Posted on 1 Comment on When Cross-Validation is More Powerful than Regularization

## When Cross-Validation is More Powerful than Regularization

Regularization is a way of avoiding overfit by restricting the magnitude of model coefficients (or in deep learning, node weights). A simple example of regularization is the use of ridge or lasso regression to fit linear models in the presence of collinear variables or (quasi-)separation. The intuition is that smaller coefficients are less sensitive to idiosyncracies in the training data, and hence, less likely to overfit.

Cross-validation is a way to safely reuse training data in nested model situations. This includes both the case of setting hyperparameters before fitting a model, and the case of fitting models (let’s call them base learners) that are then used as variables in downstream models, as shown in Figure 1. In either situation, using the same data twice can lead to models that are overtuned to idiosyncracies in the training data, and more likely to overfit.

In general, if any stage of your modeling pipeline involves looking at the outcome (we’ll call that a y-aware stage), you cannot directly use the same data in the following stage of the pipeline. If you have enough data, you can use separate data in each stage of the modeling process (for example, one set of data to learn hyperparameters, another set of data to train the model that uses those hyperparameters). Otherwise, you should use cross-validation to reduce the nested model bias.

Cross-validation is relatively computationally expensive; regularization is relatively cheap. Can you mitigate nested model bias by using regularization techniques instead of cross-validation?

The short answer: no, you shouldn’t. But as, we’ve written before, demonstrating this is more memorable than simply saying “Don’t do that.”

## A simple example

Suppose you have a system with two categorical variables. The variable x_s has 10 levels, and the variable x_n has 100 levels. The outcome y is a function of x_s, but not of x_n (but you, the analyst building the model, don’t know this). Here’s the head of the data.

##     x_s  x_n           y
## 2  s_10 n_72  0.34228110
## 3  s_01 n_09 -0.03805102
## 4  s_03 n_18 -0.92145960
## 9  s_08 n_43  1.77069352
## 10 s_08 n_17  0.51992928
## 11 s_01 n_78  1.04714355

With most modeling techniques, a categorical variable with K levels is equivalent to K or K-1 numerical (indicator or dummy) variables, so this system actually has around 110 variables. In real life situations where a data scientist is working with high-cardinality categorical variables, or with a lot of categorical variables, the number of actual variables can begin to swamp the size of training data, and/or bog down the machine learning algorithm.

One way to deal with these issues is to represent each categorical variable by a single variable model (or base learner), and then use the predictions of those base learners as the inputs to a bigger model. So instead of fitting a model with 110 indicator variables, you can fit a model with two numerical variables. This is a simple example of nested models.

We refer to this procedure as “impact coding,” and it is one of the data treatments available in the vtreat package, specifically for dealing with high-cardinality categorical variables. But for now, let’s go back to the original problem.

## The naive way

For this simple example, you might try representing each variable as the expected value of y - mean(y) in the training data, conditioned on the variable’s level. So the ith “coefficient” of the one-variable model would be given by:

vi = E[y|x = si] − E[y]

Where si is the ith level. Let’s show this with the variable x_s (the code for all the examples in this article is here):

##     x_s      meany      coeff
## 1  s_01  0.7998263  0.8503282
## 2  s_02 -1.3815640 -1.3310621
## 3  s_03 -0.7928449 -0.7423430
## 4  s_04 -0.8245088 -0.7740069
## 5  s_05  0.7547054  0.8052073
## 6  s_06  0.1564710  0.2069728
## 7  s_07 -1.1747557 -1.1242539
## 8  s_08  1.3520153  1.4025171
## 9  s_09  1.5789785  1.6294804
## 10 s_10 -0.7313895 -0.6808876

In other words, whenever the value of x_s is s_01, the one variable model vs returns the value 0.8503282, and so on. If you do this for both variables, you get a training set that looks like this:

##     x_s  x_n           y         vs         vn
## 2  s_10 n_72  0.34228110 -0.6808876 0.64754957
## 3  s_01 n_09 -0.03805102  0.8503282 0.54991135
## 4  s_03 n_18 -0.92145960 -0.7423430 0.01923877
## 9  s_08 n_43  1.77069352  1.4025171 1.90394159
## 10 s_08 n_17  0.51992928  1.4025171 0.26448341
## 11 s_01 n_78  1.04714355  0.8503282 0.70342961

Now fit a linear model for y as a function of vs and vn.

model_raw = lm(y ~ vs + vn,
data=dtrain_treated)
summary(model_raw)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = y ~ vs + vn, data = dtrain_treated)
##
## Residuals:
##      Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max
## -2.33068 -0.57106  0.00342  0.52488  2.25472
##
## Coefficients:
##             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) -0.05050    0.05597  -0.902    0.368
## vs           0.77259    0.05940  13.006   <2e-16 ***
## vn           0.61201    0.06906   8.862   <2e-16 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 0.8761 on 242 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.6382, Adjusted R-squared:  0.6352
## F-statistic: 213.5 on 2 and 242 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

Note that this model gives significant coefficients to both vs and vn, even though y is not a function of x_n (or vn). Because you used the same data to fit the one variable base learners and to fit the larger model, you have overfit.

## The right way: cross-validation

The correct way to impact code (or to nest models in general) is to use cross-validation techniques. Impact coding with cross-validation is already implemented in vtreat; note the similarity between this diagram and Figure 1 above.

The training data is used both to fit the base learners (as we did above) and to also to create a data frame of cross-validated base learner predictions (called a cross-frame in vtreat). This cross-frame is used to train the overall model. Let’s fit the correct nested model, using vtreat.

library(vtreat)
library(wrapr)
xframeResults = mkCrossFrameNExperiment(dtrain,
qc(x_s, x_n), "y",
codeRestriction = qc(catN),
verbose = FALSE)
# the plan uses the one-variable models to treat data
treatmentPlan = xframeResults$treatments # the cross-frame dtrain_treated = xframeResults$crossFrame

head(dtrain_treated)
##     x_s_catN   x_n_catN           y
## 1 -0.6337889 0.91241547  0.34228110
## 2  0.8342227 0.82874089 -0.03805102
## 3 -0.7020597 0.18198634 -0.92145960
## 4  1.3983175 1.99197404  1.77069352
## 5  1.3983175 0.11679580  0.51992928
## 6  0.8342227 0.06421659  1.04714355
variables = setdiff(colnames(dtrain_treated), "y")

model_X = lm(mk_formula("y", variables),
data=dtrain_treated)
summary(model_X)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = mk_formula("y", variables), data = dtrain_treated)
##
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max
## -3.2157 -0.7343  0.0225  0.7483  2.9639
##
## Coefficients:
##             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) -0.04169    0.06745  -0.618    0.537
## x_s_catN     0.92968    0.06344  14.656   <2e-16 ***
## x_n_catN     0.10204    0.06654   1.533    0.126
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 1.055 on 242 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.4753, Adjusted R-squared:  0.471
## F-statistic: 109.6 on 2 and 242 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

This model correctly determines that x_n (and its one-variable model x_n_catN) do not affect the outcome. We can compare the performance of this model to the naive model on holdout data.

rmse rsquared
ypred_naive 1.303778 0.2311538
ypred_crossval 1.093955 0.4587089

The correct model has a much smaller root-mean-squared error and a much larger R-squared than the naive model when applied to new data.

## An attempted alternative: regularized models.

But cross-validation is so complicated. Can’t we just regularize? As we’ll show in the appendix of this article, for a one-variable model, L2-regularization is simply Laplace smoothing. Again, we’ll represent each “coefficient” of the one-variable model as the Laplace smoothed value minus the grand mean.

vi = ∑xj = si yi/(counti + λ) − E[yi]

Where counti is the frequency of si in the training data, and λ is the smoothing parameter (usually 1). If λ = 1 then the first term on the right is just adding one to the frequency of the level and then taking the “adjusted conditional mean” of y.

Again, let’s show this for the variable x_s.

##     x_s      sum_y count_y   grandmean         vs
## 1  s_01  20.795484      26 -0.05050187  0.8207050
## 2  s_02 -37.302227      27 -0.05050187 -1.2817205
## 3  s_03 -22.199656      28 -0.05050187 -0.7150035
## 4  s_04 -14.016649      17 -0.05050187 -0.7282009
## 5  s_05  19.622340      26 -0.05050187  0.7772552
## 6  s_06   3.129419      20 -0.05050187  0.1995218
## 7  s_07 -35.242672      30 -0.05050187 -1.0863585
## 8  s_08  36.504412      27 -0.05050187  1.3542309
## 9  s_09  33.158549      21 -0.05050187  1.5577086
## 10 s_10 -16.821957      23 -0.05050187 -0.6504130

After applying the one variable models for x_s and x_n to the data, the head of the resulting treated data looks like this:

##     x_s  x_n           y         vs         vn
## 2  s_10 n_72  0.34228110 -0.6504130 0.44853367
## 3  s_01 n_09 -0.03805102  0.8207050 0.42505898
## 4  s_03 n_18 -0.92145960 -0.7150035 0.02370493
## 9  s_08 n_43  1.77069352  1.3542309 1.28612835
## 10 s_08 n_17  0.51992928  1.3542309 0.21098803
## 11 s_01 n_78  1.04714355  0.8207050 0.61015422

Now fit the overall model:

##
## Call:
## lm(formula = y ~ vs + vn, data = dtrain_treated)
##
## Residuals:
##      Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max
## -2.30354 -0.57688 -0.02224  0.56799  2.25723
##
## Coefficients:
##             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) -0.06665    0.05637  -1.182    0.238
## vs           0.81142    0.06203  13.082  < 2e-16 ***
## vn           0.85393    0.09905   8.621  8.8e-16 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 0.8819 on 242 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.6334, Adjusted R-squared:  0.6304
## F-statistic: 209.1 on 2 and 242 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

Again, both variables look significant. Even with regularization, the model is still overfit. Comparing the performance of the models on holdout data, you see that the regularized model does a little better than the naive model, but not as well as the correctly cross-validated model.

rmse rsquared
ypred_naive 1.303778 0.2311538
ypred_crossval 1.093955 0.4587089
ypred_reg 1.267648 0.2731756

## The Moral of the Story

Unfortunately, regularization is not enough to overcome nested model bias. Whenever you apply a y-aware process to your data, you have to use cross-validation methods (or a separate data set) at the next stage of your modeling pipeline.

### Appendix: Derivation of Laplace Smoothing as L2-Regularization

Without regularization, the optimal one-variable model for y in terms of a categorical variable with K levels {sj} is a set of K coefficients v such that

$f(\mathbf{v}) := \sum\limits_{i=1}^N (y_i - v_i)^2$

is minimized (N is the number of data points). L2-regularization adds a penalty to the magnitude of v, so that the goal is to minimize

$f(\mathbf{v}) := \sum\limits_{i=1}^N (y_i - v_i)^2 + \lambda \sum\limits_{j=1}^K {v_j}^2$

where λ is a known smoothing hyperparameter, usually set (in this case) to 1.

To minimize the above expression for a single coefficient vj, take the deriviative with respect to vj and set it to zero:

$\sum\nolimits_{x_i = s_j} -2 (y_i - v_j) + 2 \lambda v_j = 0\\ \sum\nolimits_{x_i = s_j }-y_i + \sum\nolimits_{x_i = s_j} v_j + \lambda v_j = 0\\ \sum\nolimits_{x_i = s_j }-y_i + \text{count}_j v_j + \lambda v_j = 0$

Where countj is the number of times the level sj appears in the training data. Now solve for vj:

$v_j (\text{count}_j + \lambda) = \sum\nolimits_{x_i = s_j} y_i\\ v_j = \sum\nolimits_{x_i = s_i} y_i / (\text{count}_j + \lambda)$

This is Laplace smoothing. Note that it is also the one-variable equivalent of ridge regression.

Posted on

## Lord Kelvin, Data Scientist

In 1876 A. Légé & Co., 20 Cross Street, Hatton Gardens, London completed the first “tide calculating machine” for William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) (ref).

The results were plotted on the paper cylinders, and one literally “turned the crank” to perform the calculations.

The tide calculating machine embodied ideas of Sir Isaac Newton, and Pierre-Simon Laplace (ref), and could predict tide driven water levels by the means of wheels and gears.

The question is: can modern data science tools quickly forecast tides to similar accuracy?

Posted on

## Link Functions versus Data Transforms

In the linear regression section of our book Practical Data Science in R, we use the example of predicting income from a number of demographic variables (age, sex, education and employment type). In the text, we choose to regress against log10(income) rather than directly against income.

One obvious reason for not regressing directly against income is that (in our example) income is restricted to be non-negative, a restraint that linear regression can’t enforce. Other reasons include the wide distribution of values and the relative or multiplicative structure of errors on outcomes. A common practice in this situation is to use Poisson regression, or generalized linear regression with a log-link function. Like all generalized linear regressions, Poisson regression is unbiased and calibrated: it preserves the conditional expectations and rollups of the training data. A calibrated model is important in many applications, particularly when financial data is involved.

Regressing against the log of the outcome will not be calibrated; however it has the advantage that the resulting model will have lower relative error than a Poisson regression against income. Minimizing relative error is appropriate in situations when differences are naturally expressed in percentages rather than in absolute amounts. Again, this is common when financial data is involved: raises in salary tend to be in terms of percentage of income, not in absolute dollar increments.

Unfortunately, a full discussion of the differences between Poisson regression and regressing against log amounts was outside of the scope of our book, so we will discuss it in this note.

Posted on 1 Comment on On indexing operators and composition

## On indexing operators and composition

In this article I will discuss array indexing, operators, and composition in depth. If you work through this article you should end up with a very deep understanding of array indexing and the deep interpretation available when we realize indexing is an instance of function composition (or an example of permutation groups or semigroups: some very deep yet accessible pure mathematics).

In this article I will be working hard to convince you a very fundamental true statement is in fact true: array indexing is associative; and to simultaneously convince you that you should still consider this amazing (as it is a very strong claim with very many consequences). Array indexing respecting associative transformations should not be a-priori intuitive to the general programmer, as array indexing code is rarely re-factored or transformed, so programmers tend to have little experience with the effect. Consider this article an exercise to build the experience to make this statement a posteriori obvious, and hence something you are more comfortable using and relying on.

R‘s array indexing notation is really powerful, so we will use it for our examples. This is going to be long (because I am trying to slow the exposition down enough to see all the steps and relations) and hard to follow without working examples (say with R), and working through the logic with pencil and a printout (math is not a spectator sport). I can’t keep all the steps in my head without paper, so I don’t really expect readers to keep all the steps in their heads without paper (though I have tried to organize the flow of this article and signal intent often enough to make this readable). Continue reading On indexing operators and composition

Posted on

## Introduction

In teaching thinking in terms of coordinatized data we find the hardest operations to teach are joins and pivot.

One thing we commented on is that moving data values into columns, or into a “thin” or entity/attribute/value form (often called “un-pivoting”, “stacking”, “melting” or “gathering“) is easy to explain, as the operation is a function that takes a single row and builds groups of new rows in an obvious manner. We commented that the inverse operation of moving data into rows, or the “widening” operation (often called “pivoting”, “unstacking”, “casting”, or “spreading”) is harder to explain as it takes a specific group of columns and maps them back to a single row. However, if we take extra care and factor the pivot operation into its essential operations we find pivoting can be usefully conceptualized as a simple single row to single row mapping followed by a grouped aggregation.

Please read on for our thoughts on teaching pivoting data. Continue reading Teaching pivot / un-pivot

Posted on Categories art, Expository Writing, Opinion1 Comment on Visualizing relational joins

## Visualizing relational joins

I want to discuss a nice series of figures used to teach relational join semantics in R for Data Science by Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham, O’Reilly 2016. Below is an example from their book illustrating an inner join:

Please read on for my discussion of this diagram and teaching joins. Continue reading Visualizing relational joins

Posted on 1 Comment on Coordinatized Data: A Fluid Data Specification

## Introduction

It has been our experience when teaching the data wrangling part of data science that students often have difficulty understanding the conversion to and from row-oriented and column-oriented data formats (what is commonly called pivoting and un-pivoting).

Real trust and understanding of this concept doesn’t fully form until one realizes that rows and columns are inessential implementation details when reasoning about your data. Many algorithms are sensitive to how data is arranged in rows and columns, so there is a need to convert between representations. However, confusing representation with semantics slows down understanding.

In this article we will try to separate representation from semantics. We will advocate for thinking in terms of coordinatized data, and demonstrate advanced data wrangling in R.

Posted on 1 Comment on Laplace noising versus simulated out of sample methods (cross frames)

## Laplace noising versus simulated out of sample methods (cross frames)

Nina Zumel recently mentioned the use of Laplace noise in “count codes” by Misha Bilenko (see here and here) as a known method to break the overfit bias that comes from using the same data to design impact codes and fit a next level model. It is a fascinating method inspired by differential privacy methods, that Nina and I respect but don’t actually use in production.

Please read on for my discussion of some of the limitations of the technique, and how we solve the problem for impact coding (also called “effects codes”), and a worked example in R. Continue reading Laplace noising versus simulated out of sample methods (cross frames)

Posted on Categories Expository Writing, Mathematics, Opinion, Statistics, Tutorials1 Comment on Relative error distributions, without the heavy tail theatrics

## Relative error distributions, without the heavy tail theatrics

Nina Zumel prepared an excellent article on the consequences of working with relative error distributed quantities (such as wealth, income, sales, and many more) called “Living in A Lognormal World.” The article emphasizes that if you are dealing with such quantities you are already seeing effects of relative error distributions (so it isn’t an exotic idea you bring to analysis, it is a likely fact about the world that comes at you). The article is a good example of how to plot and reason about such situations.

I am just going to add a few additional references (mostly from Nina) and some more discussion on log-normal distributions versus Zipf-style distributions or Pareto distributions. Continue reading Relative error distributions, without the heavy tail theatrics