I am trying to build decision tree and random forest classifier on the UCI bank marketing data -> https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/bank+marketing. There are many categorical features (having string values) in the data set.
In the spark ml document, it's mentioned that the categorical variables can be converted to numeric by indexing using either StringIndexer or VectorIndexer. I chose to use StringIndexer (vector index requires vector feature and vector assembler which convert features to vector feature accepts only numeric type ). Using this approach, each of the level of a categorical feature will be assigned numeric value based on it's frequency (0 for most frequent label of a category feature).
My question is how the algorithm of Random Forest or Decision Tree will understand that new features (derived from categorical features) are different than continuous variable. Will indexed feature be considered as continuous in the algorithm? Is it the right approach? Or should I go ahead with One-Hot-Encoding for categorical features.
I read some of the answers from this forum but i didn't get clarity on the last part.
One Hot Encoding should be done for categorical variables with categories > 2.
To understand why, you should know the difference between the sub categories of categorical data: Ordinal data and Nominal data.
Ordinal Data: The values has some sort of ordering between them. example:
Customer Feedback(excellent, good, neutral, bad, very bad). As you can see there is a clear ordering between them (excellent > good > neutral > bad > very bad). In this case StringIndexer alone is sufficient for modelling purpose.
Nominal Data: The values has no defined ordering between them.
example: colours(black, blue, white, ...). In this case StringIndexer alone is NOT sufficient. and One Hot Encoding is required after String Indexing.
After String Indexing lets assume the output is:
id | colour | categoryIndex
----|----------|---------------
0 | black | 0.0
1 | white | 1.0
2 | yellow | 2.0
3 | red | 3.0
Then without One Hot Encoding, the machine learning algorithm will assume: red > yellow > white > black, which we know its not true.
OneHotEncoder() will help us avoid this situation.
So to answer your question,
Will indexed feature be considered as continuous in the algorithm?
It will be considered as continious variable.
Is it the right approach? Or should I go ahead with One-Hot-Encoding
for categorical features
depends on your understanding of data.Although Random Forest and some boosting methods doesn't require OneHot Encoding, most ML algorithms need it.
Refer: https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/ml-features.html#onehotencoder
In short, Spark's RandomForest does NOT require OneHotEncoder for categorical features created by StringIndexer or VectorIndexer.
Longer Explanation. In general DecisionTrees can handle both Ordinal and Nominal types of data. However, when it comes to the implementation, it could be that OneHotEncoder is required (as it is in Python's scikit-learn).
Luckily, Spark's implementation of RandomForest honors categorical features if properly handled and OneHotEncoder is NOT required!
Proper handling means that categorical features contain the corresponding metadata so that RF knows what it is working on. Features that have been created by StringIndexer or VectorIndexer contain metadata in the DataFrame about being generated by the Indexer and being categorical.
According to the vdep answers, the StringIndexer is enough for Ordinal Data. Howerver the StringIndexer sort the data by label frequency, for example "excellent > good > neutral > bad > very bad" maybe become the "good,excellent,neutral". So for Oridinal data, the StringIndexer do not suit for it.
Secondly, for Nominal Data, the document tells us that
for a binary classification problem with one categorical feature with three categories A, B and C whose corresponding proportions of label 1 are 0.2, 0.6 and 0.4, the categorical features are ordered as A, C, B. The two split candidates are A | C, B and A , C | B where | denotes the split.
The "corresponding proportions of label 1" is same as the label frequency? So I am confused of the feasibility with the StringInder to DecisionTree in Spark.
Related
When / in what context should you use StringIndexer vs StringIndexer+OneHotEncoder?
Looking at the docs for sparkml's StringIndexer (https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/ml-features#stringindexer) and OneHotEncoder (https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/ml-features#onehotencoder), it's not obvious to me when to use just StringIndexer vs StringIndexer+OneHotEncoder (I've been using just a StringIndexer on a benchmarking dataset and getting pretty good results as is, but I suppose that does not mean that doing this is necessarily "correct"). The ohe docs refer to a StringIndexer > OneHotEncoder > VectorAssembler staging pipeline, but the way it is worded make that seem optional (vs just doing StringIndexer > VectorAssembler).
Can anyone clarify this for me?
First, it is necessary to use StringIndexer before OneHotEncoder, because OneHotEncoder needs a column of category indices as input.
To answer your question, StringIndexer may bias some machine learning models. For instance, after passing a data frame with a categorical column that has three classes (0, 1, and 2) to a linear regression model. A relationship of double between value 1 and 2 may be concluded while it is just a different class, a different index. When having a vector with zeros and ones at specific positions can transmit the desired information of class difference. So finally, it depends on the model used during training, tree-based models are sensitive to one-hot encoding and become worse with one-hot encoded vectors.
You may consider reading Create a Pipeline - Learning Spark for more details behind one hot encoding.
I'm looking for a solution to use something like most_similar() from Gensim but using Spacy.
I want to find the most similar sentence in a list of sentences using NLP.
I tried to use similarity() from Spacy (e.g. https://spacy.io/api/doc#similarity) one by one in loop, but it takes a very long time.
To go deeper :
I would like to put all these sentences in a graph (like this) to find sentence clusters.
Any idea ?
This is a simple, built-in solution you could use:
import spacy
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_lg")
text = (
"Semantic similarity is a metric defined over a set of documents or terms, where the idea of distance between items is based on the likeness of their meaning or semantic content as opposed to lexicographical similarity."
" These are mathematical tools used to estimate the strength of the semantic relationship between units of language, concepts or instances, through a numerical description obtained according to the comparison of information supporting their meaning or describing their nature."
" The term semantic similarity is often confused with semantic relatedness."
" Semantic relatedness includes any relation between two terms, while semantic similarity only includes 'is a' relations."
" My favorite fruit is apples."
)
doc = nlp(text)
max_similarity = 0.0
most_similar = None, None
for i, sent in enumerate(doc.sents):
for j, other in enumerate(doc.sents):
if j <= i:
continue
similarity = sent.similarity(other)
if similarity > max_similarity:
max_similarity = similarity
most_similar = sent, other
print("Most similar sentences are:")
print(f"-> '{most_similar[0]}'")
print("and")
print(f"-> '{most_similar[1]}'")
print(f"with a similarity of {max_similarity}")
(text from wikipedia)
It will yield the following output:
Most similar sentences are:
-> 'Semantic similarity is a metric defined over a set of documents or terms, where the idea of distance between items is based on the likeness of their meaning or semantic content as opposed to lexicographical similarity.'
and
-> 'These are mathematical tools used to estimate the strength of the semantic relationship between units of language, concepts or instances, through a numerical description obtained according to the comparison of information supporting their meaning or describing their nature.'
with a similarity of 0.9583859443664551
Note the following information from spacy.io:
To make them compact and fast, spaCy’s small pipeline packages (all packages that end in sm) don’t ship with word vectors, and only include context-sensitive tensors. This means you can still use the similarity() methods to compare documents, spans and tokens – but the result won’t be as good, and individual tokens won’t have any vectors assigned. So in order to use real word vectors, you need to download a larger pipeline package:
- python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm
+ python -m spacy download en_core_web_lg
Also see Document similarity in Spacy vs Word2Vec for advice on how to improve the similarity scores.
Since K-means cannot handle categorical variables directly, I want to know if it is correct to convert International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities or ISIC into double data types to cluster it using K-means along with other financial and transactional data? Or shall I try other techniques such as one hot encoding?
The biggest assumption is that ISIC codes are categorical not numeric variables since code “2930” refers to “Manufacture of parts and accessories for motor vehicles” and not money, kilos, feet, etc., but there is a sort of pattern in such codes since they are not assigned randomly and have a hierarchy for instance 2930 belongs to Section C “Manufacturing” and Division 29 “Manufacture of motor vehicles, trailers and semi-trailers”.
As you want to use standard K-Means, you need your data has a geometric meaning. Hence, if your mapping of the codes into the geometric space is linear, you will not get any proper clustering result. As the distance of the code does not project in their value. For example code 2930 is as close to code 2931 as code 2929. Therefore, you need a nonlinear mapping for the categorical space to the geometric space to using the standard k-mean clustering.
One solution is using from machine learning techniques similar to word-to-vec (for vectorizing words) if you have enough data for co-occurrences of these codes.
Clustering is all about distance measurement.
Discretizing numeric variable to categorical is a partial solution. As earlier highlighted, the underlying question is how to measure the distance for a discretized variable with other discretized variable and numeric variable?
In literature, there are several unsupervised algorithms for treating mixed data. Take a look at the k-prototypes algorithm and the Gower distance.
The k-prototypes in R is given in clustMixType package. The Gower distance in R is given in the function daisy in the cluster package. If using Python, you can look at this post
Huang, Z. (1997). Clustering large data sets with mixed numeric and categorical values. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 1st Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining,(PAKDD).
Gower, J. C. (1971). A general coefficient of similarity and some of its properties. Biometrics, 857-871.
K-means is designed to minimize the sum of squares.
Does minimizing the sum of squares make sense for your problem? Probably not!
While 29, 2903 and 2930 are supposedly all related 2899 likely is not very much related to 2900. Hence, a least squares approach will produce undesired results.
The method is really designed for continuous variables of the same type and scale. One-hot encoded variables cause more problems than they solve - these are a naive hack to make the function "run", but the results are statistically questionable.
Try to figure out what he right thing to do is. It's probably not least squares here.
I am trying to use one-class SVM with Python scikit-learn.
But I do not understand what are the different variables X_outliers, n_error_train, n_error_test, n_error_outliers, etc. which are at this address. Why does X is randomly selected and is not a part of a dataset?
Scikit-learn "documentation" did not help me a lot. Also, I found very few examples on Internet
Can I use One-class SVM for outlier detection in a case of a hudge number of data and if I do not know if there are anomalies in my training set?
One-class SVM is an Unsupervised Outlier Detection (here)
One-class SVM is not an outlier-detection method, but a
novelty-detection method (here)
Is this possible?
Ok, so this is not really a Python question, more of a SVM comprehension question, but eh. A typical SVM is two-classed, and is an algorithm which is going to have two phases :
First, it will learn relationships between variables and attributes. For example, you show your algorithm tomato pictures and banana pictures, telling him each time if it's a banana or a tomato, and you tell him to count the number of red pixels in each picture. If you do it correctly, the SVM will be trained, meaning he will know that pictures with lots of red pixels are more likely to be tomatoes than bananas.
Then comes the predicting phase. You show him a picture of a tomato or a banana without telling him which it is. And since he has been trained before, he will count the red pixels, and know which it is.
In your case of a one-class SVM, it's a bit simpler, basically the training phase is showing him a bunch of variables which are all supposed to be similar. You show him a bunch of tomato pictures telling him "these are tomatoes, everything else too different from these are not tomatoes".
The code you link to is a code to test the SVM's capability of learning. You start by creating variables X_train. Then you generate two other sets, X_test which is similar to X_train (tomato pictures) and X_outliers which is very different. (banana pictures)
Then you show him the X_train variables and tell your SVM "this is the kind of variables we're looking for" with the line clf.fit(X_train). This is equivalent in my example to showing him lots of tomato images, and the SVN learning what a "tomato" is.
And then you test your SVM's capability to sort new variables, by showing him your two other sets (X_test and X_outliers), and asking him whether he thinks they are similar to X_train or not. You ask him that with the predict fuction, and predict will yield for every element in the sets either "1" i.e. "yes this is a similar element to X_train", or "-1", i.e. "this element is very different".
In an ideal case, the SVM should yield only "1" for X_test and only "-1" for X_outliers. But this code is to show you that this is not always the case. The variables n_error_ are here to count the mistakes that the SVM makes, misclassifying X_test elements as "not similar to X_train and X_outliers elements as "similar to X_train". You can see that there are even errors when the SVM is asked to predict on the very set that is has been trained on ! (n_error_train)
Why are there such errors ? Welcome to machine learning. The main difficulty of SVMs is setting the training set such that it enables the SVM to learn efficiently to distinguish between classes. So you need to set carefully the number of images you show him, (and what he has to look out for in the images (in my example, it was the number of red pixels, in the code, it is the value of the variable), but that is a different question).
In the code, the bounded but random initialization of the X sets means that for example you could during on run train the SVM on an X_train set with lots of values between -0.3 and 0 even though they are randomly initialized between -0.3 and 0.3 (espcecially if you have few elements per set, say for example 5, and you get [-0.2 -0.1 0 -0.1 0.1]). And so, when you show the SVM an element with a value of 0.2, then he will have trouble associating it to X_train, because it will have learned that X_train elements are more likely to have negative values.
This is equivalent to show your SVM a few yellow-ish tomatoes when you train him, so when you show him a really red tomato afterwards, it will have trouble clasifying it as a tomato.
This one-class SVM is a classifier to determine whether entries are similar or dissimilar to entries that the classifier has been trained with.
The script generates three sets:
A training set.
A test-set of entries that are similar to the training a set.
A test-set of entries that are dissimilar to the training set.
The error is the number of entries from each of the sets, that have been classified wrongly. That is; That have been classified as dissimilar to the training set when they were similar (for set 1 and 2), or that have been classifier as similar to the training set when they were dissimilar (set 3).
X_outliers: This is set 3.
n_error_train: The number of classification errors for the elements in the train-set (1).
n_error_test: The number of classification errors for the elements in the test-set (2).
n_error_outliers: The number of classification errors for the elements in the outlier-set (3).
This answer should be complementary to scikit-description but I agree that is a bit technical. I will elaborate some aspects of the One Class SVM algorithm (OCSVM) here. OCSVM is designed to solve the unsupervised anomaly detection problem.
Given unstructured (unlabelled) data it will find a n-dimensional space a matrix W^T with d columns (T stands for transpose).
The objective function of all SVM based methods (and OCSVM) is:
$$f(x) = sign(wT x + b)$$, where sign means sign (-1 anomalous 1 nominal) shifted by a bias term b.
In the classification problem the matrix W is associated with the distance(margin) between 2 classes but this differs in OCSVM since there is only 1 class and it maximizes from the origin (original paper of OCSVM demonstrates this ) .
As you see it is a generic algorithm because SVM is a family of models that can approximate any non linear boundary such as neural networks. To achieve something complicated you have to construct your own kernel matrix.
To do this you need to find some convenient mathematical property (suggestions to improve the answer are welcome at this point).
But in the most cases Gaussian kernel is a kernel that has some quite nice mathematical properties and associated ML theorems such as the Large
of large numbers.
The scikit implementation provides a wrapper to LIBSVM implementation for SVM and has 4 such kernels.
-nu parameter is a problem formulation parameter it allows to say to the model here is how dirty my sample is.
More formally it makes the problem a outlier detection problem where you know your data is mixed (nominal and anomalous) instead of pure where the problem is different and it is called novelty detection.
kernel parameter: One of the most important decisions. Mathematically kernel is a big matrix of numbers where by multiplying you achieve to project data in a higher dimensions. A nice read demonstrating the issue is here while the paper of Scholkopf who created OCSVMK goes into more detail.
gamma
In the case of robust kernel you essentially use a gaussian projection.
Disclaimer my interpretation: Essentially with gamma parameter you describe how big the variance of the Normal distribution $N(\mu, \sigma)$ is.
-tolerance
One class svm search the margin tha separates better among training data and the origin. The tolerance refers to the stopping criterion or how small should the tolerance for satisfaction of the quadratic optimization of the
objective function. The objective function the thing that tells SVM what the parameters should like to describe a specific margin - the space between nominal and anomalous) seen in Figure~().
Many Sklearn examples are usually based on randomly generated data. If you want to see an example of how OneClassSVM works on a real dataset for outlier detection, you can go through my post: https://justanoderbit.com/outlier-detection/one-class-svm/
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.