I use a CatBoostClassifier and my classes are highly imbalanced. I applied a scale_pos_weight parameter to account for that. While training with an evaluation dataset (test) CatBoost shows a high precision on test. However, when I make predictions on test using a predict method, I only get a low precision score (calculated using the sklearn.metrics).
I think this might be related to class weights that I applied. However, I don't quite understand how a precision score is affected by this.
params = frozendict({
'task_type': 'CPU',
'loss_function': 'Logloss',
'eval_metric': 'F1',
'custom_metric': ['F1', 'Precision', 'Recall'],
'iterations': 100,
'random_seed': 20190128,
'scale_pos_weight': 56.88657244809081,
'learning_rate': 0.5412829495147387,
'depth': 7,
'l2_leaf_reg': 9.526905230698302
})
from catboost import CatBoostClassifier
model = cb.CatBoostClassifier(**params)
model.fit(
X_train, y_train,
cat_features=np.where(X_train.dtypes == np.object)[0],
eval_set=(X_test, y_test),
verbose=False,
plot=True
)
model.get_best_score()
{'learn': {'Recall': 0.9243007537531925,
'Logloss': 0.15892360013680026,
'F1': 0.9416723809244181,
'Precision': 0.9640191600545249},
'validation_0': {'Recall': 0.914252301192093,
'Logloss': 0.1714387314107052,
'F1': 0.9357892623978286,
'Precision': 0.9642642597943112}}
y_test_pred = model.predict(data=X_test)
from sklearn.metrics import balanced_accuracy_score, recall_score, precision_score, f1_score
print('Balanced accuracy: {:.2f}'.format(balanced_accuracy_score(y_test, y_test_pred)))
print('Precision: {:.2f}'.format(precision_score(y_test, y_test_pred)))
print('Recall: {:.2f}'.format(recall_score(y_test, y_test_pred)))
print('F1: {:.2f}'.format(f1_score(y_test, y_test_pred)))
Balanced accuracy: 0.94
Precision: 0.29
Recall: 0.91
F1: 0.44
I expected to get the same precision as CatBoost show while training, however, it's not so. What am I doing wrong?
Default use_weights is set to True , which means adding weights to the evaluation metrics, e.g. Precision:use_weights=True,
To let your own precision calculator the same as his, change to Precision: use_weights=False
Also, get_best_score gives the highest score over the iterations, you need to specify which iteration to be used in prediction. You can set use_best_model=True in model.fit to automatically choose the iteration.
The predict function uses a standard threshold of 0.5 to convert the probabilities of the prediction into a binary value. When you are dealing with a imbalanced problem, the threshold of 0.5 is not always the best value, that's why on the test set you are achieving a poor precision.
In order to find a better threshold, catboost has some methods that help you to do so, like get_roc_curve, get_fpr_curve, get_fnr_curve. These 3 methods can help you to visualize the true positive, false positive and false negative rates by changing the prediction threhsold.
Besides these visualization methods, catboost has a method called select_threshold which gives you the best threshold by that optimizes one of the curves.
You can check this on their documentation.
In addition to setting the use_bet_model=True, ensure that the class balance in both datasets is the same, or use balanced accuracy metrics to account for different class balance.
If you've done both of these, and you still see much worse accuracy metrics on a test set versus the train set, it is a sign of overfitting. I'd recommend you take advantage of the CatBoost's overfitting detector. The most common first method is to set early_stopping_rounds to an integer like 10, which will stop training once an improvement in the selected loss function isn't achieved after that number of training rounds (see early_stopping_rounds documentation).
Related
I'm playing with CIFAR-10 dataset using ResNet-50 on Keras with Tensorflow backend, but I ran into a very strange training pattern, where the model loss decreased first, and then started to increase until it plateaued/stuck at a single value due to almost 0 learning rate. Correspondingly, the model accuracy increased first, and then started to decrease until it plateaued at 10% (aka random guess). I wonder what is going wrong?
Typically this U shaped pattern happens with a learning rate that is too large (like this post), but it is not the case here. This pattern also doesn't' look like a classic "over-fitting" as both the training and validation loss increase over time. In the answer to the above linked post, someone mentioned that if Adam optimizer is used, loss may explode under small learning rate when local minimum is exceeded, I'm not sure I can follow what is said there, and also I'm using SGD with weight decay instead of Adam.
Specifically for the training set up, I used resent50 with random initialization, SGD optimizer with 0.9 momentum and a weight decay of 0.0001 using decoupled weight decay regularization, batch-size 64, initial learning_rate 0.01 which declined by a factor of 0.5 with each 10 epochs of non-decreasing validation loss.
base_model = tf.keras.applications.ResNet50(include_top=False,
weights=None,pooling='avg',
input_shape=(32,32,3))
prediction_layer = tf.keras.layers.Dense(10)
model = tf.keras.Sequential([base_model,
prediction_layer])
SGDW = tfa.optimizers.extend_with_decoupled_weight_decay(tf.keras.optimizers.SGD)
optimizer = SGDW(weight_decay=0.0001, learning_rate=0.01, momentum=0.9)
loss=tf.keras.losses.SparseCategoricalCrossentropy(from_logits=True),
metrics=["accuracy"])
reduce_lr= tf.keras.callbacks.ReduceLROnPlateau(monitor='val_loss',factor=0.5, patience=10)
model.compile(optimizer=optimizer,
loss=tf.keras.losses.SparseCategoricalCrossentropy(from_logits=True),
metrics=["accuracy"])
model.fit(train_batches, epochs=250,
validation_data=validation_batches,
callbacks=[reduce_lr])
Data pre-processers such as StandardScaler should be used to fit_transform the train set and only transform (not fit) the test set. I expect the same fit/transform process applies to cross-validation for tuning the model. However, I found cross_val_score and GridSearchCV fit_transform the entire train set with the preprocessor (rather than fit_transform the inner_train set, and transform the inner_validation set). I believe this artificially removes the variance from the inner_validation set which makes the cv score (the metric used to select the best model by GridSearch) biased. Is this a concern or did I actually miss anything?
To demonstrate the above issue, I tried the following three simple test cases with the Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnostic) Data Set from Kaggle.
I intentionally fit and transform the entire X with StandardScaler()
X_sc = StandardScaler().fit_transform(X)
lr = LogisticRegression(penalty='l2', random_state=42)
cross_val_score(lr, X_sc, y, cv=5)
I include SC and LR in the Pipeline and run cross_val_score
pipe = Pipeline([
('sc', StandardScaler()),
('lr', LogisticRegression(penalty='l2', random_state=42))
])
cross_val_score(pipe, X, y, cv=5)
Same as 2 but with GridSearchCV
pipe = Pipeline([
('sc', StandardScaler()),
('lr', LogisticRegression(random_state=42))
])
params = {
'lr__penalty': ['l2']
}
gs=GridSearchCV(pipe,
param_grid=params, cv=5).fit(X, y)
gs.cv_results_
They all produce the same validation scores.
[0.9826087 , 0.97391304, 0.97345133, 0.97345133, 0.99115044]
No, sklearn doesn't do fit_transform with entire dataset.
To check this, I subclassed StandardScaler to print the size of the dataset sent to it.
class StScaler(StandardScaler):
def fit_transform(self,X,y=None):
print(len(X))
return super().fit_transform(X,y)
If you now replace StandardScaler in your code, you'll see dataset size passed in first case is actually bigger.
But why does the accuracy remain exactly same? I think this is because LogisticRegression is not very sensitive to feature scale. If we instead use a classifier that is very sensitive to scale, like KNeighborsClassifier for example, you'll find accuracy between two cases start to vary.
X,y = load_breast_cancer(return_X_y=True)
X_sc = StScaler().fit_transform(X)
lr = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors=1)
cross_val_score(lr, X_sc,y, cv=5)
Outputs:
569
[0.94782609 0.96521739 0.97345133 0.92920354 0.9380531 ]
And the 2nd case,
pipe = Pipeline([
('sc', StScaler()),
('lr', KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors=1))
])
print(cross_val_score(pipe, X, y, cv=5))
Outputs:
454
454
456
456
456
[0.95652174 0.97391304 0.97345133 0.92920354 0.9380531 ]
Not big change accuracy-wise, but change nonetheless.
Learning the parameters of a prediction function and testing it on the same data is a methodological mistake: a model that would just repeat the labels of the samples that it has just seen would have a perfect score but would fail to predict anything useful on yet-unseen data. This situation is called overfitting. To avoid it, it is common practice when performing a (supervised) machine learning experiment to hold out part of the available data as a test set X_test, y_test
A solution to this problem is a procedure called cross-validation (CV for short). A test set should still be held out for final evaluation, but the validation set is no longer needed when doing CV. In the basic approach, called k-fold CV, the training set is split into k smaller sets (other approaches are described below, but generally follow the same principles). The following procedure is followed for each of the k “folds”:
A model is trained using of the folds as training data;
the resulting model is validated on the remaining part of the data (i.e., it is used as a test set to compute a performance measure such as accuracy).
The performance measure reported by k-fold cross-validation is then the average of the values computed in the loop. This approach can be computationally expensive, but does not waste too much data (as is the case when fixing an arbitrary validation set), which is a major advantage in problems such as inverse inference where the number of samples is very small.
More over if your model is already biased from starting we have to make it balance by SMOTE /Oversampling of Less Target Variable/Under-sampling of High target variable.
I am using the LogisticRegression() method in scikit-learn on a highly unbalanced data set. I have even turned the class_weight feature to auto.
I know that in Logistic Regression it should be possible to know what is the threshold value for a particular pair of classes.
Is it possible to know what the threshold value is in each of the One-vs-All classes the LogisticRegression() method designs?
I did not find anything in the documentation page.
Does it by default apply the 0.5 value as threshold for all the classes regardless of the parameter values?
There is a little trick that I use, instead of using model.predict(test_data) use model.predict_proba(test_data). Then use a range of values for thresholds to analyze the effects on the prediction;
pred_proba_df = pd.DataFrame(model.predict_proba(x_test))
threshold_list = [0.05,0.1,0.15,0.2,0.25,0.3,0.35,0.4,0.45,0.5,0.55,0.6,0.65,.7,.75,.8,.85,.9,.95,.99]
for i in threshold_list:
print ('\n******** For i = {} ******'.format(i))
Y_test_pred = pred_proba_df.applymap(lambda x: 1 if x>i else 0)
test_accuracy = metrics.accuracy_score(Y_test.as_matrix().reshape(Y_test.as_matrix().size,1),
Y_test_pred.iloc[:,1].as_matrix().reshape(Y_test_pred.iloc[:,1].as_matrix().size,1))
print('Our testing accuracy is {}'.format(test_accuracy))
print(confusion_matrix(Y_test.as_matrix().reshape(Y_test.as_matrix().size,1),
Y_test_pred.iloc[:,1].as_matrix().reshape(Y_test_pred.iloc[:,1].as_matrix().size,1)))
Best!
Logistic regression chooses the class that has the biggest probability. In case of 2 classes, the threshold is 0.5: if P(Y=0) > 0.5 then obviously P(Y=0) > P(Y=1). The same stands for the multiclass setting: again, it chooses the class with the biggest probability (see e.g. Ng's lectures, the bottom lines).
Introducing special thresholds only affects in the proportion of false positives/false negatives (and thus in precision/recall tradeoff), but it is not the parameter of the LR model. See also the similar question.
Yes, Sci-Kit learn is using a threshold of P>=0.5 for binary classifications. I am going to build on some of the answers already posted with two options to check this:
One simple option is to extract the probabilities of each classification using the output from model.predict_proba(test_x) segment of the code below along with class predictions (output from model.predict(test_x) segment of code below). Then, append class predictions and their probabilities to your test dataframe as a check.
As another option, one can graphically view precision vs. recall at various thresholds using the following code.
### Predict test_y values and probabilities based on fitted logistic
regression model
pred_y=log.predict(test_x)
probs_y=log.predict_proba(test_x)
# probs_y is a 2-D array of probability of being labeled as 0 (first
column of
array) vs 1 (2nd column in array)
from sklearn.metrics import precision_recall_curve
precision, recall, thresholds = precision_recall_curve(test_y, probs_y[:,
1])
#retrieve probability of being 1(in second column of probs_y)
pr_auc = metrics.auc(recall, precision)
plt.title("Precision-Recall vs Threshold Chart")
plt.plot(thresholds, precision[: -1], "b--", label="Precision")
plt.plot(thresholds, recall[: -1], "r--", label="Recall")
plt.ylabel("Precision, Recall")
plt.xlabel("Threshold")
plt.legend(loc="lower left")
plt.ylim([0,1])
we can use a wrapper as follows:
model = LogisticRegression()
model.fit(X, y)
def custom_predict(X, threshold):
probs = model.predict_proba(X)
return (probs[:, 1] > threshold).astype(int)
new_preds = custom_predict(X=X, threshold=0.4)
I'm trying to train a CNN to categorize text by topic. When I use binary cross-entropy I get ~80% accuracy, with categorical cross-entropy I get ~50% accuracy.
I don't understand why this is. It's a multiclass problem, doesn't that mean that I have to use categorical cross-entropy and that the results with binary cross-entropy are meaningless?
model.add(embedding_layer)
model.add(Dropout(0.25))
# convolution layers
model.add(Conv1D(nb_filter=32,
filter_length=4,
border_mode='valid',
activation='relu'))
model.add(MaxPooling1D(pool_length=2))
# dense layers
model.add(Flatten())
model.add(Dense(256))
model.add(Dropout(0.25))
model.add(Activation('relu'))
# output layer
model.add(Dense(len(class_id_index)))
model.add(Activation('softmax'))
Then I compile it either it like this using categorical_crossentropy as the loss function:
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
or
model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
Intuitively it makes sense why I'd want to use categorical cross-entropy, I don't understand why I get good results with binary, and poor results with categorical.
The reason for this apparent performance discrepancy between categorical & binary cross entropy is what user xtof54 has already reported in his answer below, i.e.:
the accuracy computed with the Keras method evaluate is just plain
wrong when using binary_crossentropy with more than 2 labels
I would like to elaborate more on this, demonstrate the actual underlying issue, explain it, and offer a remedy.
This behavior is not a bug; the underlying reason is a rather subtle & undocumented issue at how Keras actually guesses which accuracy to use, depending on the loss function you have selected, when you include simply metrics=['accuracy'] in your model compilation. In other words, while your first compilation option
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
is valid, your second one:
model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
will not produce what you expect, but the reason is not the use of binary cross entropy (which, at least in principle, is an absolutely valid loss function).
Why is that? If you check the metrics source code, Keras does not define a single accuracy metric, but several different ones, among them binary_accuracy and categorical_accuracy. What happens under the hood is that, since you have selected binary cross entropy as your loss function and have not specified a particular accuracy metric, Keras (wrongly...) infers that you are interested in the binary_accuracy, and this is what it returns - while in fact you are interested in the categorical_accuracy.
Let's verify that this is the case, using the MNIST CNN example in Keras, with the following modification:
model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy']) # WRONG way
model.fit(x_train, y_train,
batch_size=batch_size,
epochs=2, # only 2 epochs, for demonstration purposes
verbose=1,
validation_data=(x_test, y_test))
# Keras reported accuracy:
score = model.evaluate(x_test, y_test, verbose=0)
score[1]
# 0.9975801164627075
# Actual accuracy calculated manually:
import numpy as np
y_pred = model.predict(x_test)
acc = sum([np.argmax(y_test[i])==np.argmax(y_pred[i]) for i in range(10000)])/10000
acc
# 0.98780000000000001
score[1]==acc
# False
To remedy this, i.e. to use indeed binary cross entropy as your loss function (as I said, nothing wrong with this, at least in principle) while still getting the categorical accuracy required by the problem at hand, you should ask explicitly for categorical_accuracy in the model compilation as follows:
from keras.metrics import categorical_accuracy
model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=[categorical_accuracy])
In the MNIST example, after training, scoring, and predicting the test set as I show above, the two metrics now are the same, as they should be:
# Keras reported accuracy:
score = model.evaluate(x_test, y_test, verbose=0)
score[1]
# 0.98580000000000001
# Actual accuracy calculated manually:
y_pred = model.predict(x_test)
acc = sum([np.argmax(y_test[i])==np.argmax(y_pred[i]) for i in range(10000)])/10000
acc
# 0.98580000000000001
score[1]==acc
# True
System setup:
Python version 3.5.3
Tensorflow version 1.2.1
Keras version 2.0.4
UPDATE: After my post, I discovered that this issue had already been identified in this answer.
It all depends on the type of classification problem you are dealing with. There are three main categories
binary classification (two target classes),
multi-class classification (more than two exclusive targets),
multi-label classification (more than two non exclusive targets), in which multiple target classes can be on at the same time.
In the first case, binary cross-entropy should be used and targets should be encoded as one-hot vectors.
In the second case, categorical cross-entropy should be used and targets should be encoded as one-hot vectors.
In the last case, binary cross-entropy should be used and targets should be encoded as one-hot vectors. Each output neuron (or unit) is considered as a separate random binary variable, and the loss for the entire vector of outputs is the product of the loss of single binary variables. Therefore it is the product of binary cross-entropy for each single output unit.
The binary cross-entropy is defined as
and categorical cross-entropy is defined as
where c is the index running over the number of classes C.
I came across an "inverted" issue — I was getting good results with categorical_crossentropy (with 2 classes) and poor with binary_crossentropy. It seems that problem was with wrong activation function. The correct settings were:
for binary_crossentropy: sigmoid activation, scalar target
for categorical_crossentropy: softmax activation, one-hot encoded target
It's really interesting case. Actually in your setup the following statement is true:
binary_crossentropy = len(class_id_index) * categorical_crossentropy
This means that up to a constant multiplication factor your losses are equivalent. The weird behaviour that you are observing during a training phase might be an example of a following phenomenon:
At the beginning the most frequent class is dominating the loss - so network is learning to predict mostly this class for every example.
After it learnt the most frequent pattern it starts discriminating among less frequent classes. But when you are using adam - the learning rate has a much smaller value than it had at the beginning of training (it's because of the nature of this optimizer). It makes training slower and prevents your network from e.g. leaving a poor local minimum less possible.
That's why this constant factor might help in case of binary_crossentropy. After many epochs - the learning rate value is greater than in categorical_crossentropy case. I usually restart training (and learning phase) a few times when I notice such behaviour or/and adjusting a class weights using the following pattern:
class_weight = 1 / class_frequency
This makes loss from a less frequent classes balancing the influence of a dominant class loss at the beginning of a training and in a further part of an optimization process.
EDIT:
Actually - I checked that even though in case of maths:
binary_crossentropy = len(class_id_index) * categorical_crossentropy
should hold - in case of keras it's not true, because keras is automatically normalizing all outputs to sum up to 1. This is the actual reason behind this weird behaviour as in case of multiclassification such normalization harms a training.
After commenting #Marcin answer, I have more carefully checked one of my students code where I found the same weird behavior, even after only 2 epochs ! (So #Marcin's explanation was not very likely in my case).
And I found that the answer is actually very simple: the accuracy computed with the Keras method evaluate is just plain wrong when using binary_crossentropy with more than 2 labels. You can check that by recomputing the accuracy yourself (first call the Keras method "predict" and then compute the number of correct answers returned by predict): you get the true accuracy, which is much lower than the Keras "evaluate" one.
a simple example under a multi-class setting to illustrate
suppose you have 4 classes (onehot encoded) and below is just one prediction
true_label = [0,1,0,0]
predicted_label = [0,0,1,0]
when using categorical_crossentropy, the accuracy is just 0 , it only cares about if you get the concerned class right.
however when using binary_crossentropy, the accuracy is calculated for all classes, it would be 50% for this prediction. and the final result will be the mean of the individual accuracies for both cases.
it is recommended to use categorical_crossentropy for multi-class(classes are mutually exclusive) problem but binary_crossentropy for multi-label problem.
As it is a multi-class problem, you have to use the categorical_crossentropy, the binary cross entropy will produce bogus results, most likely will only evaluate the first two classes only.
50% for a multi-class problem can be quite good, depending on the number of classes. If you have n classes, then 100/n is the minimum performance you can get by outputting a random class.
You are passing a target array of shape (x-dim, y-dim) while using as loss categorical_crossentropy. categorical_crossentropy expects targets to be binary matrices (1s and 0s) of shape (samples, classes). If your targets are integer classes, you can convert them to the expected format via:
from keras.utils import to_categorical
y_binary = to_categorical(y_int)
Alternatively, you can use the loss function sparse_categorical_crossentropy instead, which does expect integer targets.
model.compile(loss='sparse_categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
when using the categorical_crossentropy loss, your targets should be in categorical format (e.g. if you have 10 classes, the target for each sample should be a 10-dimensional vector that is all-zeros except for a 1 at the index corresponding to the class of the sample).
Take a look at the equation you can find that binary cross entropy not only punish those label = 1, predicted =0, but also label = 0, predicted = 1.
However categorical cross entropy only punish those label = 1 but predicted = 1.That's why we make assumption that there is only ONE label positive.
The main point is answered satisfactorily with the brilliant piece of sleuthing by desernaut. However there are occasions when BCE (binary cross entropy) could throw different results than CCE (categorical cross entropy) and may be the preferred choice. While the thumb rules shared above (which loss to select) work fine for 99% of the cases, I would like to add a few new dimensions to this discussion.
The OP had a softmax activation and this throws a probability distribution as the predicted value. It is a multi-class problem. The preferred loss is categorical CE. Essentially this boils down to -ln(p) where 'p' is the predicted probability of the lone positive class in the sample. This means that the negative predictions dont have a role to play in calculating CE. This is by intention.
On a rare occasion, it may be needed to make the -ve voices count. This can be done by treating the above sample as a series of binary predictions. So if expected is [1 0 0 0 0] and predicted is [0.1 0.5 0.1 0.1 0.2], this is further broken down into:
expected = [1,0], [0,1], [0,1], [0,1], [0,1]
predicted = [0.1, 0.9], [.5, .5], [.1, .9], [.1, .9], [.2, .8]
Now we proceed to compute 5 different cross entropies - one for each of the above 5 expected/predicted combo and sum them up. Then:
CE = -[ ln(.1) + ln(0.5) + ln(0.9) + ln(0.9) + ln(0.8)]
The CE has a different scale but continues to be a measure of the difference between the expected and predicted values. The only difference is that in this scheme, the -ve values are also penalized/rewarded along with the +ve values. In case your problem is such that you are going to use the output probabilities (both +ve and -ves) instead of using the max() to predict just the 1 +ve label, then you may want to consider this version of CE.
How about a multi-label situation where expected = [1 0 0 0 1]? Conventional approach is to use one sigmoid per output neuron instead of an overall softmax. This ensures that the output probabilities are independent of each other. So we get something like:
expected = [1 0 0 0 1]
predicted is = [0.1 0.5 0.1 0.1 0.9]
By definition, CE measures the difference between 2 probability distributions. But the above two lists are not probability distributions. Probability distributions should always add up to 1. So conventional solution is to use same loss approach as before - break the expected and predicted values into 5 individual probability distributions, proceed to calculate 5 cross entropies and sum them up. Then:
CE = -[ ln(.1) + ln(0.5) + ln(0.9) + ln(0.9) + ln(0.9)] = 3.3
The challenge happens when the number of classes may be very high - say a 1000 and there may be only couple of them present in each sample. So the expected is something like: [1,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0.....990 zeroes]. The predicted could be something like: [.8, .1, .1, .1, .1, .1, .8, .1, .1, .1.....990 0.1's]
In this case the CE =
- [ ln(.8) + ln(.8) for the 2 +ve classes and 998 * ln(0.9) for the 998 -ve classes]
= 0.44 (for the +ve classes) + 105 (for the negative classes)
You can see how the -ve classes are beginning to create a nuisance value when calculating the loss. The voice of the +ve samples (which may be all that we care about) is getting drowned out. What do we do? We can't use categorical CE (the version where only +ve samples are considered in calculation). This is because, we are forced to break up the probability distributions into multiple binary probability distributions because otherwise it would not be a probability distribution in the first place. Once we break it into multiple binary probability distributions, we have no choice but to use binary CE and this of course gives weightage to -ve classes.
One option is to drown the voice of the -ve classes by a multiplier. So we multiply all -ve losses by a value gamma where gamma < 1. Say in above case, gamma can be .0001. Now the loss comes to:
= 0.44 (for the +ve classes) + 0.105 (for the negative classes)
The nuisance value has come down. 2 years back Facebook did that and much more in a paper they came up with where they also multiplied the -ve losses by p to the power of x. 'p' is the probability of the output being a +ve and x is a constant>1. This penalized -ve losses even further especially the ones where the model is pretty confident (where 1-p is close to 1). This combined effect of punishing negative class losses combined with harsher punishment for the easily classified cases (which accounted for majority of the -ve cases) worked beautifully for Facebook and they called it focal loss.
So in response to OP's question of whether binary CE makes any sense at all in his case, the answer is - it depends. In 99% of the cases the conventional thumb rules work but there could be occasions when these rules could be bent or even broken to suit the problem at hand.
For a more in-depth treatment, you can refer to: https://towardsdatascience.com/cross-entropy-classification-losses-no-math-few-stories-lots-of-intuition-d56f8c7f06b0
The binary_crossentropy(y_target, y_predict) doesn't need to apply to binary classification problem.
In the source code of binary_crossentropy(), the nn.sigmoid_cross_entropy_with_logits(labels=target, logits=output) of tensorflow was actually used.
And, in the documentation, it says that:
Measures the probability error in discrete classification tasks in which each class is independent and not mutually exclusive. For instance, one could perform multilabel classification where a picture can contain both an elephant and a dog at the same time.
The image on the left shows a standard ROC curve formed by sweeping a single threshold and recording the corresponding True Positive Rate (TPR) and False Positive Rate (FPR).
The image on the right shows my problem setup where there are 3 parameters, and for each, we have only 2 choices. Together, it produces 8 points as depicted on the graph. In practice, I intend to have thousands of possible combinations of 100s of parameters, but the concept remains the same in this down-scaled case.
I intend to find 2 things here:
Determine the optimum parameter(s) for the given data
Provide an overall performance score for all combinations of parameters
In the case of the ROC curve on the left, this is done easily using the following methods:
Optimal parameter: Maximal difference of TPR and FPR with a cost component (I believe it is called the J-statistic?)
Overall performance: Area under the curve (the shaded portion in the graph)
However, for my case in the image on the right, I do not know if the methods I have chosen are the standard principled methods that are normally used.
Optimal parameter set: Same maximal difference of TPR and FPR
Parameter score = TPR - FPR * cost_ratio
Overall performance: Average of all "parameter scores"
I have found a lot of reference material for the ROC curve with a single threshold and while there are other techniques available to determine the performance, the ones mentioned in this question is definitely considered a standard approach. I found no such reading material for the scenario presented on the right.
Bottomline, the question here is two-fold: (1) Provide methods to evaluate the optimal parameter set and overall performance in my problem scenario, (2) Provide reference that claims the suggested methods to be a standard approach for the given scenario.
P.S.: I had first posted this question on the "Cross Validated" forum, but didn't get any responses, in fact, got only 7 views in 15 hours.
I'm going to expand a little on aberger's previous answer on a Grid Search. As with any tuning of a model it's best to optimise hyper-parameters using one portion of the data and evaluate those parameters using another proportion of the data, so GridSearchCV is best for this purpose.
First I'll create some data and split it into training and test
import numpy as np
from sklearn import model_selection, ensemble, metrics
np.random.seed(42)
X = np.random.random((5000, 10))
y = np.random.randint(0, 2, 5000)
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = model_selection.train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.3)
This gives us a classification problem, which is what I think you're describing, though the same would apply to regression problems too.
Now it's helpful to think about what parameters you may want to optimise. A cross-validated grid search is a computational expensive process, so the smaller the search space the quicker it gets done. I will show an example for a RandomForestClassifier because it's my go to model.
clf = ensemble.RandomForestClassifier()
parameters = {'n_estimators': [10, 20, 30],
'max_features': [5, 8, 10],
'max_depth': [None, 10, 20]}
So now I have my base estimator and a list of parameters that I want to optimise. Now I just have to think about how I want to evaluate each of the models that I'm going to build. It seems from your question that you're interested in the ROC AUC, so that's what I'll use for this example. Though you can chose from many default metrics in scikit or even define your own.
gs = model_selection.GridSearchCV(clf, param_grid=parameters,
scoring='roc_auc', cv=5)
gs.fit(X_train, y_train)
This will fit a model for all possible combinations of parameters that I have given it, using 5-fold cross-validation evaluate how well those parameters performed using the ROC AUC. Once that's been fit, we can look at the best parameters and pull out the best performing model.
print gs.best_params_
clf = gs.best_estimator_
Outputs:
{'max_features': 5, 'n_estimators': 30, 'max_depth': 20}
Now at this point you may want to retrain your classifier on all of the training data, as currently it's been trained using cross-validation. Some people prefer not to, but I'm a retrainer!
clf.fit(X_train, y_train)
So now we can evaluate how well the model performs on both our training and test set.
print metrics.classification_report(y_train, clf.predict(X_train))
print metrics.classification_report(y_test, clf.predict(X_test))
Outputs:
precision recall f1-score support
0 1.00 1.00 1.00 1707
1 1.00 1.00 1.00 1793
avg / total 1.00 1.00 1.00 3500
precision recall f1-score support
0 0.51 0.46 0.48 780
1 0.47 0.52 0.50 720
avg / total 0.49 0.49 0.49 1500
We can see that this model has overtrained by the poor score on the test set. But this is not surprising as the data is just random noise! Hopefully when performing these methods on data with a signal you will end up with a well-tuned model.
EDIT
This is one of those situations where 'everyone does it' but there's no real clear reference to say this is the best way to do it. I would suggest looking for an example close to the classification problem that you're working on. For example using Google Scholar to search for "grid search" "SVM" "gene expression"
I feeeeel like we're talking about Grid Search in scikit-learn. It (1), provides methods to evaluate optimal (hyper)parameters and (2), is implemented in a massively popular and well referenced statistical software package.