I know using 'timeslice' in trainControl allows for time series cross validation, but it seems as if it progresses through the training set one sample at a time.
Is there any way to perform the same cross validation strategy while specifying the number of splits for 'timeslice'?
I recommend you to check createDataPartition() also in caret R package.
Among the user defined resampling methods for trainControl(), the function parameter method = 'timeslice' will allow you to use the arguments that should be given to the time series version of createDataPartition(), namely createTimeSlices().
You can set the number of consecutive values in each training set sample (horizon); if a fixedWindow should be used for the rolling-origin time series cross validation procedure; and how many resamples (in this case, time observations) to skip. Then, the number of splits to be specified it can be set by using both horizon and skip parameters.
Related
I am reading Hands on Machine Learning book and author talks about random seed during train and test split, and at one point of time, the author says over the period Machine will see your whole dataset.
Author is using following function for dividing Tran and Test split,
def split_train_test(data, test_ratio):
shuffled_indices = np.random.permutation(len(data))
test_set_size = int(len(data) * test_ratio)
test_indices = shuffled_indices[:test_set_size]
train_indices = shuffled_indices[test_set_size:]
return data.iloc[train_indices], data.iloc[test_indices]
Usage of the function like this:
>>>train_set, test_set = split_train_test(housing, 0.2)
>>> len(train_set)
16512
>>> len(test_set)
4128
Well, this works, but it is not perfect: if you run the program again, it will generate a different test set! Over time, you (or your Machine Learning algorithms) will get to see the whole dataset, which is what you want to avoid.
Sachin Rastogi: Why and how will this impact my model performance? I understand that my model accuracy will vary on each run as Train set will always be different. How my model will see the whole dataset over a time ?
The author is also providing a few solutions,
One solution is to save the test set on the first run and then load it in subsequent runs. Another option is to set the random number generator’s seed (e.g., np.random.seed(42)) before calling np.random.permutation(), so that it always generates the same shuffled indices.
But both these solutions will break next time you fetch an updated dataset. A common solution is to use each instance’s identifier to decide whether or not it should go in the test set (assuming instances have a unique and immutable identifier).
Sachin Rastogi: Will it be a good train/test division? I think No, Train and Test should contain elements from across dataset to avoid any bias from the Train set.
The author is giving an example,
You could compute a hash of each instance’s identifier and put that instance in the test set if the hash is lower or equal to 20% of the maximum hash value. This ensures that the test set will remain consistent across multiple runs, even if you refresh the dataset.
The new test set will contain 20% of the new instances, but it will not contain any instance that was previously in the training set.
Sachin Rastogi: I am not able to understand this solution. Could you please help?
For me, these are the answers:
The point here is that you should better put aside part of your data (which will constitute your test set) before training the model. Indeed, what you want to achieve is to be able to generalize well on unseen examples. By running the code that you have shown, you'll get different test sets through time; in other words, you'll always train your model on different subsets of your data (and possibly on data that you've previously marked as test data). This in turn will affect training and - going to the limit - there will be nothing to generalize to.
This will be indeed a solution satisfying the previous requirement (of having a stable test set) provided that new data are not added.
As said in the comments to your question, by hashing each instance's identifier you can be sure that old instances always get assigned to the same subsets.
Instances that were put in the training set before the update of the dataset will remain there (as their hash value won't change - and so their left-most bit - and it will remain higher than 0.2*max_hash_value);
Instances that were put in the test set before the update of the dataset will remain there (as their hash value won't change and it will remain lower than 0.2*max_hash_value).
The updated test set will contain 20% of the new instances and all of the instances associated to the old test set, letting it remain stable.
I would also suggest to see here for an explanation from the author: https://github.com/ageron/handson-ml/issues/71.
I've been looking into Google Dataprep as an ETL solution to perform some basic data transformation before feeding it to a machine learning platform. I'm wondering if it's possible to use the Dataprep/Dataflow tools to split a dataset into train, test, and validation sets. Ideally I'm looking to do a stratified split on a target column, but for starters I'd settle for a simple uniform random split by percent of whole (e.g. 50% train, 30% validation, 20% test).
So far I haven't been able to find anything about whether this is even possible with Dataprep, so I'm wondering if anyone knows definitively if this is possible and, if so, how to accomplish it.
EDIT 1
Thanks #jakub-janoštík for getting me going in the right direction! I modified your answer slightly and came up with the following (in wrangle form):
case condition: customConditions cases: [false,0] default: rand() as: 'split_condition'
case condition: customConditions cases: [split_condition < 0.6,'train'],[split_condition >= 0.8,'test'] default: 'validation' as: 'dataset_type'
drop col: split_condition action: Drop
By assigning random values in a separate step, I got the guaranteed percentage split I was looking for. The flow ended up looking like this:
Image: final flow diagram with dataset splitting
EDIT 2
I just figured out how to do the stratified split too, so I thought I'd add it in case anyone else is trying to do this. Here's the rough steps:
Split your dataset based on whatever subpopulations you're targeting (e.g. target0, target1)
For each subpopulation, do the uniform random split described above (e.g. now you have target0-train, target0-test, target0-validation, target1-train, etc.)
For each set type (i.e. train, test, validation):
Create a new recipe from one of the sets
Edit the recipe, and use the Union transform to merge it with other datasets of the same type (e.g. target0-train union with target1-train). The union button is in the middle of the toolbar on the Edit Recipe page.
I hope that's helpful to someone!
I'm looking at the same problem and I was able to partially solve this using "case on custom condition" and "Random" functions. What I do is that I create new column named target and apply following logic:
After applying this you'll have new column with these 3 new labels and you can generate 3 new datasets by applying row filtering rules based on those values. Thing to keep in mind is that each time you'll run the job you'll get different validation set. So if you want to keep it fixed you need to use the dataset created in first run as input for future runs (and randomise only train and test sets).
If you need more control on the distribution of labels in your datasets there is ROWNUMBER window function that could potentially be used. But I haven't been able to make it work yet.
I am given a financial time series that is characterized by a bunch of structural breaks, i.e. the series isn't moving (literally at all), but at some points in time the series jumps up or down. Then it stays at this level for a while until the series jumps again. So the time series basically looks like a step function.
My assumption is that these breaks come from some particular exogenous variables that are in the form of dummies. So if a particular exogenous variable takes on the value 1, (I assume) it is very likely that the series jumps.
My question is how I could model this particular time series (in a uni- or multivariate sense). I guess that standard AR(MA)-models are inappropriate. I was thinking about creating two binary variables that take on the value 1 if there's an upward (downward) break and 0 otherwise. Then I would run a dynamic probit model to test the probabilities that the exogenous variables trigger a break. What do you think about this idea? Or would you have other suggestions? Please note that I don't wanna test for structural breaks but rather formulate a time series model.
Did you try ARIMAX, TAR, or STAR models?
You said that you have time series data and you think this series is influanced by some exogeneous shocks. I think you need to include exogeneous variable in your time series analysis thats where ARIMAX comes. This modela allows you to include exogeneous variable in ARIMA model.
You also said that there are(is) structural breaks. Try Treshold AutoRegressive or Smoothed Treshold AutoRegressive. I hope this helps to find more materials about that models. Here is one click here
I am trying to understand Q-Learning,
My current algorithm operates as follows:
1. A lookup table is maintained that maps a state to information about its immediate reward and utility for each action available.
2. At each state, check to see if it is contained in the lookup table and initialise it if not (With a default utility of 0).
3. Choose an action to take with a probability of:
(*ϵ* = 0>ϵ>1 - probability of taking a random action)
1-ϵ = Choosing the state-action pair with the highest utility.
ϵ = Choosing a random move.
ϵ decreases over time.
4. Update the current state's utility based on:
Q(st, at) += a[rt+1, + d.max(Q(st+1, a)) - Q(st,at)]
I am currently playing my agent against a simple heuristic player, who always takes the move that will give it the best immediate reward.
The results - The results are very poor, even after a couple hundred games, the Q-Learning agent is losing a lot more than it is winning. Furthermore, the change in win-rate is almost non-existent, especially after reaching a couple hundred games.
Am I missing something? I have implemented a couple agents:
(Rote-Learning, TD(0), TD(Lambda), Q-Learning)
But they all seem to be yielding similar, disappointing, results.
There are on the order of 10²⁰ different states in checkers, and you need to play a whole game for every update, so it will be a very, very long time until you get meaningful action values this way. Generally, you'd want a simplified state representation, like a neural network, to solve this kind of problem using reinforcement learning.
Also, a couple of caveats:
Ideally, you should update 1 value per game, because the moves in a single game are highly correlated.
You should initialize action values to small random values to avoid large policy changes from small Q updates.
I'm trying to create a model with a training dataset and want to label the records in a test data set.
All tutorials or help I find online has information on only using cross validation with one data set, i.e., training dataset. I couldn't find how to use test data. I tried to apply the result model on to the test set. But the test set seems to give different no. of attributes than training set after pre-processing. This is a text classification problem.
At the end I get some output like this
18.03.2013 01:47:00 Results of ResultWriter 'Write as Text (2)' [1]:
18.03.2013 01:47:00 SimpleExampleSet:
5275 examples,
366 regular attributes,
special attributes = {
confidence_1 = #367: confidence(1) (real/single_value)
confidence_5 = #368: confidence(5) (real/single_value)
confidence_2 = #369: confidence(2) (real/single_value)
confidence_4 = #370: confidence(4) (real/single_value)
prediction = #366: prediction(label) (nominal/single_value)/values=[1, 5, 2, 4]
}
But what I wanted is all my examples to be labelled.
It seems that my test data and training data have different no. of attributes, I see many of following in the logs.
Mar 18, 2013 1:46:41 AM WARNING: Kernel Model: The given example set does not contain a regular attribute with name 'wireless'. This might cause problems for some models depending on this particular attribute.
But how do we solve such problem in text classification as we cannot know no. of and name of attributes before hand.
Can some one please throw some pointers.
You probably use a Process Documents operator to preprocess both training and test set. Here it is important that both these operators are setup identically. To "synchronize" the wordlist, i.e. consider the same set of words in both of them, you have to connect the wordlist (wor) output of the Process Documents operator used for training to the corresponding input port of the Process Documents operator used for preprocessing the test set.