Summing up my understanding of the topic 'Dummy Coding' is usually understood as coding a nominal attribute with K possible values as K-1 binary dummies. The usage of K values would cause redundancy and would have a negative impact e.g. on logistic regression, as far as I learned it. That far, everything's clear to me.
Yet, two issues are unclear to me:
1) Bearing in mind the issue stated above, I am confused that the 'Logistic' classifier in WEKA actually uses K dummies (see picture). Why would that be the case?
2) An issue arises as soon as I consider attribute selection. Where the left-out attribute value is implicitly included as the case where all dummies are zero if all dummies are actually used for the model, it isn't included clearly anymore, if one dummy is missing (as not selected in attribute selection). The issue is much easy to understand with the sketch I uploaded. How can that issue be treated?
Secondly
Images
WEKA Output: The Logistic algorithm was run on the UCI dataset German Credit, where the possible values of the first attribute are A11,A12,A13,A14. All of them are included in the logistic regression model. http://abload.de/img/bildschirmfoto2013-089out9.png
Decision Tree Example: Sketch showing the issue when it comes to running decision trees on datasets with dummy-coded instances after attribute selection. http://abload.de/img/sketchziu5s.jpg
The output is generally more easy to read, interpret and use when you use k dummies instead of k-1 dummies. I figure that is why everybody seems to actually use k dummies.
But yes, as the k values sum up to 1, there exists a correlation that may cause problems. But correlations in data sets are common, you will never completely get rid of them!
I believe feature selection and dummy coding just doesn't fit. It equals dropping some values from the attribute. Why do you insist on doing feature selection?
You really should be using weighting, or consider more advanced algorithms that can handle such data. In fact the dummy variables can cause just as much trouble, because they are binary, and oh so many algorithms (e.g. k-means) don't make much sense on binary variables.
As for the decision tree: don't perform, feature selection on your output attribute...
Plus, as a decision tree already selects features, it does not make sense to do all this anyway... leave it to the decision tree to decide upon which attribute to use for splitting. This way, it can learn dependencies, too.
Related
I'm working on a simple project in which I'm trying to describe the relationship between two positively correlated variables and determine if that relationship is changing over time, and if so, to what degree. I feel like this is something people probably do pretty often, but maybe I'm just not using the correct terminology because google isn't helping me very much.
I've plotted the variables on a scatter plot and know how to determine the correlation coefficient and plot a linear regression. I thought this may be a good first step because the linear regression tells me what I can expect y to be for a given x value. This means I can quantify how "far away" each data point is from the regression line (I think this is called the squared error?). Now I'd like to see what the error looks like for each data point over time. For example, if I have 100 data points and the most recent 20 are much farther away from where the regression line/function says it should be, maybe I could say that the relationship between the variables is showing signs of changing? Does that make any sense at all or am I way off base?
I have a suspicion that there is a much simpler way to do this and/or that I'm going about it in the wrong way. I'd appreciate any guidance you can offer!
I can suggest two strands of literature that study changing relationships over time. Typing these names into google should provide you with a large number of references so I'll stick to more concise descriptions.
(1) Structural break modelling. As the name suggest, this assumes that there has been a sudden change in parameters (e.g. a correlation coefficient). This is applicable if there has been a policy change, change in measurement device, etc. The estimation approach is indeed very close to the procedure you suggest. Namely, you would estimate the squared error (or some other measure of fit) on the full sample and the two sub-samples (before and after break). If the gains in fit are large when dividing the sample, then you would favour the model with the break and use different coefficients before and after the structural change.
(2) Time-varying coefficient models. This approach is more subtle as coefficients will now evolve more slowly over time. These changes can originate from the time evolution of some observed variables or they can be modeled through some unobserved latent process. In the latter case the estimation typically involves the use of state-space models (and thus the Kalman filter or some more advanced filtering techniques).
I hope this helps!
I want to ask about 2 things in a decision tree model:
1- In the Decision Tree I know how it's built, but there is the "data overfitting problem" so I need to work with "Cost complexity pruning" which I have two problems with it, when I request from the model to bring all the values of alpha, I want to know the alpha values that it returns how does the model find those values and also after I find the best value for alpha and built on it the tree how does the model build this tree with those values. This is the first question
2- When using Decisiontreeclassifier(random_state=any int) I don't understand what is the importance of "random_state" and how will it work inside the model, I understand how it works in the "train_test_split". I searched at stackoverflow and found someone saying that the tree uses the "Heuristic" while it is built, I don't get it how this could happen while I am standing on every node, I search for the value of information gain in every feature, taking the highest value and using it to split the next node around this feature , so I don't get how it's used Heuristic where it's obvious it works as a greedy algorithm. Even if we assume that it works with Heuristic, if I gave it a random state to control the randomness so what is it storing ?
I am very new to java and using ELKI. I have three dimensional objects have information about their uncertainty ( a multivariate gaussian). I would like to use FDBSCAN to cluster my data. I am wondering if it is possible to do this in ELKI using the UncertainiObject class. However, I am not sure how to do this.
Any help or pointers to examples will be very useful.
Yes, you can use, e.g., SimpleGaussianContinuousUncertainObject to model uncertain data with Gaussian uncertainty. But if you want a full multivariate Gaussian, you will have to modify its source code. It is not a very complicated class.
Many of the algorithms assume you can put a bounding box around uncertain objects, in order to prune the search space (otherwise, you will always be in O(n^2)). This is more difficult with rotated Gaussians!
The key difficulty with using all of these is actually data input. There is no standard file format for specifying objects with uncertainty. Apparently, most people that work with uncertain data just use certain data, and add an artificial uncertainty to it. But even that needs a lot of parameters to tune, and I am not convinced by this approach.
The way I understand it, in creating a random forest, the algorithm bundles a bunch of randomly generated decision trees together, weighting them such that they fit the training data.
Is it reasonable to say that this average of forests could be simplified into a simple decision tree? And, if so - how can I access and present this tree?
What I'm looking to do here is extract the information in the tree to help identify both the leading attributes, their boundary values and placement in the tree. I'm assuming that such a tree would provide insight to a human (or computer heuristic) as to which attributes within a dataset provide the most insight into determining the target outcome.
This probably seems a naive question - and if so, please be patient, I'm new to this and want to get to a stage where I understand it sufficiently.
RandomForest uses bootstrap to create many training sets by sampling the data with replacement (bagging). Each bootstrapped set is very close to the original data, but slightly different, since it may have multiples of the some points and some other points in the original data will be missing. (This helps create a whole bunch of similar but different sets that as a whole represent the population your data came from, and allow better generalization)
Then it fits a DecisionTree to each set. However, what a regular DecisionTree does at each step, is to loop over each feature, find the best split for each feature, and in the end choose to do the split in the feature that produced the best one among all. In RandomForest, instead of looping over every feature to find the best split, you only try a random subsample at each step (default is sqrt(n_features)).
So, every tree in RandomForest is fit to a bootstrapped random training set. And at each branching step, it only looks at a subsample of features, so some of the branching will be good but not necessarily the ideal split. This means that each tree is a less than ideal fit to the original data. When you average the result of all these (sub-ideal) trees, though, you get a robust prediction. Regular DecisionTrees overfit the data, this two-way randomization (bagging and feature subsampling) allow them to generalize and a forest usually does a good job.
Here is the catch: While you can average out the output of each tree, you cannot really "average the trees" to get an "average tree". Since trees are a bunch of if-then statements that are chained, there is no way of taking these chains and coming up with a single chain that produces the result that's the same as averaged result from each chain. Each tree in the forest is different, even if same features show up, they show up in different places of the trees, which makes it impossible to combine. You cannot represent a RandomForest as a single tree.
There are two things you can do.
1) As RPresle mentioned, you can look at the .feature_importances_ attribute, which for each feature averages the splitting score from different trees. The idea is, while you can't get an average tree, you can quantify how much and how effectively each feature is used in the forest by averaging their score in each tree.
2) When I fit a RandomForest model and need to get some insight into what's happening, how the features are affecting the result, I also fit a single DecisionTree. Now, this model is usually not good at all by itself, it will easily be outperformed by the RandomForest and I wouldn't use it to predict anything, but by drawing and looking at the splits in this tree, combined with the .feature_importances_ of the forest, I usually get a pretty good idea of the big picture.
I have a trading strategy on the foreign exchange market that I am attempting to improve upon.
I have a huge table (100k+ rows) that represent every possible trade in the market, the type of trade (buy or sell), the profit/loss after that trade closed, and 10 or so additional variables that represent various market measurements at the time of trade-opening.
I am trying to find out if any of these 10 variables are significantly related to the profits/losses.
For example, imagine that variable X ranges from 50 to -50.
The average value of X for a buy order is 25, and for a sell order is -25.
If most profitable buy orders have a value of X > 25, and most profitable sell orders have a value of X < -25 then I would consider the relationship of X-to-profit as significant.
I would like a good starting point for this. I have installed RapidMiner 5 in case someone can give me a specific recommendation for that.
A Decision Tree is perhaps the best place to begin.
The tree itself is a visual summary of feature importance ranking (or significant variables as phrased in the OP).
gives you a visual representation of the entire
classification/regression analysis (in the form of a binary tree),
which distinguishes it from any other analytical/statistical
technique that i am aware of;
decision tree algorithms require very little pre-processing on your data, no normalization, no rescaling, no conversion of discrete variables into integers (eg, Male/Female => 0/1); they can accept both categorical (discrete) and continuous variables, and many implementations can handle incomplete data (values missing from some of the rows in your data matrix); and
again, the tree itself is a visual summary of feature importance ranking
(ie, significant variables)--the most significant variable is the
root node, and is more significant than the two child nodes, which in
turn are more significant than their four combined children. "significance" here means the percent of variance explained (with respect to some response variable, aka 'target variable' or the thing
you are trying to predict). One proviso: from a visual inspection of
a decision tree you cannot distinguish variable significance from
among nodes of the same rank.
If you haven't used them before, here's how Decision Trees work: the algorithm will go through every variable (column) in your data and every value for each variable and split your data into two sub-sets based on each of those values. Which of these splits is actually chosen by the algorithm--i.e., what is the splitting criterion? The particular variable/value combination that "purifies" the data the most (i.e., maximizes the information gain) is chosen to split the data (that variable/value combination is usually indicated as the node's label). This simple heuristic is just performed recursively until the remaining data sub-sets are pure or further splitting doesn't increase the information gain.
What does this tell you about the "importance" of the variables in your data set? Well importance is indicated by proximity to the root node--i.e., hierarchical level or rank.
One suggestion: decision trees handle both categorical and discrete data usually without problem; however, in my experience, decision tree algorithms always perform better if the response variable (the variable you are trying to predict using all other variables) is discrete/categorical rather than continuous. It looks like yours is probably continuous, in which case in would consider discretizing it (unless doing so just causes the entire analysis to be meaningless). To do this, just bin your response variable values using parameters (bin size, bin number, and bin edges) meaningful w/r/t your problem domain--e.g., if your r/v is comprised of 'continuous values' from 1 to 100, you might sensibly bin them into 5 bins, 0-20, 21-40, 41-60, and so on.
For instance, from your Question, suppose one variable in your data is X and it has 5 values (10, 20, 25, 50, 100); suppose also that splitting your data on this variable with the third value (25) results in two nearly pure subsets--one low-value and one high-value. As long as this purity were higher than for the sub-sets obtained from splitting on the other values, the data would be split on that variable/value pair.
RapidMiner does indeed have a decision tree implementation, and it seems there are quite a few tutorials available on the Web (e.g., from YouTube, here and here). (Note, I have not used the decision tree module in R/M, nor have i used RapidMiner at all.)
The other set of techniques i would consider is usually grouped under the rubric Dimension Reduction. Feature Extraction and Feature Selection are two perhaps the most common terms after D/R. The most widely used is PCA, or principal-component analysis, which is based on an eigen-vector decomposition of the covariance matrix (derived from to your data matrix).
One direct result from this eigen-vector decomp is the fraction of variability in the data accounted for by each eigenvector. Just from this result, you can determine how many dimensions are required to explain, e.g., 95% of the variability in your data
If RapidMiner has PCA or another functionally similar dimension reduction technique, it's not obvious where to find it. I do know that RapidMiner has an R Extension, which of course let's you access R inside RapidMiner.R has plenty of PCA libraries (Packages). The ones i mention below are all available on CRAN, which means any of the PCA Packages there satisfy the minimum Package requirements for documentation and vignettes (code examples). I can recommend pcaPP (Robust PCA by Projection Pursuit).
In addition, i can recommend two excellent step-by-step tutorials on PCA. The first is from the NIST Engineering Statistics Handbook. The second is a tutorial for Independent Component Analysis (ICA) rather than PCA, but i mentioned it here because it's an excellent tutorial and the two techniques are used for the similar purposes.