I am working on a basketball model that predicts how well an NBA player will play in their next game, based on how well they have performed in all previous games of the season. There are roughly 10 players per NBA team, and each of 30 teams has played about 25 games this season, so my dataframe has about 10*30*25 = 7,500 observations at this point. I run my model each day, predicting how well players will play in the next day - therefore, for tomorrow I will make roughly 10*30 = 300 predictions.
My question is this - currently i have about 50 columns / features / x-variables that I am using for prediction, all of which are numeric variables (average number of points scored, average number of rebounds, etc.). However, I think it may help my model to know which player each row corresponds to. That is, I want to pass a 51st column, a factor variable including the players names. I read online that GBM can deal with factor variables as it will "dummify" them internally, however I am worried that "dummifying" 300 different players will not perform well. Will passing a factor variable with all of the player names backfire and ultimately hurt my model, due to the large number of dummy variables it will create internally, or is this okay?
my_df
PLAYER FG FGA X3P X3PA FT FTA
1042 Andre Drummond 6 16 0 0 6 10
17747 Marcus Morris 6 19 1 4 5 6
14861 Kentavious Caldwell-Pope 7 14 4 7 3 3
7976 Ersan Ilyasova 6 12 3 6 1 2
22401 Reggie Jackson 4 10 2 4 5 5
24475 Stanley Johnson 3 10 1 3 0 0
24649 Steve Blake 1 6 1 5 0 0
12489 Jodie Meeks 1 4 0 0 0 0
1955 Aron Baynes 3 5 0 0 0 0
21500 Paul Millsap 7 15 2 6 3 4
I have used factor variables with a large number of levels in gbm and the biggest problem you will face with that is that your computation time will significantly increase.(which may not be a problem for your case as the dataset you are using is small) Also, when you plot variable importance
gbm_model <- train(A0 ~ .,
data = training,
method="gbm",
distribution = "bernoulli",
metric="ROC",
maximise=TRUE,
tuneGrid=grid,
train.fraction = 0.6,
trControl=ctrl)
ggplot(varImp(gbm_model, scale=TRUE))
each factor level shows up separately, which can make it pretty confusing to asses importance.
Apart from this, you mention that you have 7,500 observations, 50 features and 300 different players. If you consider adding player name as a variable that would mean approx 25 obs per player, which is a pretty small sample to work with and may mean that your model wont generalize well. So my personal suggestion would be to abstain from doing so.
However, I see the point of why you would want to do so and would suggest that you try clustering the players (using player-specific criteria or maybe even some features you already have) and then use the cluster a player belongs to as a variable.
Hope this helps! :)
I have the same proble with function gbm, for instance i added a randomn factor with 100 levels and it appears as the most influent variable.
Related
I am working on a dataset which has a feature that has multiple categories for a single example.
The feature looks like this:-
Feature
0 [Category1, Category2, Category2, Category4, Category5]
1 [Category11, Category20, Category133]
2 [Category2, Category9]
3 [Category1000, Category1200, Category2000]
4 [Category12]
The problem is similar to the this question posted:- Encode categorical features with multiple categories per example - sklearn
Now, I want to vectorize this feature. One solution is to use MultiLabelBinarizer as suggested in the answer of the above similar question. But, there are around 2000 categories, which results into a sparse and very high dimentional encoded data.
Is there any other encoding that can be used? Or any possible solution for this problem. Thanks.
Given an incredibly sparse array one could use a dimensionality reduction technique such as PCA (Principal component analysis) to reduce the feature space to the top k features that best describe the variance.
Assuming the MultiLabelBinarizered 2000 features = X
from sklearn.decomposition import PCA
k = 5
model = PCA(n_components = k, random_state = 666)
model.fit(X)
Components = model.predict(X)
And then you can use the top K components as a smaller dimensional feature space that can explain a large portion of the variance for the original feature space.
If you want to understand how well the new smaller feature space describes the variance you could use the following command
model.explained_variance_
In many cases when I encountered the problem of too many features being generated from a column with many categories, I opted for binary encoding and it worked out fine most of the times and hence is worth a shot for you perhaps.
Imagine you have 9 features, and you mark them from 1 to 9 and now binary encode them, you will get:
cat 1 - 0 0 0 1
cat 2 - 0 0 1 0
cat 3 - 0 0 1 1
cat 4 - 0 1 0 0
cat 5 - 0 1 0 1
cat 6 - 0 1 1 0
cat 7 - 0 1 1 1
cat 8 - 1 0 0 0
cat 9 - 1 0 0 1
This is the basic intuition behind Binary Encoder.
PS: Given that 2 power 11 is 2048 and you may have 2000 categories or so, you can reduce your categories to 11 feature columns instead of many (for example, 1999 in the case of one-hot)!
I also encountered these same problems but I solved using Countvectorizer from sklearn.feature_extraction.text just by giving binary=True, i.e CounterVectorizer(binary=True)
I am looking for any methodology to assign a risk score to an individual based on certain events. I am looking to have a 0-100 scale with an exponential assignment. For example, for one event a day the score may rise to 25, for 2 it may rise to 50-60 and for 3-4 events a day the score for the day would be 100.
I tried to Google it but since I am not aware of the right terminology, I am landing up on random topics. :(
Is there any mathematical terminology for this kind of scoring system? what are the most common methods you might know?
P.S.: Expert/experience data scientist advice highly appreciated ;)
I would start by writing some qualifications:
0 events trigger a score of 0.
Non edge event count observations are where the score – 100-threshold would live.
Any score after the threshold will be 100.
If so, here's a (very) simplified example:
Stage Data:
userid <- c("a1","a2","a3","a4","a11","a12","a13","a14","u2","wtf42","ub40","foo","bar","baz","blue","bop","bob","boop","beep","mee","r")
events <- c(0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,2,3,2,3,6,122,13,1)
df1 <- data.frame(userid,events)
Optional: Normalize events to be in (1,2].
This might be helpful for logarithmic properties. (Otherwise, given the assumed function, score=events^exp, as in this example, 1 event will always yield a score of 1) This will allow you to control sensitivity, but it must be done right as we are dealing with exponents and logarithms. I am not using normalization in the example:
normevents <- (events-mean(events))/((max(events)-min(events))*2)+1.5
Set the quantile threshold for max score:
MaxScoreThreshold <- 0.25
Get the non edge quintiles of the events distribution:
qts <- quantile(events[events>min(events) & events<max(events)], c(seq(from=0, to=100,by=5)/100))
Find the Events quantity that give a score of 100 using the set threshold.
MaxScoreEvents <- quantile(qts,MaxScoreThreshold)
Find the exponent of your exponential function
Given that:
Score = events ^ exponent
events is a Natural number - integer >0: We took care of it by
omitting the edges)
exponent > 1
Exponent Calculation:
exponent <- log(100)/log(MaxScoreEvents)
Generate the scores:
df1$Score <- apply(as.matrix(events^exponent),1,FUN = function(x) {
if (x > 100) {
result <- 100
}
else if (x < 0) {
result <- 0
}
else {
result <- x
}
return(ceiling(result))
})
df1
Resulting Data Frame:
userid events Score
1 a1 0 0
2 a2 0 0
3 a3 0 0
4 a4 0 0
5 a11 0 0
6 a12 0 0
7 a13 0 0
8 a14 0 0
9 u2 0 0
10 wtf42 0 0
11 ub40 0 0
12 foo 0 0
13 bar 1 1
14 baz 2 100
15 blue 3 100
16 bop 2 100
17 bob 3 100
18 boop 6 100
19 beep 122 100
20 mee 13 100
21 r 1 1
Under the assumption that your data is larger and has more event categories, the score won't snap to 100 so quickly, it is also a function of the threshold.
I would rely more on the data to define the parameters, threshold in this case.
If you have prior data as to what users really did whatever it is your score assess you can perform supervised learning, set the threshold # wherever the ratio is over 50% for example. Or If the graph of events to probability of ‘success’ looks like the cumulative probability function of a normal distribution, I’d set threshold # wherever it hits 45 degrees (For the first time).
You could also use logistic regression if you have prior data but instead of a Logit function ingesting the output of regression, use the number as your score. You can normalize it to be within 0-100.
It’s not always easy to write a Data Science question. I made many assumptions as to what you are looking for, hope this is the general direction.
I have a dataset of time series that I use as input to an LSTM-RNN for action anticipation. The time series comprises a time of 5 seconds at 30 fps (i.e. 150 data points), and the data represents the position/movement of facial features.
I sample additional sub-sequences of smaller length from my dataset in order to add redundancy in the dataset and reduce overfitting. In this case I know the starting and ending frame of the sub-sequences.
In order to train the model in batches, all time series need to have the same length, and according to many papers in the literature padding should not affect the performance of the network.
Example:
Original sequence:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Subsequences:
4 5 6 7
8 9 10
2 3 4 5 6
considering that my network is trying to anticipate an action (meaning that as soon as P(action) > threshold as it goes from t = 0 to T = tmax, it will predict that action) will it matter where the padding goes?
Option 1: Zeros go to substitute original values
0 0 0 4 5 6 7 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8 9 10
0 2 3 4 5 6 0 0 0 0
Option 2: all zeros at the end
4 5 6 7 0 0 0 0 0 0
8 9 10 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2 3 4 5 0 0 0 0 0 0
Moreover, some of the time series are missing a number of frames, but it is not known which ones they are - meaning that if we only have 60 frames, we don't know whether they are taken from 0 to 2 seconds, from 1 to 3s, etc. These need to be padded before the subsequences are even taken. What is the best practice for padding in this case?
Thank you in advance.
The most powerful attribute of LSTMs and RNNs in general is that their parameters are shared along the time frames(Parameters recur over time frames) but the parameter sharing relies upon the assumption that the same parameters can be used for different time steps i.e. the relationship between the previous time step and the next time step does not depend on t as explained here in page 388, 2nd paragraph.
In short, padding zeros at the end, theoretically should not change the accuracy of the model. I used the adverb theoretically because at each time step LSTM's decision depends on its cell state among other factors and this cell state is kind of a short summary of the past frames. As far as I understood, that past frames may be missing in your case. I think what you have here is a little trade-off.
I would rather pad zeros at the end because it doesn't completely conflict with the underlying assumption of RNNs and it's more convenient to implement and keep track of.
On the implementation side, I know tensorflow calculates the loss function once you give it the sequences and the actual sequence size of each sample(e.g. for 4 5 6 7 0 0 0 0 0 0 you also need to give it the actual size which is 4 here) assuming you're implementing the option 2. I don't know whether there is an implementation for option 1, though.
Better go for padding zeroes in the beginning, as this paper suggests Effects of padding on LSTMs and CNNs,
Though post padding model peaked it’s efficiency at 6 epochs and started to overfit after that, it’s accuracy is way less than pre-padding.
Check table 1, where the accuracy of pre-padding(padding zeroes in the beginning) is around 80%, but for post-padding(padding zeroes in the end), it is only around 50%
In case you have sequences of variable length, pytorch provides a utility function torch.nn.utils.rnn.pack_padded_sequence. The general workflow with this function is
from torch.nn.utils.rnn import pack_padded_sequence, pad_packed_sequence
embedding = nn.Embedding(4, 5)
rnn = nn.GRU(5, 5)
sequences = torch.tensor([[1,2,0], [3,0,0], [2,1,3]])
lens = [2, 1, 3] # indicating the actual length of each sequence
embeddings = embedding(sequences)
packed_seq = pack_padded_sequence(embeddings, lens, batch_first=True, enforce_sorted=False)
e, hn = rnn(packed_seq)
One can collect the embedding of each token by
e = pad_packed_sequence(e, batch_first=True)
Using this function is better than padding by yourself, because torch will limit RNN to only inspecting the actual sequence and stop before the padded token.
I do regression analysis with multiple features. Number of features is 20-23. For now, I check each feature correlation with output variable. Some features show correlation coefficient close to 1 or -1 (highly correlated). Some features show correlation coefficient near 0. My question is: do I have to remove this feature if it has close to 0 correlation coefficient? Or I can keep it and the only problem is that this feature will no make some noticeable effect to regression model or will have faint affect on it. Or removing that kind of features is obligatory?
In short
High (absolute) correlation between a feature and output implies that this feature should be valuable as predictor
Lack of correlation between feature and output implies nothing
More details
Pair-wise correlation only shows you how one thing affects the other, it says completely nothing about how good is this feature connected with others. So if your model is not trivial then you should not drop variables because they are not correlated with output). I will give you the example which should show you why.
Consider following sample, we have 2 features (X, Y), and one output value (Z, say red is 1, black is 0)
X Y Z
1 1 1
1 2 0
1 3 0
2 1 0
2 2 1
2 3 0
3 1 0
3 2 0
3 3 1
Let us compute the correlations:
CORREL(X, Z) = 0
CORREL(Y, Z) = 0
So... we should drop all values? One of them? If we drop any variable - our prolem becomes completely impossible to model! "magic" lies in the fact that there is actually a "hidden" relation in the data.
|X-Y|
0
1
2
1
0
1
2
1
0
And
CORREL(|X-Y|, Z) = -0.8528028654
Now this is a good predictor!
You can actually get a perfect regressor (interpolator) through
Z = 1 - sign(|X-Y|)
I have found that during training my model vw shows very big (much more than my features count ) feature number count in it's log.
I have tried to reproduce it using some small example:
simple.test:
-1 | 1 2 3
1 | 3 4 5
then "vw simple.test" command says that it have used 8 features. +one feature is constant but what are the other ? And in my real exmaple difference between my features and features used in wv is abot x10 more.
....
Num weight bits = 18
learning rate = 0.5
initial_t = 0
power_t = 0.5
using no cache
Reading datafile = t
num sources = 1
average since example example current current current
loss last counter weight label predict features
finished run
number of examples = 2
weighted example sum = 2
weighted label sum = 3
average loss = 1.9179
best constant = 1.5
total feature number = 8 !!!!
total feature number displays a sum of feature counts from all observed examples. So it's 2*(3+1 constant)=8 in your case. The number of features in current example is displayed in current features column. Note that only 2^Nth example is printed on screen by default. In general observations can have unequal number of features.