information criteria for confusion matrices - statistics

One can measure goodness of fit of a statistical model using Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), which accounts for goodness of fit and for the number of parameters that were used for model creation. AIC involves calculation of maximized value of likelihood function for that model (L).
How can one compute L, given prediction results of a classification model, represented as a confusion matrix?

It is not possible to calculate the AIC from a confusion matrix since it doesn't contain any information about the likelihood. Depending on the model you are using it may be possible to calculate the likelihood or quasi-likelihood and hence the AIC or QIC.
What is the classification problem that you are working on, and what is your model?
In a classification context often other measures are used to do GoF testing. I'd recommend reading through The Elements of Statistical Learning by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman to get a good overview of this kind of methodology.
Hope this helps.

Information-Based Evaluation Criterion for Classifier's Performance by Kononenko and Bratko is exactly what I was looking for:
Classification accuracy is usually used as a measure of classification performance. This measure is, however, known to have several defects. A fair evaluation criterion should exclude the influence of the class probabilities which may enable a completely uninformed classifier to trivially achieve high classification accuracy. In this paper a method for evaluating the information score of a classifier''s answers is proposed. It excludes the influence of prior probabilities, deals with various types of imperfect or probabilistic answers and can be used also for comparing the performance in different domains.

Related

How to put more weight on one class during training in Pytorch [duplicate]

I have a multilabel classification problem, which I am trying to solve with CNNs in Pytorch. I have 80,000 training examples and 7900 classes; every example can belong to multiple classes at the same time, mean number of classes per example is 130.
The problem is that my dataset is very imbalance. For some classes, I have only ~900 examples, which is around 1%. For “overrepresented” classes I have ~12000 examples (15%). When I train the model I use BCEWithLogitsLoss from pytorch with a positive weights parameter. I calculate the weights the same way as described in the documentation: the number of negative examples divided by the number of positives.
As a result, my model overestimates almost every class… Mor minor and major classes I get almost twice as many predictions as true labels. And my AUPRC is just 0.18. Even though it’s much better than no weighting at all, since in this case the model predicts everything as zero.
So my question is, how do I improve the performance? Is there anything else I can do? I tried different batch sampling techniques (to oversample minority class), but they don’t seem to work.
I would suggest either one of these strategies
Focal Loss
A very interesting approach for dealing with un-balanced training data through tweaking of the loss function was introduced in
Tsung-Yi Lin, Priya Goyal, Ross Girshick, Kaiming He and Piotr Dollar Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection (ICCV 2017).
They propose to modify the binary cross entropy loss in a way that decrease the loss and gradient of easily classified examples while "focusing the effort" on examples where the model makes gross errors.
Hard Negative Mining
Another popular approach is to do "hard negative mining"; that is, propagate gradients only for part of the training examples - the "hard" ones.
see, e.g.:
Abhinav Shrivastava, Abhinav Gupta and Ross Girshick Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining (CVPR 2016)
#Shai has provided two strategies developed in the deep learning era. I would like to provide you some additional traditional machine learning options: over-sampling and under-sampling.
The main idea of them is to produce a more balanced dataset by sampling before starting your training. Note that you probably will face some problems such as losing the data diversity (under-sampling) and overfitting the training data (over-sampling), but it might be a good start point.
See the wiki link for more information.

Why is EmbeddingSimilarityEvaluator used to evaluate the similarity between two embeddings?

TL;DR How can the Pearson correlation coefficient between ground truth labels and cosine similarity scores evaluate the performance of a sentence embedding model? A positive/negative linear relationship between the two doesn't necessarily indicate that a model is accurate, just that they move together, which to me doesn't seem like a good way to evaluate the performance of a sentence embedding model.
I'm training a model to be able to tell if two questions are similar or not. I first continue pre-training using MLM (masked language modeling) and finally fine-tune on the STS dataset. For fine-tuning, I'm using this example python file https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/blob/master/examples/training/sts/training_stsbenchmark.py. At the end of the file, it says to "load the stored model and evaluate its performance on STS benchmark dataset", and it uses this file to evaluate the performance of the model https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/blob/master/sentence_transformers/evaluation/EmbeddingSimilarityEvaluator.py.
The second file has a few metrics for evaluation (cosine similarity being one of them), and it uses the Pearson correlation coefficient and Spearman correlation coefficient for each metric to evaluate the performance of the model. What I'm not understanding is: how does calculating the relationship (correlation coefficient) between the ground truth labels and the cosine similarity contribute to measuring the performance of the model? Even if the two have similar movement patterns i.e. a high correlation coefficient, that doesn't mean the model is performing well, does it?

Multilabel classification with class imbalance in Pytorch

I have a multilabel classification problem, which I am trying to solve with CNNs in Pytorch. I have 80,000 training examples and 7900 classes; every example can belong to multiple classes at the same time, mean number of classes per example is 130.
The problem is that my dataset is very imbalance. For some classes, I have only ~900 examples, which is around 1%. For “overrepresented” classes I have ~12000 examples (15%). When I train the model I use BCEWithLogitsLoss from pytorch with a positive weights parameter. I calculate the weights the same way as described in the documentation: the number of negative examples divided by the number of positives.
As a result, my model overestimates almost every class… Mor minor and major classes I get almost twice as many predictions as true labels. And my AUPRC is just 0.18. Even though it’s much better than no weighting at all, since in this case the model predicts everything as zero.
So my question is, how do I improve the performance? Is there anything else I can do? I tried different batch sampling techniques (to oversample minority class), but they don’t seem to work.
I would suggest either one of these strategies
Focal Loss
A very interesting approach for dealing with un-balanced training data through tweaking of the loss function was introduced in
Tsung-Yi Lin, Priya Goyal, Ross Girshick, Kaiming He and Piotr Dollar Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection (ICCV 2017).
They propose to modify the binary cross entropy loss in a way that decrease the loss and gradient of easily classified examples while "focusing the effort" on examples where the model makes gross errors.
Hard Negative Mining
Another popular approach is to do "hard negative mining"; that is, propagate gradients only for part of the training examples - the "hard" ones.
see, e.g.:
Abhinav Shrivastava, Abhinav Gupta and Ross Girshick Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining (CVPR 2016)
#Shai has provided two strategies developed in the deep learning era. I would like to provide you some additional traditional machine learning options: over-sampling and under-sampling.
The main idea of them is to produce a more balanced dataset by sampling before starting your training. Note that you probably will face some problems such as losing the data diversity (under-sampling) and overfitting the training data (over-sampling), but it might be a good start point.
See the wiki link for more information.

Confusion matrix for LDA

I’m trying to check the performance of my LDA model using a confusion matrix but I have no clue what to do. I’m hoping someone can maybe just point my in the right direction.
So I ran an LDA model on a corpus filled with short documents. I then calculated the average vector of each document and then proceeded with calculating cosine similarities.
How would I now get a confusion matrix? Please note that I am very new to the world of NLP. If there is some other/better way of checking the performance of this model please let me know.
What is your model supposed to be doing? And how is it testable?
In your question you haven't described your testable assessment of the model the results of which would be represented in a confusion matrix.
A confusion matrix helps you represent and explore the different types of "accuracy" of a predictive system such as a classifier. It requires your system to make a choice (e.g. yes/no, or multi-label classifier) and you must use known test data to be able to score it against how the system should have chosen. Then you count these results in the matrix as one of the combination of possibilities, e.g. for binary choices there's two wrong and two correct.
For example, if your cosine similarities are trying to predict if a document is in the same "category" as another, and you do know the real answers, then you can score them all as to whether they were predicted correctly or wrongly.
The four possibilities for a binary choice are:
Positive prediction vs. positive actual = True Positive (correct)
Negative prediction vs. negative actual = True Negative (correct)
Positive prediction vs. negative actual = False Positive (wrong)
Negative prediction vs. positive actual = False Negative (wrong)
It's more complicated in a multi-label system as there are more combinations, but the correct/wrong outcome is similar.
About "accuracy".
There are many kinds of ways to measure how well the system performs, so it's worth reading up on this before choosing the way to score the system. The term "accuracy" means something specific in this field, and is sometimes confused with the general usage of the word.
How you would use a confusion matrix.
The confusion matrix sums (of total TP, FP, TN, FN) can fed into some simple equations which give you, these performance ratings (which are referred to by different names in different fields):
sensitivity, d' (dee-prime), recall, hit rate, or true positive rate (TPR)
specificity, selectivity or true negative rate (TNR)
precision or positive predictive value (PPV)
negative predictive value (NPV)
miss rate or false negative rate (FNR)
fall-out or false positive rate (FPR)
false discovery rate (FDR)
false omission rate (FOR)
Accuracy
F Score
So you can see that Accuracy is a specific thing, but it may not be what you think of when you say "accuracy"! The last two are more complex combinations of measure. The F Score is perhaps the most robust of these, as it's tuneable to represent your requirements by combining a mix of other metrics.
I found this wikipedia article most useful and helped understand why sometimes is best to choose one metric over the other for your application (e.g. whether missing trues is worse than missing falses). There are a group of linked articles on the same topic, from different perspectives e.g. this one about search.
This is a simpler reference I found myself returning to: http://www2.cs.uregina.ca/~dbd/cs831/notes/confusion_matrix/confusion_matrix.html
This is about sensitivity, more from a science statistical view with links to ROC charts which are related to confusion matrices, and also useful for visualising and assessing performance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_index
This article is more specific to using these in machine learning, and goes into more detail: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs578/2003fa/performance_measures.pdf
So in summary confusion matrices are one of many tools to assess the performance of a system, but you need to define the right measure first.
Real world example
I worked through this process recently in a project I worked on where the point was to find all of few relevant documents from a large set (using cosine distances like yours). This was like a recommendation engine driven by manual labelling rather than an initial search query.
I drew up a list of goals with a stakeholder in their own terms from the project domain perspective, then tried to translate or map these goals into performance metrics and statistical terms. You can see it's not just a simple choice! The hugely imbalanced nature of our data set skewed the choice of metric as some assume balanced data or else they will give you misleading results.
Hopefully this example will help you move forward.

Loss functions in LightFM

I recently came across LightFM while learning to train a recommender system. And so far what I know is that it utilizes loss functions which are logistic, BPR, WARP and k-OS WARP. I did not go through the math behind all these functions. Now what I am confused about is that how will I know that which loss function to use where?
From lightfm model documentation page:
logistic: useful when both positive (1) and negative (-1) interactions are present.
BPR: Bayesian Personalised Ranking 1 pairwise loss. Maximises the prediction difference between a positive example and a randomly chosen negative example. Useful when only positive interactions are present and optimising ROC AUC is desired.
WARP: Weighted Approximate-Rank Pairwise [2] loss. Maximises the rank of positive examples by repeatedly sampling negative examples until rank violating one is found. Useful when only positive interactions are present and optimising the top of the recommendation list (precision#k) is desired.
k-OS WARP: k-th order statistic loss [3]. A modification of WARP that uses the k-the positive example for any given user as a basis for pairwise updates.
Everything boils down to how your dataset is structured and what kind of user interacions you're looking at. Obviously one approach would be to include the loss function in your parameter grid when going through hyperparameter tuning (at least that's what I did) and check model accuracy. I find investingating why a given loss function performed better/worse on a dataset as a good learning exercise.

Resources