Decision tree split implementation - machine-learning

I am doing this as a part of my university assignment, but I can't find any resources online on how to correctly implement this.
I have read tons materials on metrics that define optimal set split (like Entropy, Gini and others), so I understand how we would choose an optimal value of feature to split learning set into left and right nodes.
However what I totally don't get is the complexity of implementation, considering we also have to choose optimal feature, which means that on each node to compute optimal value it would take O(n^2), which is bad considering real ML datasets are shaped about 10^2 x 10^6, this is really big in terms of computation cost.
Am I missing some kind of approach that could be used here to help reduce complexity?
I currently have this baseline implementation for choosing best feature and value to split on, but I really want to make it better:
for f_idx in range(X_subset.shape[1]):
sorted_values = X_subset.iloc[:, f_idx].sort_values()
for v in sorted_values[self.min_samples_split - 1 : -self.min_samples_split + 1]:
y_left, y_right = self.make_split_only_y(f_idx, v, X_subset, y_subset)
if threshold is not None:
G = calc_g(y_subset, y_left, y_right)
if G < tr_G:
threshold = v
feature_idx = f_idx
tr_G = G
else:
threshold = v
feature_idx = f_idx
tr_G = G
return feature_idx, threshold

So, since no one answered, here some stuff I found out.
Firstly, yes, this task is very computationaly intensive. However, several tricks may be used to reduce amount of splits you need to perform to "grow a tree".
This is especially important, since you don't really want a giant overfitted tree - it just doesn't has any value, what it is more important is to get weak model, which can be used with others in some sort of ensmebling teqnique.
As for the regularization tricks, here are couple of I used myself:
limit the maximum depth of tree
limit the minimal amount of items in node
limit the maximimum amount of leafes in tree
limit the minimum quiality change in split criteria after performing an optimal split
For algorithmic part, there is a way to build a tree a smart way. If you do it as in the code I posted earlier, time complexity will be around O(h * N^2 * D), where h is height of the tree. To work around this, there are several approaches, which I didn't personally code, but read about:
Use dynamic programming for accumulating of statistics per feature, so you don't have to recalculate them every split
Use data binning and bucket sort for O(n) sorting
Source of info: https://ml-handbook.ru/chapters/decision_tree/intro
(use google translate, since website is in russian)

Related

How to squish a continuous cosine-theta score to a discrete (0/1) output?

I implemented a cosine-theta function, which calculates the relation between two articles. If two articles are very similar then the words should contain quite some overlap. However, a cosine theta score of 0.54 does not mean "related" or "not related". I should end up with a definitive answer which is either 0 for 'not related' or 1 for 'related'.
I know that there are sigmoid and softmax functions, yet I should find the optimal parameters to give to such functions and I do not know if these functions are satisfactory solutions. I was thinking that I have the cosine theta score, I can calculate the percentage of overlap between two sentences two (e.g. the amount of overlapping words divided by the amount of words in the article) and maybe some more interesting things. Then with the data, I could maybe write a function (what type of function I do not know and is part of the question!), after which I can minimize the error via the SciPy library. This means that I should do some sort of supervised learning, and I am willing to label article pairs with labels (0/1) in order to train a network. Is this worth the effort?
# Count words of two strings.
v1, v2 = self.word_count(s1), self.word_count(s2)
# Calculate the intersection of the words in both strings.
v3 = set(v1.keys()) & set(v2.keys())
# Calculate some sort of ratio between the overlap and the
# article length (since 1 overlapping word on 2 words is more important
# then 4 overlapping words on articles of 492 words).
p = min(len(v1), len(v2)) / len(v3)
numerator = sum([v1[w] * v2[w] for w in v3])
w1 = sum([v1[w]**2 for w in v1.keys()])
w2 = sum([v2[w]**2 for w in v2.keys()])
denominator = math.sqrt(w1) * math.sqrt(w2)
# Calculate the cosine similarity
if not denominator:
return 0.0
else:
return (float(numerator) / denominator)
As said, I would like to use variables such as p, and the cosine theta score in order to produce an accurate discrete binary label, either 0 or 1.
As said, I would like to use variables such as p, and the cosine theta score in order to produce an accurate discrete binary label, either 0 or 1.
Here it really comes down to what you mean by accuracy. It is up to you to choose how the overlap affects whether or not two strings are "matching" unless you have a labelled data set. If you have a labelled data set (I.e., a set of pairs of strings along with a 0 or 1 label), then you can train a binary classification algorithm and try to optimise based on that. I would recommend something like a neural net or SVM due to the potentially high dimensional, categorical nature of your problem.
Even the optimisation, however, is a subjective measure. For example, in theory let's pretend you have a model which out of 100 samples only predicts 1 answer (Giving 99 unknowns). Technically if that one answer is correct, that is a model with 100% accuracy, but which has a very low recall. Generally in machine learning you will find a trade off between recall and accuracy.
Some people like to go for certain metrics which combine the two (The most famous of which is the F1 score), but honestly it depends on the application. If I have a marketing campaign with a fixed budget, then I care more about accuracy - I would only want to target consumers who are likely to buy my product. If however, we are looking to test for a deadly disease or markers for bank fraud, then it's feasible for that test to be accurate only 10% of the time - if its recall of true positives is somewhere close to 100%.
Finally, if you have no labelled data, then your best bet is just to define some cut off value which you believe indicates a good match. This is would then be more analogous to a binary clustering problem, and you could use some more abstract measure such as distance to a centroid to test which cluster (Either the "related" or "unrelated" cluster) the point belongs to. Note however that here your features feel like they would be incredibly hard to define.

machine learning, why do we need to weight data

This my sound as very naive question. I checked on google and many YouTube videos for beginners and pretty much, all explain data weighting as something the most obvious. I still do not understand why data is being weighted.
Let's assume I have four features:
a b c d
1 2 1 4
If I pass each value to Sigmond function, I'll receive -1 >< 1 value already.
I really don't understand why data needs or it is recommended to be weighted first. If you could explain to me this in very simple manner, I would appreciate it a lot.
I think you are not talking about weighing data but features.
A feature is a column in your table and as data I would understand rows.
The confusion comes now from the fact that weighing rows is also sometimes sensible, e.g., if you want to punish misclassification of positive class more.
Why do we need to weigh features?
I assume you are talking about a modle like
prediction = sigmoid(sum_i weight_i * feature_i) > base
Let's assume you want to predict whether a person is overweight based on Bodyweight, height, and age.
In R we can generate a sample dataset as
height = rnorm(100,1.80,0.1) #normal distributed mean 1.8,variance 0.1
weight = rnorm(100,70,10)
age = runif(100,0,100)
ow = weight / (height**2)>25 #overweight if BMI > 25
data = data.frame(height,weight,age,bc,ow)
if we now plot the data you can see that at least my sample of the data can be separated with a straight line in weight/height. However, age does not provide any value. If we weight it prior to the sum/sigmoid you can put all factors into relation.
Furthermore, as you can see from the following plot the weight/height have a very different domain. Hence, they need to be put into relation, such that the line in the following plot has the right slope, as the value of weight have are one order of magnitude larger

how can fixed parameters cost and gamma using libsvm matlab to improve accuracy?

I use libsvm to classify a data base that contain 1000 labels. I am new in libsvm and I found a problem to choose the parameters c and g to improve performance. First, here is the program that I use to set the parameters:
bestcv = 0;
for log2c = -1:3,
for log2g = -4:1,
cmd = ['-v 5 -c ', num2str(2^log2c), ' -g ', num2str(2^log2g)];
cv = svmtrain(yapp, xapp, cmd);
if (cv >= bestcv),
bestcv = cv; bestc = 2^log2c; bestg = 2^log2g;
end
fprintf('%g %g %g (best c=%g, g=%g, rate=%g)\n', log2c, log2g, cv, bestc, bestg, bestcv);
end
end
as a result, this program gives c = 8 and g = 2 and when I use these values
c and g, I found an accuracy rate of 55%. for classification, I use svm one against all.
numLabels=max(yapp);
numTest=size(ytest,1);
%# train one-against-all models
model = cell(numLabels,1);
for k=1:numLabels
model{k} = svmtrain(double(yapp==k),xapp, ' -c 1000 -g 10 -b 1 ');
end
%# get probability estimates of test instances using each model
prob_black = zeros(numTest,numLabels);
for k=1:numLabels
[~,~,p] = svmpredict(double(ytest==k), xtest, model{k}, '-b 1');
prob_black(:,k) = p(:,model{k}.Label==1); %# probability of class==k
end
%# predict the class with the highest probability
[~,pred_black] = max(prob_black,[],2);
acc = sum(pred_black == ytest) ./ numel(ytest) %# accuracy
The problem is that I need to change these parameters to increase performance. for example, when I put randomly c = 10000 and g = 100, I found a better accuracy rate: 70%.
Please I need help, how can I set theses parameters ( c and g) so to find the optimum accuracy rate? thank you in advance
Hyperparameter tuning is a nontrivial problem in machine learning. The simplest approach is what you've already implemented: define a grid of values, and compute the model on the grid until you find some optimal combination. A key assumption is that the grid itself is a good approximation of the surface: that it's fine enough to not miss anything important, but not so fine that you waste time computing values that are essentially the same as neighboring values. I'm not aware of any method to, in general, know ahead of time how fine a grid is necessary. As illustration: imagine that the global optimum is at $(5,5)$ and the function is basically flat elsewhere. If your grid is $(0,0),(0,10),(10,10),(0,10)$, you'll miss the optimum completely. Likewise, if the grid is $(0,0), (-10,-10),(-10,0),(0,-10)$, you'll never be anywhere near the optimum. In both cases, you have no hope of finding the optimum itself.
Some rules of thumb exist for SVM with RBF kernels, though: a grid of $\gamma\in\{2^{-15},2^{-14},...,2^5\}$ and $C \in \{2^{-5}, 2^{-4},...,2^{15}\}$ is one such recommendation.
If you found a better solution outside of the range of grid values that you tested, this suggests you should define a larger grid. But larger grids take more time to evaluate, so you'll either have to commit to waiting a while for your results, or move to a more efficient method of exploring the hyperparameter space.
Another alternative is random search: define a "budget" of the number of SVMs that you want to try out, and generate that many random tuples to test. This approach is mostly just useful for benchmarking purposes, since it's entirely unintelligent.
Both grid search and random search have the advantage of being stupidly easy to implement in parallel.
Better options fall in the domain of global optimization. Marc Claeson et al have devised the Optunity package, which uses particle swarm optimization. My research focuses on refinements of the Efficient Global Optimization algorithm (EGO), which builds up a Gaussian process as an approximation of the hyperparameter response surface and uses that to make educated predictions about which hyperparameter tuples are most likely to improve upon the current best estimate.
Imagine that you've evaluated the SVM at some hyperparameter tuple $(\gamma, C)$ and it has some out-of-sample performance metric $y$. An advantage to EGO-inspired methods is that it assumes that the values $y^*$ nearby $(\gamma,C)$ will be "close" to $y$, so we don't necessarily need to spend time exploring those tuples nearby, especially if $y-y_{min}$ is very large (where $y_{min}$ is the smallest $y$ value we've discovered). EGO will identify and evaluate the SVM at points where it estimates there is a high probability of improvement, so it will intelligently move through the hyper-parameter space: in the ideal case, it will skip over regions of low performance in favor of focusing on regions of high performance.

How to normalize tf-idf vectors for SVMs?

I am using Support Vector Machines for document classification. My feature set for each document is a tf-idf vector. I have M documents with each tf-idf vector of size N.
Giving M * N matrix.
The size of M is just 10 documents and tf-idf vector is 1000 word vector. So my features are much larger than number of documents. Also each word occurs in either 2 or 3 documents. When i am normalizing each feature ( word ) i.e. column normalization in [0,1] with
val_feature_j_row_i = ( val_feature_j_row_i - min_feature_j ) / ( max_feature_j - min_feature_j)
It either gives me 0, 1 of course.
And it gives me bad results. I am using libsvm, with rbf function C = 0.0312, gamma = 0.007815
Any recommendations ?
Should i include more documents ? or other functions like sigmoid or better normalization methods ?
The list of things to consider and correct is quite long, so first of all I would recommend some machine-learning reading before trying to face the problem itself. There are dozens of great books (like ie. Haykin's "Neural Networks and Learning Machines") as well as online courses, which will help you with such basics, like those listed here: http://www.class-central.com/search?q=machine+learning .
Getting back to the problem itself:
10 documents is rows of magnitude to small to get any significant results and/or insights into the problem,
there is no universal method of data preprocessing, you have to analyze it through numerous tests and data analytics,
SVMs are parametrical models, you cannot use a single C and gamma values and expect any reasonable results. You have to check dozens of them to even get a clue "where to search". The most simple method for doing so is so called grid search,
1000 of features is a great number of dimensions, this suggest that using a kernel, which implies infinitely dimensional feature space is quite... redundant - it would be a better idea to first analyze simplier ones, which have smaller chance to overfit (linear or low degree polynomial)
finally is tf*idf a good choice if "each word occurs in 2 or 3 documents"? It can be doubtfull, unless what you actually mean is 20-30% of documents
finally why is simple features squashing
It either gives me 0, 1 of course.
it should result in values in [0,1] interval, not just its limits. So if this is a case you are probably having some error in your implementation.

Recommended anomaly detection technique for simple, one-dimensional scenario?

I have a scenario where I have several thousand instances of data. The data itself is represented as a single integer value. I want to be able to detect when an instance is an extreme outlier.
For example, with the following example data:
a = 10
b = 14
c = 25
d = 467
e = 12
d is clearly an anomaly, and I would want to perform a specific action based on this.
I was tempted to just try an use my knowledge of the particular domain to detect anomalies. For instance, figure out a distance from the mean value that is useful, and check for that, based on heuristics. However, I think it's probably better if I investigate more general, robust anomaly detection techniques, which have some theory behind them.
Since my working knowledge of mathematics is limited, I'm hoping to find a technique which is simple, such as using standard deviation. Hopefully the single-dimensioned nature of the data will make this quite a common problem, but if more information for the scenario is required please leave a comment and I will give more info.
Edit: thought I'd add more information about the data and what I've tried in case it makes one answer more correct than another.
The values are all positive and non-zero. I expect that the values will form a normal distribution. This expectation is based on an intuition of the domain rather than through analysis, if this is not a bad thing to assume, please let me know. In terms of clustering, unless there's also standard algorithms to choose a k-value, I would find it hard to provide this value to a k-Means algorithm.
The action I want to take for an outlier/anomaly is to present it to the user, and recommend that the data point is basically removed from the data set (I won't get in to how they would do that, but it makes sense for my domain), thus it will not be used as input to another function.
So far I have tried three-sigma, and the IQR outlier test on my limited data set. IQR flags values which are not extreme enough, three-sigma points out instances which better fit with my intuition of the domain.
Information on algorithms, techniques or links to resources to learn about this specific scenario are valid and welcome answers.
What is a recommended anomaly detection technique for simple, one-dimensional data?
Check out the three-sigma rule:
mu = mean of the data
std = standard deviation of the data
IF abs(x-mu) > 3*std THEN x is outlier
An alternative method is the IQR outlier test:
Q25 = 25th_percentile
Q75 = 75th_percentile
IQR = Q75 - Q25 // inter-quartile range
IF (x < Q25 - 1.5*IQR) OR (Q75 + 1.5*IQR < x) THEN x is a mild outlier
IF (x < Q25 - 3.0*IQR) OR (Q75 + 3.0*IQR < x) THEN x is an extreme outlier
this test is usually employed by Box plots (indicated by the whiskers):
EDIT:
For your case (simple 1D univariate data), I think my first answer is well suited.
That however isn't applicable to multivariate data.
#smaclell suggested using K-means to find the outliers. Beside the fact that it is mainly a clustering algorithm (not really an outlier detection technique), the problem with k-means is that it requires knowing in advance a good value for the number of clusters K.
A better suited technique is the DBSCAN: a density-based clustering algorithm. Basically it grows regions with sufficiently high density into clusters which will be maximal set of density-connected points.
DBSCAN requires two parameters: epsilon and minPoints. It starts with an arbitrary point that has not been visited. It then finds all the neighbor points within distance epsilon of the starting point.
If the number of neighbors is greater than or equal to minPoints, a cluster is formed. The starting point and its neighbors are added to this cluster and the starting point is marked as visited. The algorithm then repeats the evaluation process for all the neighbors recursively.
If the number of neighbors is less than minPoints, the point is marked as noise.
If a cluster is fully expanded (all points within reach are visited) then the algorithm proceeds to iterate through the remaining unvisited points until they are depleted.
Finally the set of all points marked as noise are considered outliers.
There are a variety of clustering techniques you could use to try to identify central tendencies within your data. One such algorithm we used heavily in my pattern recognition course was K-Means. This would allow you to identify whether there are more than one related sets of data, such as a bimodal distribution. This does require you having some knowledge of how many clusters to expect but is fairly efficient and easy to implement.
After you have the means you could then try to find out if any point is far from any of the means. You can define 'far' however you want but I would recommend the suggestions by #Amro as a good starting point.
For a more in-depth discussion of clustering algorithms refer to the wikipedia entry on clustering.
This is an old topic but still it lacks some information.
Evidently, this can be seen as a case of univariate outlier detection. The approaches presented above have several pros and cons. Here are some weak spots:
Detection of outliers with the mean and sigma has the obvious disadvantage of dependence of mean and sigma on the outliers themselves.
The case of the small sample limit (see question for example) is not adequately covered by, 3 sigma, K-Means, IQR etc.
And I could go on... However the statistical literature offers a simple metric: the median absolute deviation. (Medians are insensitive to outliers)
Details can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128047330/introduction-to-robust-estimation-and-hypothesis-testing
I think this problem can be solved in a few lines of python code like this:
import numpy as np
import scipy.stats as sts
x = np.array([10, 14, 25, 467, 12]) # your values
np.abs(x - np.median(x))/(sts.median_abs_deviation(x)/0.6745) #MAD criterion
Subsequently you reject values above a certain threshold (97.5 percentile of the distribution of data), in case of an assumed normal distribution the threshold is 2.24. Here it translates to:
array([ 0.6745 , 0. , 1.854875, 76.387125, 0.33725 ])
or the 467 entry being rejected.
Of course, one could argue, that the MAD (as presented) also assumes a normal dist. Therefore, why is it that argument 2 above (small sample) does not apply here? The answer is that MAD has a very high breakdown point. It is easy to choose different threshold points from different distributions and come to the same conclusion: 467 is the outlier.
Both three-sigma rule and IQR test are often used, and there are a couple of simple algorithms to detect anomalies.
The three-sigma rule is correct
mu = mean of the data
std = standard deviation of the data
IF abs(x-mu) > 3*std THEN x is outlier
The IQR test should be:
Q25 = 25th_percentile
Q75 = 75th_percentile
IQR = Q75 - Q25 // inter-quartile range
If x > Q75 + 1.5 * IQR or x < Q25 - 1.5 * IQR THEN x is a mild outlier
If x > Q75 + 3.0 * IQR or x < Q25 – 3.0 * IQR THEN x is a extreme outlier

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