Exogenous variables in hmmlearn's GaussianHMM - statsmodels

I am trying to use hmmlearn's GaussianHMM to fit a Hidden Markov Model with 2 main states, while allowing for multiple exogenous variables. My goal is to determine two states of GDP growth (one with low variance and the other with high variance), these states then depend on lagged unemployment, lagged commercial confidence level etc. I have a couple of questions:
Using hmmlearn's GaussiansHMM, I have read through the documentation but I cannot find any mention of exogenous variable. Using the method fit(X, lengths=None), I see that X can have n_features columns, do I understand correctly that I should pass in an array with the first column being the endogenous varible (GDP growth in my case) and the rest of columns are the exogenous variables ?
Is hmmlearn's GaussianHMM equivalent to statsmodels.tsa.regime_switching.markov_regression.MarkovRegression ? This model allows for exog_tvtp which means that exogenous variables are used to calculate a time varying transition probabilities matrix.
An example of fitting the monthly returns of the S&P500, no exogenous variable.
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
from hmmlearn.hmm import GaussianHMM
import yfinance as yf
sp500 = yf.download("^GSPC")["Adj Close"]
# Fitting an absolute return model because we only care about volatility #
rets = np.log(sp500/sp500.shift(1)).dropna()
rets.index = pd.to_datetime(rets.index)
rets = rets.resample("M").sum()
model = GaussianHMM(n_components=2)
model.fit(rets.to_frame())
state_sequence = model.predict(rets.to_frame())
Imagine if I want to add a dependency on exogenous variables to the returns of the S&P500, for example on economic growth or past volatilities, is there a way to do this ?
Thanks for any help.

n_features can be thought of as the temporal domain, and should not be conflated with features that describe the complexity of ie. a regression model.
If your hidden states are the two states of GDP growth, then the observed variable (or emissions) that you are trying to infer the hidden states from should be the feature space (a.k.a. n_features).
This should be a single measurement (emission) descriptive of a combination of your "exogenous variables", collected over time. hmmlearn will not be able to take multivariate emissions.
Suggestions
If I understand your question correctly, perhaps what you might be looking for are Kalman filters. KF produces estimates of unknowns based on multiple measurements (ie. all of your exogenous variables) that ultimately produce a model more accurate than those based on a single measurement.
If you wish each hidden state to have multiple independent emissions then what you might be looking for is a structured perceptron. This is discussed here: Hidden Markov Model for multiple observed variables

Related

How to define lmfit model for complex functions?

I am working on cole cole model which basically exhibits how the permittivity varies with respect to frequency and is given by;
Where, ε_∞ is the higher permittivity,
ε_s is the static permittivity ε_s>ε_∞,
ε_(o) is 8.854e-12,
ω=2πf,
α is the relaxation time 0≪α≪1
σ is the conductivity (can be a CONSTANT)
I tried one of the examples given here https://lmfit.github.io/lmfit-py/examples/example_complex_resonator_model.html but was not able to follow along.
Currently I have frequency vs real permittivity data. I want to fit the model to my measured data by using lmfit and guess the values from the fit. Basically i want to fit the real part of permittivity to the model.

Why the decision tree algorithm in python change every run?

I am following a course on udemy about data science with python.
The course is focused on the output of the algorithm and less on the algorithm by itself.
In particular I am performing a decision tree. Every doing I run the algorithm on python, also with the same samples, the algorithm gives me a slightly different decision tree. I have asked to the tutors and they told me "The decision trees does not guarantee the same results each run because of its nature." Someone can explain me why more in detail or maybe give me an advice for a good book about it?
I did the decision tree of my data importing:
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
from sklearn import tree
and doing this command:
clf = tree.DecisionTreeClassifier()
clf = clf.fit(X,y)
where X are my feature data and y is my target data
Thank you
The DecisionTreeClassifier() function is apparently documented here:
https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.tree.DecisionTreeClassifier.html
So this function has many arguments. But in Python, function arguments may have default values. Here, all arguments have default values, so you can even call the function with an empty argument list, like this:
clf = tree.DecisionTreeClassifier()
The parameter of interest, random_state is documented like this:
random_state: int, RandomState instance or None, default=None
So your call is equivalent to, among many other things:
clf = tree.DecisionTreeClassifier(random_state=None)
The None value tells the library that you don't want to bother with providing a seed (that is, an initial state) to the underlying pseudo-random number generator. Hence, the library has to come up with some seed.
Typically, it will take the current time value, with microsecond precision if possible, and apply some hash function. So at every call you will get a different initial state, and so a different sequence of pseudo-random numbers. Hence, a different tree.
You might want to try forcing the seed. For example:
clf = tree.DecisionTreeClassifier(random_state=42)
and see if your problem persists.
Now, regarding why does the decision tree require pseudo-random numbers, this is discussed for example here:
According to scikit-learn’s “best” and “random” implementation [4], both the “best” splitter and the “random” splitter uses Fisher-Yates-based algorithm to compute a permutation of the features array.
The Fisher-Yates algorithm is the most common way to compute a random permutation. Also, if stopped before completion, it can be used to extract a random subset of the data sample, for example if you need a random 10% of the sample to be excluded from the data fitting and set aside for a later cross-validation step.
Side note: in some circumstances, non-reproducibility can become a pain point, for example if you want to study the influence of an external parameter, say some global Y values bias. In that case, you don't want uncontrolled changes in the random numbers to blur the effects of your parameter changes. Hence the need for the API to provide some way to control the seed value.

How do I intuitively interpret a sigmoidal neural network model?

There are multiple sources, but they explain at a bit too high a level for me a to actually understand.
Here is my knowledge of how this model works;
We feed-forward information in prior layer's nodes using the weight * value. We do NOT use the sigmoid function here. This is because any hidden layers will force the value to be POSITIVE if we use the sigmoid function here. If it is always positive, then subsequent values can never be less than 0.5.
When we have fed forward to the output, we then use the sigmoid function on the output.
So in total we only use the sigmoid function on the output layer values only.
I will try to include a hopefully not terrible diagram
https://imgur.com/a/4EzkpH5
I have tested with my own code, and evidently it should not be the sigmoid function on every value and weight, but I am unsure if it is just the sum of weight*value
So basically you have a set of features for your model. These features are independent variables which will be responsible for producing of the output. So features are the inputs and the predicted values are the outputs. This is indeed a function.
It is easy to understand neural networks if we study them in terms of functions.
First multiply the feature vector with the vector of weights. Meaning, the dot product of the both vectors must be produced.
The dot product is a scalar if you have a single node ( neuron ). Apply sigmoid function on the product. The output is the final prediction.
The whole model could be expressed as a single composite function like,
y = sigmoid( dot( w , x ) )
Also understanding back propogation ( gradient descent ) for NN makes some intuition if we treat NN as functions.
In the above function,
sigmoid : applies sigmoid activation function to the argument.
dot : returns the dot product of two vectors.
Also, use vector notation as far as possible. It saves you from the confusion related with summations.
Hope it helps.
Activation functions serve an important role in neural network models: they can, given the choice of activation function, grant the network the capability to model non-linear datasets.
The example illustrated in the figure you posted (rendered below) will be limited to model linear problems where the output value is between 0 and 1 (the range of the sigmoidal function). However, the model would support non-linear datasets if the sigmoidal was applied to the two nodes in the middle. StackOverflow is not the place to discuss the theoretic foundation of why this works, instead I recommend looking into some light reading like this ebook: Neural Networks and Deep Learning (no affiliation).
As a side note: the final, output layer of a network are sometimes instantiated as a simple sum, or a ReLU. This will widen the range of the network's output.

An understandable clusterization

I have a dataset. Each element of this set consists of numerical and categorical variables. Categorical variables are nominal and ordinal.
There is some natural structure in this dataset. Commonly, experts clusterize datasets such as mine using their 'expert knowledge', but I want to automate this process of clusterization.
Most algorithms for clusterization use distance (Euclidean, Mahalanobdis and so on) between objects to group them in clusters. But it is hard to find some reasonable metrics for mixed data types, i.e. we can't find a distance between 'glass' and 'steel'. So I came to the conclusion that I have to use conditional probabilities P(feature = 'something' | Class) and some utility function that depends on them. It is reasonable for categorical variables, and it works fine with numeric variables assuming they are distributed normally.
So it became clear to me that algorithms like K-means will not produce good results.
At this time I try to work with COBWEB algorithm, that fully matches my ideas of using conditional probabilities. But I faced another obsacles: results of clusterization are really hard to interpret, if not impossible. As a result I wanted to get something like a set of rules that describes each cluster (e.g. if feature1 = 'a' and feature2 in [30, 60], it is cluster1), like descision trees for classification.
So, my question is:
Is there any existing clusterization algorithm that works with mixed data type and produces an understandable (and reasonable for humans) description of clusters.
Additional info:
As I understand my task is in the field of conceptual clustering. I can't define a similarity function as it was suggested (it as an ultimate goal of the whoal project), because of the field of study - it is very complicated and mercyless in terms of formalization. As far as I understand the most reasonable approach is the one used in COBWEB, but I'm not sure how to adapt it, so I can get an undestandable description of clusters.
Decision Tree
As it was suggested, I tried to train a decision tree on the clustering output, thus getting a description of clusters as a set of rules. But unfortunately interpretation of this rules is almost as hard as with the raw clustering output. First of only a few first levels of rules from the root node do make any sense: closer to the leaf - less sense we have. Secondly, these rules doesn't match any expert knowledge.
So, I came to the conclusion that clustering is a black-box, and it worth not trying to interpret its results.
Also
I had an interesting idea to modify a 'decision tree for regression' algorithm in a certain way: istead of calculating an intra-group variance calcualte a category utility function and use it as a split criterion. As a result we should have a decision tree with leafs-clusters and clusters description out of the box. But I haven't tried to do so, and I am not sure about accuracy and everything else.
For most algorithms, you will need to define similarity. It doesn't need to be a proper distance function (e.g. satisfy triangle inequality).
K-means is particularly bad, because it also needs to compute means. So it's better to stay away from it if you cannot compute means, or are using a different distance function than Euclidean.
However, consider defining a distance function that captures your domain knowledge of similarity. It can be composed of other distance functions, say you use the harmonic mean of the Euclidean distance (maybe weighted with some scaling factor) and a categorial similarity function.
Once you have a decent similarity function, a whole bunch of algorithms will become available to you. e.g. DBSCAN (Wikipedia) or OPTICS (Wikipedia). ELKI may be of interest to you, they have a Tutorial on writing custom distance functions.
Interpretation is a separate thing. Unfortunately, few clustering algorithms will give you a human-readable interpretation of what they found. They may give you things such as a representative (e.g. the mean of a cluster in k-means), but little more. But of course you could next train a decision tree on the clustering output and try to interpret the decision tree learned from the clustering. Because the one really nice feature about decision trees, is that they are somewhat human understandable. But just like a Support Vector Machine will not give you an explanation, most (if not all) clustering algorithms will not do that either, sorry, unless you do this kind of post-processing. Plus, it will actually work with any clustering algorithm, which is a nice property if you want to compare multiple algorithms.
There was a related publication last year. It is a bit obscure and experimental (on a workshop at ECML-PKDD), and requires the data set to have a quite extensive ground truth in form of rankings. In the example, they used color similarity rankings and some labels. The key idea is to analyze the cluster and find the best explanation using the given ground truth(s). They were trying to use it to e.g. say "this cluster found is largely based on this particular shade of green, so it is not very interesting, but the other cluster cannot be explained very well, you need to investigate it closer - maybe the algorithm discovered something new here". But it was very experimental (Workshops are for work-in-progress type of research). You might be able to use this, by just using your features as ground truth. It should then detect if a cluster can be easily explained by things such as "attribute5 is approx. 0.4 with low variance". But it will not forcibly create such an explanation!
H.-P. Kriegel, E. Schubert, A. Zimek
Evaluation of Multiple Clustering Solutions
In 2nd MultiClust Workshop: Discovering, Summarizing and Using Multiple Clusterings Held in Conjunction with ECML PKDD 2011. http://dme.rwth-aachen.de/en/MultiClust2011
A common approach to solve this type of clustering problem is to define a statistical model that captures relevant characteristics of your data. Cluster assignments can be derived by using a mixture model (as in the Gaussian Mixture Model) then finding the mixture component with the highest probability for a particular data point.
In your case, each example is a vector has both real and categorical components. A simple approach is to model each component of the vector separately.
I generated a small example dataset where each example is a vector of two dimensions. The first dimension is a normally distributed variable and the second is a choice of five categories (see graph):
There are a number of frameworks that are available to run monte carlo inference for statistical models. BUGS is probably the most popular (http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/). I created this model in Stan (http://mc-stan.org/), which uses a different sampling technique than BUGs and is more efficient for many problems:
data {
int<lower=0> N; //number of data points
int<lower=0> C; //number of categories
real x[N]; // normally distributed component data
int y[N]; // categorical component data
}
parameters {
real<lower=0,upper=1> theta; // mixture probability
real mu[2]; // means for the normal component
simplex[C] phi[2]; // categorical distributions for the categorical component
}
transformed parameters {
real log_theta;
real log_one_minus_theta;
vector[C] log_phi[2];
vector[C] alpha;
log_theta <- log(theta);
log_one_minus_theta <- log(1.0 - theta);
for( c in 1:C)
alpha[c] <- .5;
for( k in 1:2)
for( c in 1:C)
log_phi[k,c] <- log(phi[k,c]);
}
model {
theta ~ uniform(0,1); // equivalently, ~ beta(1,1);
for (k in 1:2){
mu[k] ~ normal(0,10);
phi[k] ~ dirichlet(alpha);
}
for (n in 1:N) {
lp__ <- lp__ + log_sum_exp(log_theta + normal_log(x[n],mu[1],1) + log_phi[1,y[n]],
log_one_minus_theta + normal_log(x[n],mu[2],1) + log_phi[2,y[n]]);
}
}
I compiled and ran the Stan model and used the parameters from the final sample to compute the probability of each datapoint under each mixture component. I then assigned each datapoint to the mixture component (cluster) with higher probability to recover the cluster assignments below:
Basically, the parameters for each mixture component will give you the core characteristics of each cluster if you have created a model appropriate for your dataset.
For heterogenous, non-Euclidean data vectors as you describe, hierarchical clustering algorithms often work best. The conditional probability condition you describe can be incorporated as an ordering of attributes used to perform cluster agglomeration or division. The semantics of the resulting clusters are easy to describe.

Confusion Matrix of Bayesian Network

I'm trying to understand bayesian network. I have a data file which has 10 attributes, I want to acquire the confusion table of this data table ,I thought I need to calculate tp,fp, fn, tn of all fields. Is it true ? if it's then what i need to do for bayesian network.
Really need some guidance, I'm lost.
The process usually goes like this:
You have some labeled data instances
which you want to use to train a
classifier, so that it can predict
the class of new unlabeled instances.
Using your classifier
of choice (neural networks, bayes
net, SVM, etc...) we build a
model with your training data
as input.
At this point, you usually would like
to evaluate the performance of the
model before deploying it. So using a
previously unused subset of the data
(test set), we compare the model
classification for these instances
against that of the actual class. A
good way to summarize these results
is by a confusion matrix which shows
how each class of instances is
predicted.
For binary classification tasks, the convention is to assign one class as positive, and the other as negative. Thus from the confusion matrix, the percentage of positive instances that are correctly classified as positive is know as the True Positive (TP) rate. The other definitions follows the same convention...
Confusion matrix is used to evaluate the performance of a classifier, any classifier.
What you are asking is a confusion matrix with more than two classes.
Here is the steps how you do:
Build a classifier for each class, where the training set consists of
the set of documents in the class (positive labels) and its
complement (negative labels).
Given the test document, apply each classifier separately.
Assign the document to the class with the maximum score, the
maximum confidence value, or the maximum probability
Here is the reference for the paper you can have more information:
Picca, Davide, Benoît Curdy, and François Bavaud.2006.Non-linear correspondence analysis in text retrieval: A kernel view. In Proc. JADT.

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