C Parameter Doesn't Affect Accuracy [LibSVM for string data] - string

I'm working on a protein classification problem with svm, so i use LibSVM for string data. The string kernel defined into LibSVM is the edit distance kernel, it depends from a parameter gamma. During cross-validation, changing C and gamma parameters, i get 75% of accuracy in every way! Moreover, also changing the number of trainingset patterns, i get the same accuracy. I use the SCOP database. I have no idea about this behavior!

Look at the counts of each type of misclassification error. If you are getting a constant error rate like this then it is quite possible that every observation is getting assigned to the same class. For example, if 75% of your training observations are in one class and the classifier assigns every observation to that class, then you'll see an error rate of 25%.

Related

Neural network regression evaluation based on target range

I am currently fitting a neural network to predict a continuous target from 1 to 10. However, the samples are not evenly distributed over the entire data set: samples with target ranging from 1-3 are quite underrepresented (only account for around 5% of the data). However, they are of big interest, since the low range of the target is kind of the critical range.
Is there any way to know how my model predicts these low range samples in particular? I know that when doing multiclass classification I can examine the recall to get a taste of how well the model performs on a certain class. For classification use cases I can also set the class weight parameter in Keras to account for class imbalances, but this is obviously not possible for regression.
Until now, I use typical metrics like MAE, MSE, RMSE and get satisfying results. I would however like to know how the model performs on the "critical" samples.
From my point of view, I would compare the test measurements (classification performance, MSE, RMSE) for the whole test step that corresponds to the whole range of values (1-10). Then, of course, I would do it separately to the specific range that you are considering critical (let's say between 1-3) and compare the divergence of the two populations. You can even perform some statistics about the significance of the difference between the two populations (Wilcoxon tests etc.).
Maybe this link could be useful for your comparisons. Since you can regression you can even compare for MSE and RMSE.
What you need to do is find identifiers for these critical samples. Often times row indices are used for this. Once you have predicted all of your samples, use those stored indices to find the critical samples in your predictions and run whatever automatic metric over those filtered samples. I hope this answers your question.

Does SciKit Have A InHouse Function That Tallies The Accuracy For Each Y Solution?

I have LinearSVC algorithm that predicts some data for stock. It has a 90% acc rating, but I think this might be due to the fact that some y's are far more likely than others. I want to see if there is a way to see if for each y I've defined, how accurately that y was predicted.
I haven't seen anything like this in the docs, but it just makes sense to have it.
If what your really want is a measure of confidence rather than actual probabilities, you can use the method LinearSVC.decision_function(). See the documentation or the probability calibration CalibratedClassifierCV using this documentation.
You can use a confusion matrix representation implemented in SciKit to generate an accuracy matrix between the predicted and real values of your classification problem for each individual attribute. The diagonal represents the raw accuracy, which can easily be converted to a percentage accuracy.

How do I test my classifier accuracy against random values?

I've set up my first scikit-learn example to play with and I'm trying to gauge accuracy on my predictions. I've got training and test lists set up fine, but I'm getting ~0.95 accuracy even if I give it random values.
This looks to be because I'm checking for 0/1 labels, and 95% of the labels are zero's, so it's guessing on 0's and getting 0.95 accuracy (I think?). Obviously this isn't what I want.
How do I go about deciding if my classifiers are working, and how do I get meaningful accuracy values?
You have a clear class imbalance issue. Your classifier is predicting 0 all the time knowing it will be right 95% of the time. You can inspect this by calling predict(X_test) on your fitted classifier. If all the values are 0 you know this is the case.
To get a better idea on how the model performs you can upsample the data labelled with 1 or down sample the data labelled with 0. You can use this package which builds off scikit-learn and implements a number of resampling methods. Alternatively, you can use scikit learns resampling method. Which will bootstrap new data points for you.

How to debug scikit classifier that chooses wrong class with high confidence

I am using the LogisticRegression classifier to classify documents. The results are good (macro-avg. f1 = 0.94). I apply an extra step to the prediction results (predict_proba) to check if a classification is "confident" enough (e.g. >0.5 confidence for the first class, >0.2 distance in confidence to the 2. class etc.). Otherwise, the sample is discarded as "unknown".
The score that is most significant for me is the number of samples that, despite this additional step, are assigned to the wrong class. This score is unfortunately too high (~ 0.03). In many of these cases, the classifier is very confident (0.8 - 0.9999!) that he chose the correct class.
Changing parameters (C, class_weight, min_df, tokenizer) so far only lead to a small decrease in this score, but a significant decrease in correct classifications. However, looking at several samples and the most discriminative features of the respective classes, I cannot understand where this high confidence comes from. I would assume it is possible to discard most of these samples without discarding significantly more correct samples.
Is there a way to debug/analyze such cases? What could be the reason for these high confidence values?

Spark Naive Bayes Result accuracy (Spark ML 1.6.0) [duplicate]

I am using Spark ML to optimise a Naive Bayes multi-class classifier.
I have about 300 categories and I am classifying text documents.
The training set is balanced enough and there is about 300 training examples for each category.
All looks good and the classifier is working with acceptable precision on unseen documents. But what I am noticing that when classifying a new document, very often, the classifier assigns a high probability to one of the categories (the prediction probability is almost equal to 1), while the other categories receive very low probabilities (close to zero).
What are the possible reasons for this?
I would like to add that in SPARK ML there is something called "raw prediction" and when I look at it, I can see negative numbers but they have more or less comparable magnitude, so even the category with the high probability has comparable raw prediction score, but I am finding difficulties in interpreting this scores.
Lets start with a very informal description of Naive Bayes classifier. If C is a set of all classes and d is a document and xi are the features, Naive Bayes returns:
Since P(d) is the same for all classes we can simplify this to
where
Since we assume that features are conditionally independent (that is why it is naive) we can further simplify this (with Laplace correction to avoid zeros) to:
Problem with this expression is that in any non-trivial case it is numerically equal to zero. To avoid we use following property:
and replace initial condition with:
These are the values you get as the raw probabilities. Since each element is negative (logarithm of the value in (0, 1]) a whole expression has negative value as well. As you discovered by yourself these values are further normalized so the maximum value is equal to 1 and divided by the sum of the normalized values
It is important to note that while values you get are not strictly P(c|d) they preserve all important properties. The order and ratios are exactly (ignoring possible numerical issues) the same. If none other class gets prediction close to one it means that, given the evidence, it is a very strong prediction. So it is actually something you want to see.

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