Tag Archives: R

data science, Expository Writing, Practical Data Science, Pragmatic Data Science, Pragmatic Machine Learning, Statistics

Does Balancing Classes Improve Classifier Performance?

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It’s a folk theorem I sometimes hear from colleagues and clients: that you must balance the class prevalence before training a classifier. Certainly, I believe that classification tends to be easier when the classes are nearly balanced, especially when the class you are actually interested in is the rarer one. But I have always been skeptical of the claim that artificially balancing the classes (through resampling, for instance) always helps, when the model is to be run on a population with the native class prevalences.

On the other hand, there are situations where balancing the classes, or at least enriching the prevalence of the rarer class, might be necessary, if not desirable. Fraud detection, anomaly detection, or other situations where positive examples are hard to get, can fall into this case. In this situation, I’ve suspected (without proof) that SVM would perform well, since the formulation of hard-margin SVM is pretty much distribution-free. Intuitively speaking, if both classes are far away from the margin, then it shouldn’t matter whether the rare class is 10% or 49% of the population. In the soft-margin case, of course, distribution starts to matter again, but perhaps not as strongly as with other classifiers like logistic regression, which explicitly encodes the distribution of the training data.

So let’s run a small experiment to investigate this question.

Continue reading Does Balancing Classes Improve Classifier Performance? →

Coding, Expository Writing, Rants, Statistics

R bracket is a bit irregular

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While skimming Professor Hadley Wickham’s Advanced R I got to thinking about nature of the square-bracket or extract operator in R. It turns out “[,]” is a bit more irregular than I remembered.

The subsetting section of Advanced R has a very good discussion on the subsetting and selection operators found in R. In particular it raises the important distinction of two simultaneously valuable but incompatible desiderata: simplification of results versus preservation of results. Continue reading R bracket is a bit irregular →

Coding, Computer Science, data science, Expository Writing, math programming, Pragmatic Machine Learning, Statistics

The Geometry of Classifiers

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As John mentioned in his last post, we have been quite interested in the recent study by Fernandez-Delgado, et.al., “Do we Need Hundreds of Classifiers to Solve Real World Classification Problems?” (the “DWN study” for short), which evaluated 179 popular implementations of common classification algorithms over 120 or so data sets, mostly from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. For fun, we decided to do a follow-up study, using their data and several classifier implementations from scikit-learn, the Python machine learning library. We were interested not just in classifier accuracy, but also in seeing if there is a “geometry” of classifiers: which classifiers produce predictions patterns that look similar to each other, and which classifiers produce predictions that are quite different? To examine these questions, we put together a Shiny app to interactively explore how the relative behavior of classifiers changes for different types of data sets.

Continue reading The Geometry of Classifiers →

data science, Pragmatic Data Science, Statistics, Tutorials

A comment on preparing data for classifiers

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I have been working through (with some honest appreciation) a recent article comparing many classifiers on many data sets: “Do we Need Hundreds of Classifiers to Solve Real World Classification Problems?” Manuel Fernández-Delgado, Eva Cernadas, Senén Barro, Dinani Amorim; 15(Oct):3133−3181, 2014 (which we will call “the DWN paper” in this note). This paper applies 179 popular classifiers to around 120 data sets (mostly from the UCI Machine Learning Repository). The work looks good and interesting, but we do have one quibble with the data-prep on 8 of the 123 shared data sets. Given the paper is already out (not just in pre-print) I think it is appropriate to comment publicly. Continue reading A comment on preparing data for classifiers →

data science, Opinion, Pragmatic Data Science, Public Service Article, Rants, Tutorials

Excel spreadsheets are hard to get right

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Any practicing data scientist is going to eventually have to work with a data stored in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. A lot of analysts use this format, so if you work with others you are going to run into it. We have already written how we don’t recommend using Excel-like formats to exchange data. But we know if you are going to work with others you are going to have to make accommodations (we even built our own modified version of gdata‘s underlying Perl script to work around a bug).

But one thing that continues to confound us is how hard it is to read Excel data correctly. When Excel exports into CSV/TSV style formats it uses fairly clever escaping rules about quotes and new-lines. Most CSV/TSV readers fail to correctly implement these rules and often fail on fields that contain actual quote characters, separators (tab or comma), or new-lines. Another issue is Excel itself often transforms data without any user verification or control. For example: Excel routinely turns date-like strings into time since epoch (which it then renders as a date). We recently ran into another uncontrollable Excel transform: changing the strings “TRUE” and “FALSE” into 1 and 0 inside the actual “.xlsx” file. That is Excel does not faithfully store the strings “TRUE” and “FALSE” even in its native format. Most Excel users do not know about this, so they certainly are in no position to warn you about it.

This would be a mere annoyance, except it turns out Libre Office (or at least LibreOffice_4.3.4_MacOS_x86-64) has a severe and silent data mangling bug on this surprising Microsoft boolean type.

We first ran into this in client data (and once the bug triggered it seemed to alter most of the columns), but it turns out the bug is very easy to trigger. In this note we will demonstrate the data representation issue and bug. Continue reading Excel spreadsheets are hard to get right →

Expository Writing, Statistics, Statistics To English Translation

Estimating Generalization Error with the PRESS statistic

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As we’ve mentioned on previous occasions, one of the defining characteristics of data science is the emphasis on the availability of “large” data sets, which we define as “enough data that statistical efficiency is not a concern” (note that a “large” data set need not be “big data,” however you choose to define it). In particular, we advocate the use of hold-out data to evaluate the performance of models.

There is one caveat: if you are evaluating a series of models to pick the best (and you usually are), then a single hold-out set is strictly speaking not enough. Hastie, et.al, say it best:

Ideally, the test set should be kept in a “vault,” and be brought out only at the end of the data analysis. Suppose instead that we use the test-set repeatedly, choosing the model with smallest test-set error. Then the test set error of the final chosen model will underestimate the true test error, sometimes substantially.

– Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman, The Elements of Statistical Learning, 2nd edition.

The ideal way to select a model from a set of candidates (or set parameters for a model, for example the regularization constant) is to use a training set to train the model(s), a calibration set to select the model or choose parameters, and a test set to estimate the generalization error of the final model.

In many situations, breaking your data into three sets may not be practical: you may not have very much data, or the the phenomena you’re interested in are rare enough that you need a lot of data to detect them. In those cases, you will need more statistically efficient estimates for generalization error or goodness-of-fit. In this article, we look at the PRESS statistic, and how to use it to estimate generalization error and choose between models.

Continue reading Estimating Generalization Error with the PRESS statistic →

Computer Science, Opinion, Practical Data Science, Pragmatic Data Science, Programming, Rants, Statistics

Factors are not first-class citizens in R

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The primary user-facing data types in the R statistical computing environment behave as vectors. That is: one dimensional arrays of scalar values that have a nice operational algebra. There are additional types (lists, data frames, matrices, environments, and so-on) but the most common data types are vectors. In fact vectors are so common in R that scalar values such as the number 5 are actually represented as length-1 vectors. We commonly think about working over vectors of “logical”, “integer”, “numeric”, “complex”, “character”, and “factor” types. However, a “factor” is not a R vector. In fact “factor” is not a first-class citizen in R, which can lead to some ugly bugs.

For example, consider the following R code.

levels <- c('a','b','c')
f <- factor(c('c','a','a',NA,'b','a'),levels=levels)
print(f)
## [1] c    a    a    <NA> b    a   
## Levels: a b c
print(class(f))
## [1] "factor"

This example encoding a series of 6 observations into a known set of factor-levels ('a', 'b', and 'c'). As is the case with real data some of the positions might be missing/invalid values such as NA. One of the strengths of R is we have a uniform explicit representation of bad values, so with appropriate domain knowledge we can find and fix such problems. Suppose we knew (by policy or domain experience) that the level 'a' was a suitable default value to use when the actual data is missing/invalid. You would think the following code would be the reasonable way to build a new revised data column.

fRevised <- ifelse(is.na(f),'a',f)
print(fRevised)
##  [1] "3" "1" "1" "a" "2" "1"
print(class(fRevised))
## [1] "character"

Notice the new column fRevised is an absolute mess (and not even of class/type factor). This sort of fix would have worked if f had been a vector of characters or even a vector of integers, but for factors we get gibberish.

We are going to work through some more examples of this problem. Continue reading Factors are not first-class citizens in R →