Matlab's fitcsvm classfication model "Beta weights" empty - matlab

Hello problem solvers,
I am currently analyzing some fMRI data of a visual task and stuck with a problem. The idea was to train an SVM classifier on some data and then use the weight vector to project novel data onto it. However, the model struct created by fitcsvm (Matlab 2018a) only sometimes actually contains a weight vector. In many cases mdl.Betas is empty.
mdl = fitcsvm(training, labels)
weights = mdl.Beta
I looked into why that could be and made sure the input is double, is not just zeros and does not contain NaNs. So far, I have not been able to identify a rule as to why it sometimes returns empty and sometimes not. If anything it seems that as I increase the amount of input data, mdl.Betas is less frequently empty. But I can only change so much about that. :(
I am happy about any help!
Thanks!
Edit: Unfortunately, like so often with fMRI, training data is quite limited. The training data consists of 50 to 300 features (depending on brain area) and one example for class A and five examples for class B.

Related

multiple regressor time series producing one output

Absolute beginner here. I'm trying to use a neural network to predict price of a product that's being shipped while using temperature, deaths during a pandemic, rain volume, and a column of 0 and 1's (dummy variable).
So imagine that I have a dataset given those values as well as column giving me time in a year/week format.
I started reading Rob Hyndman's forecasting book but I haven't yet seen anything that can help me. One idea that I have is to make a variable that's going to take out each column of the dataframe and make it into a time series. For example, for rain, I can do something like
rain <- df$rain_inches cost<-mainset3 %>% select(approx_cost) raintimeseries <-ts(rain, frequency=52, start=c(2015,1), end=c(2021,5))
I would the same for the other regressors.
I want to use neural networks on each of the regressors to predict cost and then put them all together.
Ideally I'm thinking it would be a good idea to train on say, 3/4 ths of the time series data and test on the remain 1/4 and then possibly make predictions.
I'm now seeing that even if I am using one regressor I'm still left with a multivariate time series and I've only found examples online for univariate models.
I'd appreciate if someone could give me ideas on how to model my problem using neural networks
I saw this link Keras RNN with LSTM cells for predicting multiple output time series based on multiple intput time series
but I just see a bunch of functions and nowhere where I can actually insert my function
The solution to your problem is the same as for the univariate case you found online except for the fact that you just need to work differently with your feature/independent set. your y variable or cost variable remains as is but your X variables will have to be in 3 dimensions which is (Number of observations, time steps, number of independent variables)

One class learning to make predictions using MATLAB

I am using MATLAB to build a prediction model which the target is binary.
The problem is that those negative observations in my training data may indeed are positives but are just not detected.
I started with a logistic regression model assuming the data is accurate and the results are less than satisfactory. After some research, I moved to one class learning hoping that I can focus on the only the part of data (the positives) that I am certain with.
I looked up the related materials from MATLAB documentation and found that I can use fitcsvm to proceed.
My current problem is:
Am I on the right path? Can one class learning solve my problem?
I tried to use fitcsvm to create a ClassificationSVM using all the positive observations that I have.
model = fitcsvm(Instance,Label,'KernelScale','auto','Standardize',true)
However, when I try to use the model to predict
[label,score] = predict(model,Test)
All the labels predicted for my Test cases are 1. I think I did something wrong. So should I feed the svm only the positive observations that I have?
If not what should I do?

Neural Network - Working with a imbalanced dataset

I am working on a Classification problem with 2 labels : 0 and 1. My training dataset is a very imbalanced dataset (and so will be the test set considering my problem).
The proportion of the imbalanced dataset is 1000:4 , with label '0' appearing 250 times more than label '1'. However, I have a lot of training samples : around 23 millions. So I should get around 100 000 samples for the label '1'.
Considering the big number of training samples I have, I didn't consider SVM. I also read about SMOTE for Random Forests. However, I was wondering whether NN could be efficient to handle this kind of imbalanced dataset with a large dataset ?
Also, as I am using Tensorflow to design the model, which characteristics should/could I tune to be able to handle this imbalanced situation ?
Thanks for your help !
Paul
Update :
Considering the number of answers, and that they are quite similar, I will answer all of them here, as a common answer.
1) I tried during this weekend the 1st option, increasing the cost for the positive label. Actually, with less unbalanced proportion (like 1/10, on another dataset), this seems to help a bit to get a better result, or at least to 'bias' the precision/recall scores proportion.
However, for my situation,
It seems to be very sensitive to the alpha number. With alpha = 250, which is the proportion of the unbalanced dataset, I have a precision of 0.006 and a recall score of 0.83, but the model is predicting way too many 1 that it should be - around 0.50 of label '1' ...
With alpha = 100, the model predicts only '0'. I guess I'll have to do some 'tuning' for this alpha parameter :/
I'll take a look at this function from TF too as I did it manually for now : tf.nn.weighted_cross_entropy_with_logitsthat
2) I will try to de-unbalance the dataset but I am afraid that I will lose a lot of info doing that, as I have millions of samples but only ~ 100k positive samples.
3) Using a smaller batch size seems indeed a good idea. I'll try it !
There are usually two common ways for imbanlanced dataset:
Online sampling as mentioned above. In each iteration you sample a class-balanced batch from the training set.
Re-weight the cost of two classes respectively. You'd want to give the loss on the dominant class a smaller weight. For example this is used in the paper Holistically-Nested Edge Detection
I will expand a bit on chasep's answer.
If you are using a neural network followed by softmax+cross-entropy or Hinge Loss you can as #chasep255 mentionned make it more costly for the network to misclassify the example that appear the less.
To do that simply split the cost into two parts and put more weights on the class that have fewer examples.
For simplicity if you say that the dominant class is labelled negative (neg) for softmax and the other the positive (pos) (for Hinge you could exactly the same):
L=L_{neg}+L_{pos} =>L=L_{neg}+\alpha*L_{pos}
With \alpha greater than 1.
Which would translate in tensorflow for the case of cross-entropy where the positives are labelled [1, 0] and the negatives [0,1] to something like :
cross_entropy_mean=-tf.reduce_mean(targets*tf.log(y_out)*tf.constant([alpha, 1.]))
Whatismore by digging a bit into Tensorflow API you seem to have a tensorflow function tf.nn.weighted_cross_entropy_with_logitsthat implements it did not read the details but look fairly straightforward.
Another way if you train your algorithm with mini-batch SGD would be make batches with a fixed proportion of positives.
I would go with the first option as it is slightly easier to do with TF.
One thing I might try is weighting the samples differently when calculating the cost. For instance maybe divide the cost by 250 if the expected result is a 0 and leave it alone if the expected result is a one. This way the more rare samples have more of an impact. You could also simply try training it without any changes and see if the nnet just happens to work. I would make sure to use a large batch size though so you always get at least one of the rare samples in each batch.
Yes - neural network could help in your case. There are at least two approaches to such problem:
Leave your set not changed but decrease the size of batch and number of epochs. Apparently this might help better than keeping the batch size big. From my experience - in the beginning network is adjusting its weights to assign the most probable class to every example but after many epochs it will start to adjust itself to increase performance on all dataset. Using cross-entropy will give you additional information about probability of assigning 1 to a given example (assuming your network has sufficient capacity).
Balance your dataset and adjust your score during evaluation phase using Bayes rule:score_of_class_k ~ score_from_model_for_class_k / original_percentage_of_class_k.
You may reweight your classes in the cost function (as mentioned in one of the answers). Important thing then is to also reweight your scores in your final answer.
I'd suggest a slightly different approach. When it comes to image data, the deep learning community has already come up with a few ways to augment data. Similar to image augmentation, you could try to generate fake data to "balance" your dataset. The approach I tried was to use a Variational Autoencoder and then sample from the underlying distribution to generate fake data for the class you want. I tried it and the results are looking pretty cool: https://lschmiddey.github.io/fastpages_/2021/03/17/data-augmentation-tabular-data.html

How to get the probabilities of each class for the test instances in weka

I have my training data with a binary column at the end, I need to run a classifier that gives me a numerical probability that it's correct. I've tried running it with the linear regression classifier and I get some minus numbers in the prediction column. I also tried it with the lazy iBk classifier but only got predictions (of 1) where the binary column was 1.
Yeah, not all algorithms provide that information. Naive Bayes is a standard for that sort of thing and works surprising well under many conditions.
I had great results with RandomCommittee where probabilities were a key factor in our application. Not only did we have to pick the top of the list, but we needed to know if there were any close runners-up. When this happened the application paused and asked the user for clarification (which was stored back in the database, of course.) RandomCommittee was chosen after extensive testing over time.

Matlab and Support Vector Machines: Why doesn't the implementation of PCA give good prediction results?

I have a training dataset with 60,000 images and a testing dataset with 10,000 images. Each image represents an integer number from 0 to 9. My goal was to use libsvm which is a library for Support Vector Machines in order to learn the numbers from the training dataset and use the classification produced to predict the images of the testing dataset.
Each image is 28x28 which means that it has 784 pixels or features. While the features seem to be too many it took only 5-10 minutes to run the SVM application and learn the training dataset. The testing results were very good giving me 93% success rate.
I decided to try and use PCA from matlab in order to reduce the amount of features while at the same time not losing too much information.
[coeff scores latent] = princomp(train_images,'econ');
I played with the latent a little bit and found out that the first 90 features would have as a result 10% information loss so I decided to use only the first 90.
in the above code train_images is an array of size [60000x784]
from this code I get the scores and from the scores I simply took the number of features I wanted, so finally I had for the training images an array of [60000x90]
Question 1: What's the correct way to project the testing dataset to the coefficients => coeff?
I tried using the following:
test_images = test_images' * coeff;
Note that the test_images accordingly is an array of size [784x10000] while the coeff an array of size [784x784]
Then from that again I took only the 90 features by doing the following:
test_images = test_images(:,(1:number_of_features))';
which seemed to be correct. However after running the training and then the prediction, I got a 60% success rate which is way lower than the success rate I got when I didn't use any PCA at all.
Question 2: Why did I get such low results?
After PCA I scaled the data as always which is the correct thing to do I guess. Not scaling is generally not a good idea according to the libsvm website so I don't think that's an issue here.
Thank you in advance
Regarding your first question, I believe MarkV has already provided you with an answer.
As for the second question: PCA indeed conserves most of the variance of your data, but it does not necessarily means that it maintains 90% of the information of your data. Sometimes, the information required for successful classification is actually located at these 10% you knocked off. A good example for this can be found here, especially figure 1 there.
So, if you have nice results with the full features, why reduce the dimension?
You might want to try and play with different principal components. What happens if you take components 91:180 ? that might be an interesting experiment...