Research surveys tend to fall on either end of the spectrum: either they are so high level and cursory in their treatment that they are useful only as a dictionary of terms in the field, or they are so deep and terse that the discussion can only be followed by those already experienced in the field. Ensemble Methods in Data Mining (Seni and Elder, 2010) strikes a good balance between these extremes. This book is an accessible introduction to the theory and practice of ensemble methods in machine learning, with sufficient detail for a novice to begin experimenting right away, and copious references for researchers interested in further details of algorithms and proofs. The treatment focuses on the use of decision trees as base learners (as they are the most common choice), but the principles discussed are applicable with any modeling algorithm. The authors also provide a nice discussion of cross-validation and of the more common regularization techniques.
The heart of the text is the chapter on the Importance Sampling. The authors frame the classic ensemble methods (bagging, boosting, and random forests) as special cases of the Importance Sampling methodology. This not only clarifies the explanations of each approach, but also provides a principled basis for finding improvements to the original algorithms. They have one of the clearest explanations of AdaBoost that I’ve ever read.
A major shortcoming of ensemble methods is the loss of interpretability, when compared to single-model methods such as Decision Trees or Linear Regression. The penultimate chapter is on “Rule Ensembles”: an attempt at a more interpretable ensemble learner. They also discuss measures for variable importance and interaction strength. The last chapter discusses Generalized Degrees of Freedom as an alternative complexity measure and its relationship to potential over-fit.
Overall, I found the book clear and concise, with good attention to practical details. I appreciated the snippets of R code and the references to relevant R packages. One minor nitpick: this book has also been published digitally, presumably with color figures. Because the print version is grayscale, some of the color-coded graphs are now illegible. Usually the major points of the figure are clear from the context in the text; still, the color to grayscale conversion is something for future authors in this series to keep in mind.
Recommended.
One of the recurring frustrations in data analytics is that your data is never in the right shape. Worst case: you are not aware of this and every step you attempt is more expensive, less reliable and less informative than you would want. Best case: you notice this and have the tools to reshape your data.
There is no final “right shape.” In fact even your data is never right. You will always be called to re-do your analysis (new variables, new data, corrections) so you should always understand you are on your “penultimate analysis” (always one more to come). This is why we insist on using general methods and scripted techniques, as these methods are much much easier to reliably reapply on new data than GUI/WYSWYG techniques.
In this article we will work a small example and call out some R tools that make reshaping your data much easier. The idea is to think in terms of “relational algebra” (like SQL) and transform your data towards your tools (and not to attempt to adapt your tools towards the data in an ad-hoc manner). Read more…
With the well deserved popularity of A/B testing computer scientists are finally becoming practicing statisticians. One part of experiment design that has always been particularly hard to teach is how to pick the size of your sample. The two points that are hard to communicate are that:
- The required sample size is essentially independent of the total population size.
- The required sample size depends strongly on the strength of the effect you are trying to measure.
These things are only hard to explain because the literature is overly technical (too many buzzwords and too many irrelevant concerns) and these misapprehensions can’t be relieved unless you spend some time addressing the legitimate underlying concerns they are standing in for. As usual explanation requires common ground (moving to shared assumptions) not mere technical bullying.
We will try to work through these assumptions and then discuss proper sample size. Read more…
This is a tutorial on how to try out a new package in R. The summary is: expect errors, search out errors and don’t start with the built in examples or real data.
Suppose you want to try out a novel statistical technique? A good fraction of the time R is your best bet for a first trial. Take as an example general additive models (“Generalized Additive Models,” Trevor J Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, Statistical Science (1986) vol. 1 (3) pp. 297-318); R has a package named “gam” written by Trevor Hastie himself. But, like most R packages, trying the package from the supplied documentation brings in unfamiliar data and concerns. It is best to start small and quickly test if the package itself is suitable to your needs. We give a quick outline of how to learn such a package and quickly find out if the package is for you.
Read more…
Living in the age of big data we ask what to do when we have the good fortune to be presented with a huge amount of supervised training data? Most often at large scale we are presented with the un-supervised problems of characterization and information extraction; but some problem domains offer an almost limitless supply of supervised training data (such as using older data to build models that predict the near future). Having too much training data is a good problem to have and there are ways to use traditional methods (like logistic regression) at this scale. We present an “out of core” logistic regression implementation and a quick example in Apache Hadoop running on Amazon Elastic MapReduce. This presentation assumes familiarity with Unix style command lines, Java and Hadoop. Read more…
One of the current best tools in the machine learning toolbox is the 1930s statistical technique called logistic regression. We explain how to add professional quality logistic regression to your analytic repertoire and describe a bit beyond that. Read more…
Having a bit of history as both a user of machine learning and a researcher in the field I feel I have developed a useful perspective on the various trends, flavors and nuances in machine learning and artificial intelligence. I thought I would take a moment to outline a bit of it here and demonstrate how what we call artificial intelligence is becoming more statistical in nature. Read more…
This article is a quick appreciation of some of the statistical, analytic and philosphic techniques of Deming, Wald and Boyd. Many of these techniques have become pillars of modern industry through the sciences of statistics and operations research.
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Readers returning to our blog will know that Win-Vector LLC is fairly “pro-R.” You can take that to mean “in favor or R” or “professionally using R” (both statements are true). Some days we really don’t feel that way. Read more…
Recently, we had a client come to us with (among other things) the following question:
Who is more valuable, Customer Type A, or Customer Type B?
This client already tracked the net profit and loss generated by every customer who used his services, and had begun to analyze his customers by group. He was especially interested in Customer Type A; his gut instinct told him that Type A customers were quite profitable compared to the others (Type B) and he wanted to back up this feeling with numbers.
He found that, on average, Type A customers generate about $92 profit per month, and Type B customers average about $115 per month (The data and figures that we are using in this discussion aren’t actual client data, of course, but a notional example). He also found that while Type A customers make up about 4% of the customer base, they generate less than 4% of the net profit per month. So Type A customers actually seem to be less profitable than Type B customers. Apparently, our client was mistaken.
Or was he? Read more…