I need to write an algorithm in any language that would order an array based on 3 factors. I use resorts as an example (like Hipmunk). Let's say I want to go on vacation. I want the cheapest spot, with the best reviews, and the most attractions. However, there is obviously no way I can find one that is #1 in all 3.
Example (assuming there are 20 important attractions):
Resort A: $150/night...98/100 in favorable reviews...18 of 20 attractions
Resort B: $99/night...85/100 in favorable reviews...12 of 20 attractions
Resort C: $120/night...91/100 in favorable reviews...16 of 20 attractions
Resort B looks the most appealing in price, but is 3rd in the other 2 categories. Wherein, I can choose resort C for only $21 more a night and get more attractions and better reviews. Price is still important to me, but Resort A has outstanding reviews and a ton of attractions: Is $51 more worth the splurge?
I want to be able to populate a list that will order a lit from "best to worst" (I quote bc it is subjective to the consumer). How would I go about maximizing the value for each resort?
Should I put a weight for each factor (ie: 55% price, 30% reviews, 15% amenities) and come to the result of a set number and order them that way?
Do I need a mode, median and range for all the hotels and determine the average price, and have the hotels around the average price hold the most weight?
If it is a little confusing then check out www.hipmunk.com. They have an airplane sort they call Agony (and a hotel sort which is similar to my question) that they use as their own. I used resorts as an example to make my question hopefully make a little more sense. How does one put math to a problem like this?
I was about to ask the same question about multiple-factor weighted sorting, because my research only came up with answers (e.g. formulas with explanations) for two-factor sorting.
Even though we're both asking about 3 factors, I'll list the possibilities I've found in case they're helpful.
Possibilities:
Note: S is the "sorting score", which is what you'd sort by (asc or desc).
"Linearly weighted" - use a function like: S = (w1 * F1) + (w2 * F2) + (w3 * F3), where wx are arbitrarily assigned weights, and Fx are the values of the factors. You'd also want to normalize F (i.e. Fx_n = Fx / Fmax).
"Base-N weighted" - more like grouping than weighting, it's just a linear weighting where weights are increasing multiples of base-10 (a similar principle to CSS selector specificity), so that more important factors are significantly higher: S = 1000 * F1 + 100 * F2 ....
Estimated True Value (ETV) - this is apparently what Google Analytics introduced in their reporting, where the value of one factor influences (weights) another factor - the consequence being to sort on more "statistically significant" values. The link explains it pretty well, so here's just the equation: S = (F2 / F2_max * F1) + ((1 - (F2 / F2_max)) * F1_avg), where F1 is the "more important" factor ("bounce rate" in the article), and F2 is the "significance modifying" factor ("visits" in the article).
Bayesian Estimate - looks really similar to ETV, this is how IMDb calculates their rating. See this StackOverflow post for explanation; equation: S = (F2 / (F2+F2_lim)) * F1 + (F2_lim / (F2+F2_lim)) × F1_avg, where Fx are the same as #3, and F2_lim is the minimum threshold limit for the "significance" factor (i.e. any value less than X shouldn't be considered).
Options #3 and #4 look really promising, since you don't really have to choose an arbitrary weighting scheme like you do in #1 and #2, but then the problem is how do you do this for more than two factors?
In your case, assigning the weights in #1 would probably be fine. You'll need to fine-tune the algorithm depending on what your users consider more important - you could expose the weights wx as a filter (like 1-10 dropdown) so your users can adjust their search on the fly. Or if you wanted to get clever you could poll your users before they're searching ("Which is more important to you?") and then assign a weighting set based on the response, and after tracking enough polls you could autosuggest the weighting scheme based on most responses.
Hope that gets you on the right track.
What about having variable weights, and letting the user adjust it through some input like levers, so that the sort order will be dynamically updated?
Related
I am doing this as a part of my university assignment, but I can't find any resources online on how to correctly implement this.
I have read tons materials on metrics that define optimal set split (like Entropy, Gini and others), so I understand how we would choose an optimal value of feature to split learning set into left and right nodes.
However what I totally don't get is the complexity of implementation, considering we also have to choose optimal feature, which means that on each node to compute optimal value it would take O(n^2), which is bad considering real ML datasets are shaped about 10^2 x 10^6, this is really big in terms of computation cost.
Am I missing some kind of approach that could be used here to help reduce complexity?
I currently have this baseline implementation for choosing best feature and value to split on, but I really want to make it better:
for f_idx in range(X_subset.shape[1]):
sorted_values = X_subset.iloc[:, f_idx].sort_values()
for v in sorted_values[self.min_samples_split - 1 : -self.min_samples_split + 1]:
y_left, y_right = self.make_split_only_y(f_idx, v, X_subset, y_subset)
if threshold is not None:
G = calc_g(y_subset, y_left, y_right)
if G < tr_G:
threshold = v
feature_idx = f_idx
tr_G = G
else:
threshold = v
feature_idx = f_idx
tr_G = G
return feature_idx, threshold
So, since no one answered, here some stuff I found out.
Firstly, yes, this task is very computationaly intensive. However, several tricks may be used to reduce amount of splits you need to perform to "grow a tree".
This is especially important, since you don't really want a giant overfitted tree - it just doesn't has any value, what it is more important is to get weak model, which can be used with others in some sort of ensmebling teqnique.
As for the regularization tricks, here are couple of I used myself:
limit the maximum depth of tree
limit the minimal amount of items in node
limit the maximimum amount of leafes in tree
limit the minimum quiality change in split criteria after performing an optimal split
For algorithmic part, there is a way to build a tree a smart way. If you do it as in the code I posted earlier, time complexity will be around O(h * N^2 * D), where h is height of the tree. To work around this, there are several approaches, which I didn't personally code, but read about:
Use dynamic programming for accumulating of statistics per feature, so you don't have to recalculate them every split
Use data binning and bucket sort for O(n) sorting
Source of info: https://ml-handbook.ru/chapters/decision_tree/intro
(use google translate, since website is in russian)
I implemented a cosine-theta function, which calculates the relation between two articles. If two articles are very similar then the words should contain quite some overlap. However, a cosine theta score of 0.54 does not mean "related" or "not related". I should end up with a definitive answer which is either 0 for 'not related' or 1 for 'related'.
I know that there are sigmoid and softmax functions, yet I should find the optimal parameters to give to such functions and I do not know if these functions are satisfactory solutions. I was thinking that I have the cosine theta score, I can calculate the percentage of overlap between two sentences two (e.g. the amount of overlapping words divided by the amount of words in the article) and maybe some more interesting things. Then with the data, I could maybe write a function (what type of function I do not know and is part of the question!), after which I can minimize the error via the SciPy library. This means that I should do some sort of supervised learning, and I am willing to label article pairs with labels (0/1) in order to train a network. Is this worth the effort?
# Count words of two strings.
v1, v2 = self.word_count(s1), self.word_count(s2)
# Calculate the intersection of the words in both strings.
v3 = set(v1.keys()) & set(v2.keys())
# Calculate some sort of ratio between the overlap and the
# article length (since 1 overlapping word on 2 words is more important
# then 4 overlapping words on articles of 492 words).
p = min(len(v1), len(v2)) / len(v3)
numerator = sum([v1[w] * v2[w] for w in v3])
w1 = sum([v1[w]**2 for w in v1.keys()])
w2 = sum([v2[w]**2 for w in v2.keys()])
denominator = math.sqrt(w1) * math.sqrt(w2)
# Calculate the cosine similarity
if not denominator:
return 0.0
else:
return (float(numerator) / denominator)
As said, I would like to use variables such as p, and the cosine theta score in order to produce an accurate discrete binary label, either 0 or 1.
As said, I would like to use variables such as p, and the cosine theta score in order to produce an accurate discrete binary label, either 0 or 1.
Here it really comes down to what you mean by accuracy. It is up to you to choose how the overlap affects whether or not two strings are "matching" unless you have a labelled data set. If you have a labelled data set (I.e., a set of pairs of strings along with a 0 or 1 label), then you can train a binary classification algorithm and try to optimise based on that. I would recommend something like a neural net or SVM due to the potentially high dimensional, categorical nature of your problem.
Even the optimisation, however, is a subjective measure. For example, in theory let's pretend you have a model which out of 100 samples only predicts 1 answer (Giving 99 unknowns). Technically if that one answer is correct, that is a model with 100% accuracy, but which has a very low recall. Generally in machine learning you will find a trade off between recall and accuracy.
Some people like to go for certain metrics which combine the two (The most famous of which is the F1 score), but honestly it depends on the application. If I have a marketing campaign with a fixed budget, then I care more about accuracy - I would only want to target consumers who are likely to buy my product. If however, we are looking to test for a deadly disease or markers for bank fraud, then it's feasible for that test to be accurate only 10% of the time - if its recall of true positives is somewhere close to 100%.
Finally, if you have no labelled data, then your best bet is just to define some cut off value which you believe indicates a good match. This is would then be more analogous to a binary clustering problem, and you could use some more abstract measure such as distance to a centroid to test which cluster (Either the "related" or "unrelated" cluster) the point belongs to. Note however that here your features feel like they would be incredibly hard to define.
I have studied association rules and know how to implement the algorithm on the classic basket of goods problem, such as:
Transaction ID Potatoes Eggs Milk
A 1 0 1
B 0 1 1
In this problem each item has a binary identifier. 1 indicates the basket contains the good, 0 indicates it does not.
But what would be the best way to model a basket which can contain many of the same good? E.g., take the below, very unrealistic example.
Transaction ID Potatoes Eggs Milk
A 5 0 178
B 0 35 7
Using binary indicators in this case would obviously be losing a lot of information and I am seeking a model which takes into account not only the presence of items in the basket, but also the frequency that the items occur.
What would be a suitable algorithm for this problem?
In my actual data there are over one hundred items and, based on the profile of a user's basket, I would like to calculate the probabilities of the customer consuming the other available items.
An alternative is to use binary indicators but constructing them in a more clever way.
The idea is to set the indicator when an amount is more than the central value, which means that it shall be significant. If everyone buys 3 breads on average, does it make sense to flag someone as a "bread-lover" for buying two or three?
Central value can a plain arithmetic mean, one with outliers removed, or the median.
Instead of:
binarize(x) = 0 if x = 0
1 otherwise
you can use
binarize*(x) = 0 if x <= central(X)
1 otherwise
I think if you really want to have probabilities is to encode your data in a probabilistic way. Bayesian or Markov networks might be a feasible way. Nevertheless without having a reasonable structure this will be computational extremely expansive. For three item types this, however, seems to be feasible
I would try to go for a Neural Network Autoencoder if you have many more item types. If there is some dependency in the data it will discover that.
For the above example you could use a network with three input, two hidden and three output neurons.
A little bit more fancy would be to use 3 fully connected layers with drop out in the middle layer.
This my sound as very naive question. I checked on google and many YouTube videos for beginners and pretty much, all explain data weighting as something the most obvious. I still do not understand why data is being weighted.
Let's assume I have four features:
a b c d
1 2 1 4
If I pass each value to Sigmond function, I'll receive -1 >< 1 value already.
I really don't understand why data needs or it is recommended to be weighted first. If you could explain to me this in very simple manner, I would appreciate it a lot.
I think you are not talking about weighing data but features.
A feature is a column in your table and as data I would understand rows.
The confusion comes now from the fact that weighing rows is also sometimes sensible, e.g., if you want to punish misclassification of positive class more.
Why do we need to weigh features?
I assume you are talking about a modle like
prediction = sigmoid(sum_i weight_i * feature_i) > base
Let's assume you want to predict whether a person is overweight based on Bodyweight, height, and age.
In R we can generate a sample dataset as
height = rnorm(100,1.80,0.1) #normal distributed mean 1.8,variance 0.1
weight = rnorm(100,70,10)
age = runif(100,0,100)
ow = weight / (height**2)>25 #overweight if BMI > 25
data = data.frame(height,weight,age,bc,ow)
if we now plot the data you can see that at least my sample of the data can be separated with a straight line in weight/height. However, age does not provide any value. If we weight it prior to the sum/sigmoid you can put all factors into relation.
Furthermore, as you can see from the following plot the weight/height have a very different domain. Hence, they need to be put into relation, such that the line in the following plot has the right slope, as the value of weight have are one order of magnitude larger
I want to classify documents (composed of words) into 3 classes (Positive, Negative, Unknown/Neutral). A subset of the document words become the features.
Until now, I have programmed a Naive Bayes Classifier using as a feature selector Information gain and chi-square statistics. Now, I would like to see what happens if I use Odds ratio as a feature selector.
My problem is that I don't know hot to implement Odds-ratio. Should I:
1) Calculate Odds Ratio for every word w, every class:
E.g. for w:
Prob of word as positive Pw,p = #positive docs with w/#docs
Prob of word as negative Pw,n = #negative docs with w/#docs
Prob of word as unknown Pw,u = #unknown docs with w/#docs
OR(Wi,P) = log( Pw,p*(1-Pw,p) / (Pw,n + Pw,u)*(1-(Pw,n + Pw,u)) )
OR(Wi,N) ...
OR(Wi,U) ...
2) How should I decide if I choose or not the word as a feature ?
Thanks in advance...
Since it took me a while to independently wrap my head around all this, let me explain my findings here for the benefit of humanity.
Using the (log) odds ratio is a standard technique for filtering features prior to text classification. It is a 'one-sided metric' [Zheng et al., 2004] in the sense that it only discovers features which are positively correlated with a particular class. As a log-odds-ratio for the probability of seeing a feature 't' given the class 'c', it is defined as:
LOR(t,c) = log [Pr(t|c) / (1 - Pr(t|c))] : [Pr(t|!c) / (1 - Pr(t|!c))]
= log [Pr(t|c) (1 - Pr(t|!c))] / [Pr(t|!c) (1 - Pr(t|c))]
Here I use '!c' to mean a document where the class is not c.
But how do you actually calculate Pr(t|c) and Pr(t|!c)?
One subtlety to note is that feature selection probabilities, in general, are usually defined over a document event model [McCallum & Nigam 1998, Manning et al. 2008], i.e., Pr(t|c) is the probability of seeing term t one or more times in the document given the class of the document is c (in other words, the presence of t given the class c). The maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of this probability would be the proportion of documents of class c that contain t at least once. [Technically, this is known as a Multivariate Bernoulli event model, and is distinct from a Multinomial event model over words, which would calculate Pr(t|c) using integer word counts - see the McCallum paper or the Manning IR textbook for more details, specifically on how this applies to a Naive Bayes text classifier.]
One key to using LOR effectively is to smooth these conditional probability estimates, since, as #yura noted, rare events are problematic here (e.g., the MLE of Pr(t|!c) could be zero, leading to an infinite LOR). But how do we smooth?
In the literature, Forman reports smoothing the LOR by "adding one to any zero count in the denominator" (Forman, 2003), while Zheng et al (2004) use "ELE [Expected Likelihood Estimation] smoothing" which usually amounts to adding 0.5 to each count.
To smooth in a way that is consistent with probability theory, I follow standard practices in text classification with a Multivariate Bernoulli event model. Essentially, we assume that we have seen each presence count AND each absence count B extra times. So our estimate for Pr(t|c) can be written in terms of #(t,c): the number of times we've seen t and c, and #(t,!c): the number of times we've seen t without c, as follows:
Pr(t|c) = [#(t,c) + B] / [#(t,c) + #(t,!c) + 2B]
= [#(t,c) + B] / [#(c) + 2B]
If B = 0, we have the MLE. If B = 0.5, we have ELE. If B = 1, we have the Laplacian prior. Note this looks different than smoothing for the Multinomial event model, where the Laplacian prior leads you to add |V| in the denominator [McCallum & Nigam, 1998]
You can choose 0.5 or 1 as your smoothing value, depending on which prior work most inspires you, and plug this into the equation for LOR(t,c) above, and score all the features.
Typically, you then decide on how many features you want to use, say N, and then choose the N highest-ranked features based on the score.
In a multi-class setting, people have often used 1 vs All classifiers and thus did feature selection independently for each classifier and thus each positive class with the 1-sided metrics (Forman, 2003). However, if you want to find a unique reduced set of features that works in a multiclass setting, there are some advanced approaches in the literature (e.g. Chapelle & Keerthi, 2008).
References:
Zheng, Wu, Srihari, 2004
McCallum & Nigam 1998
Manning, Raghavan & Schütze, 2008
Forman, 2003
Chapelle & Keerthi, 2008
Odd ratio is not good measure for feature selection, because it is only shows what happen when feature present, and nothing when it is not. So it will not work for rare features and almost all features are rare so it not work for almost all features. Example feature with 100% confidence that class is positive which present in 0.0001 is useless for classification. Therefore if you still want to use odd ratio add threshold on frequency of feature, like feature present in 5% of cases. But I would recommend better approach - use Chi or info gain metrics which automatically solve those problems.