strongly or has small outliers:
sample_weight = 1 / y_err
sample_weight = np.minimum(sample_weight, MAX_WEIGHT)
where MAX_WEIGHT should be determined from your data (by looking at the y_err or 1 / y_err distributions, e.g. if they have outliers they can be clipped).

I found this document helpful in understanding and setting up my own weighted least squares routine (applicable for any programming language).
Typically learning and using optimized routines is the best way to go but there are times where understanding the guts of a routine is important.