Whether we need to scale(by zscale or by standardization) the data while building decision tree or random forests? As we know that we need to scale the data for KNN, K-means clustering and PCA. As these algorithms are based on distance calculations. What about scaling in Linear, Logistic, NavieBayes, Decision trees and Random forests?
We do data scaling, when we are seeking for some relation between data point. In ANN and other data mining approaches we need to normalize the inputs, otherwise network will be ill-conditioned. We do the scaling to reach a linear, more robust relationship. Moreover, data scaling can also help you a lot to overcome outliers in the data. In short, data scaling is highly recommended in each type of machine learning algorithms.
You can do normalization or standardization in order to scale your data.
[Notice that do not confuse normalization with standardization (e.g. Z-score)]
Hope that helps.
Whether we need to scale(by zscale or by standardization) the data while building decision tree or random forests?
A: Decision trees and Random Forests are immune to the feature magnitude and hence its not required.
As we know that we need to scale the data for KNN, K-means clustering and PCA. As these algorithms are based on distance calculations. What about scaling in Linear, Logistic, NavieBayes, Decision trees and Random forests?
A: In general, scaling is not an absolute requirement, its a recommendation, primarily for similarity based algorithms. For many algorithms, you may need to consider data transformation prior to normalization.There's also various normalization techniques you can try out, and there's no one size fits best for all problems. The main reason for normalization for error based algorithms such as linear, logistic regression, neural networks is faster convergence to the global minimum due to the better initialization of weights.Information based algorithms (Decision Trees, Random Forests) and probability based algorithms (Naive Bayes, Bayesian Networks) don't require normalization either.
Scaling is better to be done in general, because if all the features are on the same scale, the Gradient Descent Algorithm converges faster to the global or optimum local minimum.
We can speed up gradient descent by having each of our input values in roughly the same range. This is because our model parameters, will descend quickly on small ranges and slowly on large ranges, and so will oscillate inefficiently down to the optimum when the variables are very uneven.
Why isn't the 0-1 loss function (being the most obvious and informative from the standpoint of conceptual binary classification models) used in the perceptron or Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms?
In the case of perceptrons, most of the time they are trained using gradient descent (or something similar) and the 0-1 loss function is flat so it doesn't converge well (not to mention that it's not differentiable at 0)
SVM is based on solving an optimization problem that maximize the margin between classes. So in this context a convex loss function is preferable so we can use several general convex optimization methods. The 0-1 loss function is not convex so it is not very useful either. Note that this is due the current state of art, but if a new method that optimize non convex functions efficiently is discovered then that would change.
Edit: typo
I want to build a machine learning model to regression on continuous output given binary valued features(0,1). the dimension of my problem is around 200.
which of the flowing methods seems suitable for this kind of problem ?
SVR with different Kernels
Regression random forest
MARS
Gradient boosting with regression tree
Kernel regression (Nadya-Watson Kernel regression)
LSR and LARS
Stochastic gradient boosting
Intuitively speaking, anything requiring the calculation of a gradient is going to struggle on binary values. From your list, SVR and Forests would be the first place I'd look for a benchmark solution.
You can also look at expectation maximization for Bernoully mixture models.
It deals with binary input sets. You can find theory in book:
Christopher M. Bishop. "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning".
This is a question about linear regression with ngrams, using Tf-IDF (term frequency - inverse document frequency). To do this, I am using numpy sparse matrices and sklearn for linear regression.
I have 53 cases and over 6000 features when using unigrams. The predictions are based on cross validation using LeaveOneOut.
When I create a tf-idf sparse matrix of only unigram scores, I get slightly better predictions than when I create a tf-idf sparse matrix of unigram+bigram scores. The more columns I add to the matrix (columns for trigram, quadgram, quintgrams, etc.), the less accurate the regression prediction.
Is this common? How is this possible? I would have thought that the more features, the better.
It's not common for bigrams to perform worse than unigrams, but there are situations where it may happen. In particular, adding extra features may lead to overfitting. Tf-idf is unlikely to alleviate this, as longer n-grams will be rarer, leading to higher idf values.
I'm not sure what kind of variable you're trying to predict, and I've never done regression on text, but here's some comparable results from literature to get you thinking:
In random text generation with small (but non-trivial) training sets, 7-grams tend to reconstruct the input text almost verbatim, i.e. cause complete overfit, while trigrams are more likely to generate "new" but still somewhat grammatical/recognizable text (see Jurafsky & Martin; can't remember which chapter and I don't have my copy handy).
In classification-style NLP tasks performed with kernel machines, quadratic kernels tend to fare better than cubic ones because the latter often overfit on the training set. Note that unigram+bigram features can be thought of as a subset of the quadratic kernel's feature space, and {1,2,3}-grams of that of the cubic kernel.
Exactly what is happening depends on your training set; it might simply be too small.
As larsmans said, adding more variables / features makes it easier for the model to overfit hence lose in test accuracy. In the master branch of scikit-learn there is now a min_df parameter to cut-off any feature with less than that number of occurrences. Hence min_df==2 to min_df==5 might help you get rid of spurious bi-grams.
Alternatively you can use L1 or L1 + L2 penalized linear regression (or classification) using either the following classes:
sklearn.linear_model.Lasso (regression)
sklearn.linear_model.ElasticNet (regression)
sklearn.linear_model.SGDRegressor (regression) with penalty == 'elastic_net' or 'l1'
sklearn.linear_model.SGDClassifier (classification) with penalty == 'elastic_net' or 'l1'
This will make it possible to ignore spurious features and lead to a sparse model with many zero weights for noisy features. Grid Searching the regularization parameters will be very important though.
You can also try univariate feature selection such as done the text classification example of scikit-learn (check the SelectKBest and chi2 utilities.
I know SVMs are supposedly 'ANN killers' in that they automatically select representation complexity and find a global optimum (see here for some SVM praising quotes).
But here is where I'm unclear -- do all of these claims of superiority hold for just the case of a 2 class decision problem or do they go further? (I assume they hold for non-linearly separable classes or else no-one would care)
So a sample of some of the cases I'd like to be cleared up:
Are SVMs better than ANNs with many classes?
in an online setting?
What about in a semi-supervised case like reinforcement learning?
Is there a better unsupervised version of SVMs?
I don't expect someone to answer all of these lil' subquestions, but rather to give some general bounds for when SVMs are better than the common ANN equivalents (e.g. FFBP, recurrent BP, Boltzmann machines, SOMs, etc.) in practice, and preferably, in theory as well.
Are SVMs better than ANN with many classes? You are probably referring to the fact that SVMs are in essence, either either one-class or two-class classifiers. Indeed they are and there's no way to modify a SVM algorithm to classify more than two classes.
The fundamental feature of a SVM is the separating maximum-margin hyperplane whose position is determined by maximizing its distance from the support vectors. And yet SVMs are routinely used for multi-class classification, which is accomplished with a processing wrapper around multiple SVM classifiers that work in a "one against many" pattern--i.e., the training data is shown to the first SVM which classifies those instances as "Class I" or "not Class I". The data in the second class, is then shown to a second SVM which classifies this data as "Class II" or "not Class II", and so on. In practice, this works quite well. So as you would expect, the superior resolution of SVMs compared to other classifiers is not limited to two-class data.
As far as i can tell, the studies reported in the literature confirm this, e.g., In the provocatively titled paper Sex with Support Vector Machines substantially better resolution for sex identification (Male/Female) in 12-square pixel images, was reported for SVM compared with that of a group of traditional linear classifiers; SVM also outperformed RBF NN, as well as large ensemble RBF NN). But there seem to be plenty of similar evidence for the superior performance of SVM in multi-class problems: e.g., SVM outperformed NN in protein-fold recognition, and in time-series forecasting.
My impression from reading this literature over the past decade or so, is that the majority of the carefully designed studies--by persons skilled at configuring and using both techniques, and using data sufficiently resistant to classification to provoke some meaningful difference in resolution--report the superior performance of SVM relative to NN. But as your Question suggests, that performance delta seems to be, to a degree, domain specific.
For instance, NN outperformed SVM in a comparative study of author identification from texts in Arabic script; In a study comparing credit rating prediction, there was no discernible difference in resolution by the two classifiers; a similar result was reported in a study of high-energy particle classification.
I have read, from more than one source in the academic literature, that SVM outperforms NN as the size of the training data decreases.
Finally, the extent to which one can generalize from the results of these comparative studies is probably quite limited. For instance, in one study comparing the accuracy of SVM and NN in time series forecasting, the investigators reported that SVM did indeed outperform a conventional (back-propagating over layered nodes) NN but performance of the SVM was about the same as that of an RBF (radial basis function) NN.
[Are SVMs better than ANN] In an Online setting? SVMs are not used in an online setting (i.e., incremental training). The essence of SVMs is the separating hyperplane whose position is determined by a small number of support vectors. So even a single additional data point could in principle significantly influence the position of this hyperplane.
What about in a semi-supervised case like reinforcement learning? Until the OP's comment to this answer, i was not aware of either Neural Networks or SVMs used in this way--but they are.
The most widely used- semi-supervised variant of SVM is named Transductive SVM (TSVM), first mentioned by Vladimir Vapnick (the same guy who discovered/invented conventional SVM). I know almost nothing about this technique other than what's it is called and that is follows the principles of transduction (roughly lateral reasoning--i.e., reasoning from training data to test data). Apparently TSV is a preferred technique in the field of text classification.
Is there a better unsupervised version of SVMs? I don't believe SVMs are suitable for unsupervised learning. Separation is based on the position of the maximum-margin hyperplane determined by support vectors. This could easily be my own limited understanding, but i don't see how that would happen if those support vectors were unlabeled (i.e., if you didn't know before-hand what you were trying to separate). One crucial use case of unsupervised algorithms is when you don't have labeled data or you do and it's badly unbalanced. E.g., online fraud; here you might have in your training data, only a few data points labeled as "fraudulent accounts" (and usually with questionable accuracy) versus the remaining >99% labeled "not fraud." In this scenario, a one-class classifier, a typical configuration for SVMs, is the a good option. In particular, the training data consists of instances labeled "not fraud" and "unk" (or some other label to indicate they are not in the class)--in other words, "inside the decision boundary" and "outside the decision boundary."
I wanted to conclude by mentioning that, 20 years after their "discovery", the SVM is a firmly entrenched member in the ML library. And indeed, the consistently superior resolution compared with other state-of-the-art classifiers is well documented.
Their pedigree is both a function of their superior performance documented in numerous rigorously controlled studies as well as their conceptual elegance. W/r/t the latter point, consider that multi-layer perceptrons (MLP), though they are often excellent classifiers, are driven by a numerical optimization routine, which in practice rarely finds the global minimum; moreover, that solution has no conceptual significance. On the other hand, the numerical optimization at the heart of building an SVM classifier does in fact find the global minimum. What's more that solution is the actual decision boundary.
Still, i think SVM reputation has declined a little during the past few years.
The primary reason i suspect is the NetFlix competition. NetFlix emphasized the resolving power of fundamental techniques of matrix decomposition and even more significantly t*he power of combining classifiers. People combined classifiers long before NetFlix, but more as a contingent technique than as an attribute of classifier design. Moreover, many of the techniques for combining classifiers are extraordinarily simple to understand and also to implement. By contrast, SVMs are not only very difficult to code (in my opinion, by far the most difficult ML algorithm to implement in code) but also difficult to configure and implement as a pre-compiled library--e.g., a kernel must be selected, the results are very sensitive to how the data is re-scaled/normalized, etc.
I loved Doug's answer. I would like to add two comments.
1) Vladimir Vapnick also co-invented the VC dimension which is important in learning theory.
2) I think that SVMs were the best overall classifiers from 2000 to 2009, but after 2009, I am not sure. I think that neural nets have improved very significantly recently due to the work in Deep Learning and Sparse Denoising Auto-Encoders. I thought I saw a number of benchmarks where they outperformed SVMs. See, for example, slide 31 of
http://deeplearningworkshopnips2010.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/nips10-workshop-tutorial-final.pdf
A few of my friends have been using the sparse auto encoder technique. The neural nets build with that technique significantly outperformed the older back propagation neural networks. I will try to post some experimental results at artent.net if I get some time.
I'd expect SVM's to be better when you have good features to start with. IE, your features succinctly capture all the necessary information. You can see if your features are good if instances of the same class "clump together" in the feature space. Then SVM with Euclidian kernel should do the trick. Essentially you can view SVM as a supercharged nearest neighbor classifier, so whenever NN does well, SVM should do even better, by adding automatic quality control over the examples in your set. On the converse -- if it's a dataset where nearest neighbor (in feature space) is expected to do badly, SVM will do badly as well.
- Is there a better unsupervised version of SVMs?
Just answering only this question here. Unsupervised learning can be done by so-called one-class support vector machines. Again, similar to normal SVMs, there is an element that promotes sparsity. In normal SVMs only a few points are considered important, the support vectors. In one-class SVMs again only a few points can be used to either:
"separate" a dataset as far from the origin as possible, or
define a radius as small as possible.
The advantages of normal SVMs carry over to this case. Compared to density estimation only a few points need to be considered. The disadvantages carry over as well.
Are SVMs better than ANNs with many classes?
SVMs have been designated for discrete classification. Before moving to ANNs, try ensemble methods like Random Forest , Gradient Boosting, Gaussian Probability Classification etc
What about in a semi-supervised case like reinforcement learning?
Deep Q learning provides better alternatives.
Is there a better unsupervised version of SVMs?
SVM is not suited for unsupervised learning. You have other alternatives for unsupervised learning : K-Means, Hierarchical clustering, TSNE clustering etc
From ANN perspective, you can try Autoencoder, General adversarial network
Few more useful links:
towardsdatascience
wikipedia