Lets say I have a database with users buying products(There are no ratings or something similar) and I want to recommend others products for them. I am using ATL.trainImplicit where the training data has the following format:
[Rating(user=2, product=23053, rating=1.0),
Rating(user=2, product=2078, rating=1.0),
Rating(user=3, product=23, rating=1.0)]
So all the ratings in the training dataset is always 1.
Is it normal that the predictions ratings gave min value -0.6 and max rating 1.85? I would expect something between 0 and 1.
Yes, it is normal. The implicit version of ALS essentially tries to reconstruct a binary preference matrix P (rather than a matrix of explicit ratings, R). In this case, the "ratings" are treated as confidence levels - higher ratings equals higher confidence that the binary preference p(ij) should be reconstructed as 1 instead of 0.
However, ALS essentially solves a (weighted) least squares regression problem to find the user and item factor matrices that reconstruct matrix P. So the predicted values are not guaranteed to be in the range [0, 1] (though in practice they are usually close to that range). It's enough to interpret the predictions as "opaque" values where higher values equate to greater likelihood that the user might purchase that product. That's enough for sorting recommended products by predicted score.
(Note item-item or user-user similarities are typically computed using cosine similarity between the factor vectors, so these scores will lie in [-1, 1]. That computation is not directly available in Spark but can be done yourself).
Related
I have recently performed K-means biclustering on a matrix of absolute correlation coefficient values. However, the biclustering algorithm requires the number of biclusters (k) to be defined as an input. Is there any good method to determine the optimal number of biclusters(k)?
I know from before that many use a silhouette score to estimate the optimal number of clusters but I have only heard that people have used it when performing hierachical clustering. Can the silhouette score also be applied to biclusters as well? Is there any other method to define an optimal number of biclusters? Could a mean squared residue score be used for this?
The biclustering algorithm generated biclusters along the diagonal such that a row or column will never belong to more than one bicluster.
The problem:
Suppose I have a group of around 1,000,000 short documents D (no more than 50 words each), and I want to let users to supply a document from the same group D, and and get the top K similar documents from D.
My approach:
My first approach was to preprocess the group D by applying simple tf-idf, and after I have vector for each document, which is extremely sparse, to use a simple nearest neighbours algorithm based on cosine similarity.
Then, on query time, to justuse my static nearest neighbours table which its size is 1,000,000 x K, without any further calculations.
After applying tf-idf, I got vectors in size ~200,000, which means now I have a very sparse table (that can be stored efficiently in memory using sparse vectors) in size 1,000,000 x 200,000.
However, calculating the nearest neighbours model took me more than one day, and still haven't finished.
I tried to lower the vectors dimension by applying HashingTF, that utilizes the hasing trick, instead, so I can set the dimension to a constant one (in my case, i used 2^13 for uninfied hashing), but still I get the same bad performance.
Some technical information:
I use Spark 2.0 for the tf-idf calculation, and sklearn NearestNeighbours on the collected data.
Is thier any more efficient way to achieve that goal?
Thanks in advance.
Edit:
I had an idea to try a LSH based approximation similarity algorithm like those implemented in spark as described here, but could not find one that supports the 'cosine' similarity metric.
There were some requirements for the algorithm on the relation between training instances and the dimensions of your vectors , but you can try DIMSUM.
You can find the paper here.
Background so I don't throw out an XY problem -- I'm trying to check the goodness of fit of a GMM because I want statistical back-up for why I'm choosing the number of clusters I've chosen to group these samples. I'm checking AIC, BIC, entropy, and root mean squared error. This question is about entropy.
I've used kmeans to cluster a bunch of samples, and I want an entropy greater than 0.9 (stats and psychology are not my expertise and this problem is both). I have 59 samples; each sample has 3 features in it. I look for the best covariance type via
for cv_type in cv_types:
for n_components in n_components_range:
# Fit a Gaussian mixture with EM
gmm = mixture.GaussianMixture(n_components=n_components,
covariance_type=cv_type)
gmm.fit(data3)
where the n_components_range is just [2] (later I'll check 2 through 5).
Then I take the GMM with the lowest AIC or BIC, saved as best_eitherAB, (not shown) of the four. I want to see if the label assignments of the predictions are stable across time (I want to run for 1000 iterations), so I know I then need to calculate the entropy, which needs class assignment probabilities. So I predict the probabilities of the class assignment via gmm's method,
probabilities = best_eitherAB.predict_proba(data3)
all_probabilities.append(probabilities)
After all the iterations, I have an array of 1000 arrays, each contains 59 rows (sample size) by 2 columns (for the 2 classes). Each inner row of two sums to 1 to make the probability.
Now, I'm not entirely sure what to do regarding the entropy. I can just feed the whole thing into scipy.stats.entropy,
entr = scipy.stats.entropy(all_probabilities)
and it spits out numbers - as many samples as I have, I get a 2 item numpy matrix for each. I could feed just one of the 1000 tests in and just get 1 small matrix of two items; or I could feed in just a single column and get a single values back. But I don't know what this is, and the numbers are between 1 and 3.
So my questions are -- am I totally misunderstanding how I can use scipy.stats.entropy to calculate the stability of my classes? If I'm not, what's the best way to find a single number entropy that tells me how good my model selection is?
I'm doing clustering by k-means in Scikit-learn on 398 samples, 306 features. The features matrix is sparse, and the number of clusters is 4.
To improve the clustering, I tried two approaches:
After clustering, I used ExtraTreesClassifier() to classify and compute feature importances (samples labeled in clustering)
I used PCA to reduce the feature dimension to 2.
I have computed the following metrics (SS, CH, SH)
Method sum_of_squares, Calinski_Harabasz, Silhouette
1 kmeans 31.682 401.3 0.879
2 kmeans+top-features 5989230.351 75863584.45 0.977
3 kmeans+PCA 890.5431893 58479.00277 0.993
My questions are:
As far as I know, if sum of squares is smaller, the performance of clustering method is better, while if Silhouette is close to 1 the performance of clustering method is better. For instance in the last row both sum of squares and Silhouette are increased compared to the first row.
How can I choose which approach has better performance?
Never compare sum-of-squares and similar metrics across different projections, transformations or data sets.
To see why, simply multiply every feature by 0.5 - your SSQ will drop by 0.25. So to "improve" your data set, you just need to scale it to a tiny size...
These metrics must only be used on the exact same input and parameters. You can't even use sum-of-squares to compare k-means with different k, because the larger k will win. All you can do is multiple random attempts, and then keep the best minimum you found this way.
With 306 features you are under the curse of dimensionality. Clustering in 306 dimensions is not meaningful. Therefore I wouldn't select features after clustering.
To get interpretable results, you need to reduce dimensionality. For 398 samples you need low dimension (2, 3, maybe 4). Your PCA with dimension 2 is good. You can try 3.
An approach with selecting important features before clustering may be problematic. Anyway, are 2/3/4 "best" features meaningful in your case?
I am working on a simple AI program that classifies shapes using unsupervised learning method. Essentially I use the number of sides and angles between the sides and generate aggregates percentages to an ideal value of a shape. This helps me create some fuzzingness in the result.
The problem is how do I represent the degree of error or confidence in the classification? For example: a small rectangle that looks very much like a square would yield night membership values from the two categories but can I represent the degree of error?
Thanks
Your confidence is based on used model. For example, if you are simply applying some rules based on the number of angles (or sides), you have some multi dimensional representation of objects:
feature 0, feature 1, ..., feature m
Nice, statistical approach
You can define some kind of confidence intervals, baesd on your empirical results, eg. you can fit multi-dimensional gaussian distribution to your empirical observations of "rectangle objects", and once you get a new object you simply check the probability of such value in your gaussian distribution, and have your confidence (which would be quite well justified with assumption, that your "observation" errors have normal distribution).
Distance based, simple approach
Less statistical approach would be to directly take your model's decision factor and compress it to the [0,1] interaval. For example, if you simply measure distance from some perfect shape to your new object in some metric (which yields results in [0,inf)) you could map it using some sigmoid-like function, eg.
conf( object, perfect_shape ) = 1 - tanh( distance( object, perfect_shape ) )
Hyperbolic tangent will "squash" values to the [0,1] interval, and the only remaining thing to do would be to select some scaling factor (as it grows quite quickly)
Such approach would be less valid in the mathematical terms, but would be similar to the approach taken in neural networks.
Relative approach
And more probabilistic approach could be also defined using your distance metric. If you have distances to each of your "perfect shapes" you can calculate the probability of an object being classified as some class with assumption, that classification is being performed at random, with probiability proportional to the inverse of the distance to the perfect shape.
dist(object, perfect_shape1) = d_1
dist(object, perfect_shape2) = d_2
dist(object, perfect_shape3) = d_3
...
inv( d_i )
conf(object, class_i) = -------------------
sum_j inv( d_j )
where
inv( d_i ) = max( d_j ) - d_i
Conclusions
First two ideas can be also incorporated into the third one to make use of knowledge of all the classes. In your particular example, the third approach should result in confidence of around 0.5 for both rectangle and circle, while in the first example it would be something closer to 0.01 (depending on how many so small objects would you have in the "training" set), which shows the difference - first two approaches show your confidence in classifing as a particular shape itself, while the third one shows relative confidence (so it can be low iff it is high for some other class, while the first two can simply answer "no classification is confident")
Building slightly on what lejlot has put forward; my preference would be to use the Mahalanobis distance with some squashing function. The Mahalanobis distance M(V, p) allows you to measure the distance between a distribution V and a point p.
In your case, I would use "perfect" examples of each class to generate the distribution V and p is the classification you want the confidence of. You can then use something along the lines of the following to be your confidence interval.
1-tanh( M(V, p) )