Unbalanced model, confused as to what steps to take - machine-learning

This is my first data mining project. I am using SAS Enterprise miner to train and test a classifier.
I have 3 files at my disposal,
Training file : 85 input variables and 1 target variable, with 5800+ observations
Prediction file : 85 input variables with 4000 observations
Verification file : 1 variable containing the correct predictions for the second file. Since this is an academic project, this file is here to tell us if we are doing a good job or not.
My problem is that the dataset is unbalanced (95% of 0s and 5% of 1s for the target variable in the training file). So naturally, I tried to re-sample the model using the "sampling node" as described in the following link
Here are the 2 approaches I used, they give slightly different results. But here is the general unsatisfactory result I am getting:
Without resampling : The model predicts less than ten solicited individuals (target variable = 1) over 4000 observations
With the resampling : The model predicts about 1500 solicited individuals over 4000 observations.
I am looking for 100 to 200 solicited individuals to have a model that would be considered acceptable.
Why do you think our predictions are way off this way, and how can we remedy to this situation?
Here is a screen shot of both models

There are some Technics to deal with unbalanced data. One that I remember many years ago was this approach:
say you have 100 observation solicited(minority) that are 5% of all your observations
cluster other none solicited(maturity) class, to 20 groups(each of with have 100 observation of none solicited individuals) with clustering algorithms like KMEAN, MEANSHIF, DBSCAN and...
then for each group of maturity clustered observation, create a dataset with all 100 observation solicited(minority) class. It means that you have 20 group of dataset each of witch is balanced with 100 solicited and 100 none solicited observations
train each balanced group and create a model for each of them
at prediction, predict all 20 models. for example if 15 out of 20 models say it is solicited, it is solicited

Related

Why max_batches independent of the size of the dataset?

I am wondering why the number of images has no influence on the number of iterations when training. Here is an example to to make my question clearer:
Suppose we have 6400 images for a training to recognize 4 classes. Based on AlexeyAB explanations, we keep batch= 64, subdivisions = 16 and write max_batches = 8000 since max_batches is determined by #classes x 2000.
Since we have 6400 images, a complete epoch requires 100 iterations. Therefore this training ends after 80 epochs.
Now, suppose that we have 12800 images. In that case, an epoch needs 200 iterations. Therefore the training ends after 40 epochs.
Since an epoch refers to one cycle through the full training dataset, I'm wondering why we don't increase the number of iterations when our dataset increases, in order to keep the number of epochs constant.
Said differently, I'm asking for a simple explanation as to why the number of epochs seems to be irrelevant to the quality of the training. I feel that it's a consequence of Yolo's construction but I am not knowledgeable enough to understand how.
Why the number of images has no influence on the number of iterations when training?
In darknet yolo, the number of iterations depends on the max_batches parameter in .cfg file. After running for max_batches, the darknet saves the final_weights.
In each epoch, all the data samples are passed through the network, so if you have many images, the training time for one epoch (and iteration) will be higher, you can test that by increasing images in your data.
The sub-division accounts for the number of mini-batches. Let's say, you have 100 images in your dataset. your batch size is 10, sub-division is 2, max_batches is 20.
So, in each iteration, 10 images are passed to the network in two mini-batches (Each having 5 samples), once you have done 20 baches (20*10 data samples), the training will be completed. (The details can be a little different, I'm using a slightly modified darknet by original author pjreddie)
The instructions are updated now. max_batches is equal to classes*2000 but not less than number of training images and not less than 6000. Please find it at this link.

Classification with imbalanced dataset using Multi Layer Perceptrons

I am having a trouble in classification problem.
I have almost 400k number of vectors in training data with two labels, and I'd like to train MLP which classifies data into two classes.
However, the dataset is so imbalanced. 95% of them have label 1, and others have label 0. The accuracy grows as training progresses, and stops after reaching 95%. I guess this is because the network predict the label as 1 for all vectors.
So far, I tried dropping out layers with 0.5 probabilities. But, the result is the same. Is there any ways to improve the accuracy?
I think the best way to deal with unbalanced data is to use weights for your class. For example, you can weight your classes such that sum of weights for each class will be equal.
import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({'x': range(7),
'y': [0] * 2 + [1] * 5})
df['weight'] = df['y'].map(len(df)/2/df['y'].value_counts())
print(df)
print(df.groupby('y')['weight'].agg({'samples': len, 'weight': sum}))
output:
x y weight
0 0 0 1.75
1 1 0 1.75
2 2 1 0.70
3 3 1 0.70
4 4 1 0.70
5 5 1 0.70
6 6 1 0.70
samples weight
y
0 2.0 3.5
1 5.0 3.5
You could try another classifier on subset of examples. SVMs, may work good with small data, so you can take let's say 10k examples only, with 5/1 proportion in classes.
You could also oversample small class somehow and under-sample the another.
You can also simply weight your classes.
Think also about proper metric. It's good that you noticed that the output you have predicts only one label. It is, however, not easily seen using accuracy.
Some nice ideas about unbalanced dataset here:
https://machinelearningmastery.com/tactics-to-combat-imbalanced-classes-in-your-machine-learning-dataset/
Remember not to change your test set.
That's a common situation: the network learns a constant and can't get out of this local minimum.
When the data is very unbalanced, like in your case, one possible solution is a weighted cross entropy loss function. For instance, in tensorflow, apply a built-in tf.nn.weighted_cross_entropy_with_logits function. There is also a good discussion of this idea in this post.
But I should say that getting more data to balance both classes (if that's possible) will always help.

LibSVM - Multi class classification with unbalanced data

I tried to play with libsvm and 3D descriptors in order to perform object recognition. So far I have 7 categories of objects and for each category I have its number of objects (and its pourcentage) :
Category 1. 492 (14%)
Category 2. 574 (16%)
Category 3. 738 (21%)
Category4. 164 (5%)
Category5. 369 (10%)
Category6. 123 (3%)
Category7. 1025 (30%)
So I have in total 3585 objects.
I have followed the practical guide of libsvm.
Here for reminder :
A. Scaling the training and the testing
B. Cross validation
C. Training
D. Testing
I separated my data into training and testing.
By doing a 5 cross validation process, I was able to determine the good C and Gamma.
However I obtained poor results (CV is about 30-40 and my accuracy is about 50%).
Then, I was thinking about my data and saw that I have some unbalanced data (categories 4 and 6 for example). I discovered that on libSVM there is an option about weight. That's why I would like now to set up the good weights.
So far I'm doing this :
svm-train -c cValue -g gValue -w1 1 -w2 1 -w3 1 -w4 2 -w5 1 -w6 2 -w7 1
However the results is the same. I'm sure that It's not the good way to do it and that's why I ask you some helps.
I saw some topics on the subject but they were related to binary classification and not multiclass classification.
I know that libSVM is doing "one against one" (so a binary classifier) but I don't know to handle that when I have multiple class.
Could you please help me ?
Thank you in advance for your help.
I've met the same problem before. I also tried to give them different weight, which didn't work.
I recommend you to train with a subset of the dataset.
Try to use approximately equal number of different class samples. You can use all category 4 and 6 samples, and then pick up about 150 samples for every other categories.
I used this method and the accuracy did improve. Hope this will help you!

Torch7 using weights with unbalanced training sets

I am using a CrossEntropyCriterion with my convnet. I have 150 classes and the number of training files per class is very unbalanced (5 to 2000 files). According to the documentation, I can compensate for this using weights:
criterion = nn.CrossEntropyCriterion([weights])
"If provided, the optional argument weights should be a 1D Tensor assigning weight to each of the classes. This is particularly useful when you have an unbalanced training set."
What format should the weights be in? Eg: number training files in class n / total number of training files.
I assume you want to balance your training in this meaning, that small class becomes more important. In general there are infinitely many possible weightings leading to various results. One of the simpliest ones, which simply assumes that each class should be equally important (thus efficiently you drop the empirical prior) is to put weight proportional to
1 / # samples_in_class
for example
weight_of_class_y = # all_samples / # samples_in_y
This way if you have 5:2000 dissproportion, the smaller class becomes 400 times more important for the model.

why normalizing feature values doesn't change the training output much?

I have 3113 training examples, over a dense feature vector of size 78. The magnitude of features is different: some around 20, some 200K. For example, here is one of the training examples, in vowpal-wabbit input format.
0.050000 1 '2006-07-10_00:00:00_0.050000| F0:9.670000 F1:0.130000 F2:0.320000 F3:0.570000 F4:9.837000 F5:9.593000 F6:9.238150 F7:9.646667 F8:9.631333 F9:8.338904 F10:9.748000 F11:10.227667 F12:10.253667 F13:9.800000 F14:0.010000 F15:0.030000 F16:-0.270000 F17:10.015000 F18:9.726000 F19:9.367100 F20:9.800000 F21:9.792667 F22:8.457452 F23:9.972000 F24:10.394833 F25:10.412667 F26:9.600000 F27:0.090000 F28:0.230000 F29:0.370000 F30:9.733000 F31:9.413000 F32:9.095150 F33:9.586667 F34:9.466000 F35:8.216658 F36:9.682000 F37:10.048333 F38:10.072000 F39:9.780000 F40:0.020000 F41:-0.060000 F42:-0.560000 F43:9.898000 F44:9.537500 F45:9.213700 F46:9.740000 F47:9.628000 F48:8.327233 F49:9.924000 F50:10.216333 F51:10.226667 F52:127925000.000000 F53:-15198000.000000 F54:-72286000.000000 F55:-196161000.000000 F56:143342800.000000 F57:148948500.000000 F58:118894335.000000 F59:119027666.666667 F60:181170133.333333 F61:89209167.123288 F62:141400600.000000 F63:241658716.666667 F64:199031688.888889 F65:132549.000000 F66:-16597.000000 F67:-77416.000000 F68:-205999.000000 F69:144690.000000 F70:155022.850000 F71:122618.450000 F72:123340.666667 F73:187013.300000 F74:99751.769863 F75:144013.200000 F76:237918.433333 F77:195173.377778
The training result was not good, so I thought I would normalize the features to make them in the same magnitude. I calculated mean and standard deviation for each of the features across all examples, then do newValue = (oldValue - mean) / stddev, so that their new mean and stddev are all 1. For the same example, here is the feature values after normalization:
0.050000 1 '2006-07-10_00:00:00_0.050000| F0:-0.660690 F1:0.226462 F2:0.383638 F3:0.398393 F4:-0.644898 F5:-0.670712 F6:-0.758233 F7:-0.663447 F8:-0.667865 F9:-0.960165 F10:-0.653406 F11:-0.610559 F12:-0.612965 F13:-0.659234 F14:0.027834 F15:0.038049 F16:-0.201668 F17:-0.638971 F18:-0.668556 F19:-0.754856 F20:-0.659535 F21:-0.663001 F22:-0.953793 F23:-0.642736 F24:-0.606725 F25:-0.609946 F26:-0.657141 F27:0.173106 F28:0.310076 F29:0.295814 F30:-0.644357 F31:-0.678860 F32:-0.764422 F33:-0.658869 F34:-0.674367 F35:-0.968679 F36:-0.649145 F37:-0.616868 F38:-0.619564 F39:-0.649498 F40:0.041261 F41:-0.066987 F42:-0.355693 F43:-0.638604 F44:-0.676379 F45:-0.761250 F46:-0.653962 F47:-0.668194 F48:-0.962591 F49:-0.635441 F50:-0.611600 F51:-0.615670 F52:-0.593324 F53:-0.030322 F54:-0.095290 F55:-0.139602 F56:-0.652741 F57:-0.675629 F58:-0.851058 F59:-0.642028 F60:-0.648002 F61:-0.952896 F62:-0.629172 F63:-0.592340 F64:-0.682273 F65:-0.470121 F66:-0.045396 F67:-0.128265 F68:-0.185295 F69:-0.510251 F70:-0.515335 F71:-0.687727 F72:-0.512749 F73:-0.471032 F74:-0.789335 F75:-0.491188 F76:-0.400105 F77:-0.505242
However, this yields basically the same testing result (if not exactly the same, since I shuffle the examples before each training).
Wondering why there is no change in the result?
Here is my training and testing commands:
rm -f cache
cat input.feat | vw -f model --passes 20 --cache_file cache
cat input.feat | vw -i model -t -p predictions --invert_hash readable_model
(Yes, I'm testing on the training data right now since I have only very few data examples to train on.)
More context:
Some of the features are "tier 2" - they were derived by manipulating or doing cross products on "tier 1" features (e.g. moving average, 1-3 order of derivatives, etc). If I normalize the tier 1 features before calculating the tier 2 features, it would actually improve the model significantly.
So I'm puzzled as why normalizing tier 1 features (before generating tier 2 features) helps a lot, while normalizing all features (after generating tier 2 features) doesn't help at all?
BTW, since I'm training a regressor, I'm using SSE as the metrics to judge the quality of the model.
vw normalizes feature values for scale as it goes, by default.
This is part of the online algorithm. It is done gradually during runtime.
In fact it does more than that, vw enhanced SGD algorithm also keeps separate learning rates (per feature) so rarer feature learning rates don't decay as fast as common ones (--adaptive). Finally there's an importance aware update, controlled by a 3rd option (--invariant).
The 3 separate SGD enhancement options (which are all turned on by default) are:
--adaptive
--invariant
--normalized
The last option is the one that adjust values for scale (discounts large values vs small). You may disable all these SGD enhancements by using the option --sgd. You may also partially enable any subset by explicitly specifying it.
All in all you have 2^3 = 8 SGD option combinations you can use.
The Possible reason is that whatever Training algorithm that you used to get the result already did the normalization process for you!.In fact many algorithms do the normalization process before working on it.Hope it helps you :)

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