I have a classification dataset with 148 input features (20 of which are binary and the rest are continuous on the range [0,1]). The dataset has 66171 negative example and only 71 positive examples.
The dataset (arff text file) can be downloaded from this dropbox link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26064635/SDataset.arff.
In Weka suite, when I use CfsSubsetEval and GreedyStepwise (with setSearchBackwards() set to true and also false), the selected feature set contains only 2 features (i.e. 79 and 140)! It is probably needless to say that the classification performance with these two features are terribly bad.
Using ConsistencySubsetEval (in Weka as well) leads to the selection of ZERO features! When feature ranking methods are used instead and the best (e.g. 12) features are selected, a much better classification performance is achieved.
I have two questions:
First, What is it about the dataset that leads to the selection of such a few features? is it because of the imbalance between the number of positive and negative examples?
Second, and more importantly, are there any other subset selection methods (in Matlab or otherwise) that I can try and may lead to the selection of more features?
Clearly, the class imbalance is not helping. You could try to take a subsample of the dataset for better diagnostic. SpreadSubsample filter lets you do that, stating what are the maximun class imbalance admisible, like 10:1, 3:1, or whatever you find appropriate.
For selection methods, you could try dimensionality reduction methods, like PCA, in WEKA, first.
But if the algorithms are selecting those sets of features, they seem to be the most meaningful for your classificatin task.
Related
I have been working on "Script identification from bilingual documents".
I want to classify the pages/blocks as either Eng(class 1), Hindi (class 2) or Mixed using libsvm in matlab. but the problem is that the training data i have consists of samples corresponding to Hindi and english pages/blocks only but no mixed pages.
The test data i want to give may consists of Mixed pages/blocks also, in that case i want it to be classified as "Mixed". I am planning to do it using confidence score or probability values. like if the prob value of class 1 is greater than a threshold (say 0.8) and prob value of class 2 is less than a threshold say(0.05) then it will be classified as class 1, and class 2 vice-versa. but if aforementioned two conditions dont satisfy then i want to classify it as "Mixed".
The third return value from the "libsvmpredict" is prob_values and i was planning to go ahead with this prob_values to decide whether the testdata is Hindi, English or Mixed. but at few places i learnt that "libsvmpredict" does not produce the actual prob_values.
Is there any way which can help me to classify the test data into 3 classes( Hindi, English, Mixed) using training data consisting of only 2 classes in SVM.
This is not the modus operandi for SVMs.
In no way SVMs can predict a given class without knowing it, without knowing how to separate such class from all other classes.
The function svmpredict() in LibSVM actually shows the probability estimates and the greater this value is, the more confident you can be regarding your prediction. But you cannot rely on such values if you have just two classes in order to predict a third class: indeed svmpredict() will return as many decision values as there are classes.
You can go on with your thresholding system (which, again, is not SVM-based) but it most likely fail or give bad performances. Think about that: you have to set up two thresholds and use them in a logic AND manner. The chance of correctly classified non-Mixed documents will indeed drastically decrease.
My suggestion is: instead of wasting time setting up thresholds, with a high chance of bad performances, join some of these texts together or create some new files with some Hindi and some English lines in order to add to your training data some proper Mixed documents and perform a standard 3-classes SVM system.
In order to create such files you can as well use Matlab, which has a pretty decent file I/O functions such as fread(), fwrite(), fprintf(), fscanf(), importdata() and so on...
I have two (or three) classes and each classes can only possess one label.
I want to optimize (automatically if possible) parameters and thresholds of classifiers in order for my first class to contain only 100 % sure data. Even if it contains a small number of instances.
I don't mind for the remaining classes to contain false alarm or correct rejection.
I don't mind to have unclassified data.
I have already been searching on stackoverflow and on the weka's wiki but maybe my lack of knowledge concerning weka made me miss some keywords.
I also tried to perform the task with the well-known "iris" database but I think that in this case, any class can be 100 % sure.
Yet, I have only succeed in testing multiple classifiers and tuning them manually but without performing 100 % correct for my first class. (I checked this result in the confusion matrix given by weka's report.)
Somehow, I know it is possible for my class to contain 100% sure data because I managed to do it in Matlab with simple threshold set manually. But I would like to try out a bigger database, to obtain better threshold and to use the power of weka.
Any suggestions would be helpful, thanks !
You probably need the "Cost Sensitive Classifier" among "meta" classifiers.
If you are working in the Explorer, here is the dialog you get.
Choose the your "classifier" (something beyond ZeroR :) ).
Set your "cost matrix". For 2-class problem this will be 2x2 matrix.
By setting one non-diagonal component very large (>>1, let us say 1000) you ensure that misclassifying one class (your "first" class) is 1000 times more expensive than misclassifying another class. This should do the job.
I am have built a small text analysis model that is classifying small text files as either good, bad, or neutral. I was using a Support-Vector Machine as my classifier. However, I was wondering if instead of classifying all three I could classify into either Good or Bad but if the support for that text file is below .7 or some user specified threshold it would classify that text file as neutral. I know this isn't looked at as the best way of doing this, I am just trying to see what would happen if I took a different approach.
The operator Drop Uncertain Predictions might be what you want.
After you have applied your model to some test data, the resulting example set will have a prediction and two new attributes called confidence(Good) and confidence(Bad). These confidences are between 0 and 1 and for the two class case they will sum to 1 for each example within the example set. The highest confidence dictates the value of the prediction.
The Drop Uncertain Predictions operator requires a min confidence parameter and will set the prediction to missing if the maximum confidence it finds is below this value (you can also have different confidences for different class values for more advanced investigations).
You could then use the Replace Missing Values operator to change all missing predictions to be a text value of your choice.
I'm having problems in understanding how K-NN classification works in MATLAB.ยด
Here's the problem, I have a large dataset (65 features for over 1500 subjects) and its respective classes' label (0 or 1).
According to what's been explained to me, I have to divide the data into training, test and validation subsets to perform supervised training on the data, and classify it via K-NN.
First of all, what's the best ratio to divide the 3 subgroups (1/3 of the size of the dataset each?).
I've looked into ClassificationKNN/fitcknn functions, as well as the crossval function (idealy to divide data), but I'm really not sure how to use them.
To sum up, I wanted to
- divide data into 3 groups
- "train" the KNN (I know it's not a method that requires training, but the equivalent to training) with the training subset
- classify the test subset and get it's classification error/performance
- what's the point of having a validation test?
I hope you can help me, thank you in advance
EDIT: I think I was able to do it, but, if that's not asking too much, could you see if I missed something? This is my code, for a random case:
nfeats=60;ninds=1000;
trainRatio=0.8;valRatio=.1;testRatio=.1;
kmax=100; %for instance...
data=randi(100,nfeats,ninds);
class=randi(2,1,ninds);
[trainInd,valInd,testInd] = dividerand(1000,trainRatio,valRatio,testRatio);
train=data(:,trainInd);
test=data(:,testInd);
val=data(:,valInd);
train_class=class(:,trainInd);
test_class=class(:,testInd);
val_class=class(:,valInd);
precisionmax=0;
koptimal=0;
for know=1:kmax
%is it the same thing use knnclassify or fitcknn+predict??
predicted_class = knnclassify(val', train', train_class',know);
mdl = fitcknn(train',train_class','NumNeighbors',know) ;
label = predict(mdl,val');
consistency=sum(label==val_class')/length(val_class);
if consistency>precisionmax
precisionmax=consistency;
koptimal=know;
end
end
mdl_final = fitcknn(train',train_class','NumNeighbors',know) ;
label_final = predict(mdl,test');
consistency_final=sum(label==test_class')/length(test_class);
Thank you very much for all your help
For your 1st question "what's the best ratio to divide the 3 subgroups" there are only rules of thumb:
The amount of training data is most important. The more the better.
Thus, make it as big as possible and definitely bigger than the test or validation data.
Test and validation data have a similar function, so it is convenient to assign them the same amount
of data. But it is important to have enough data to be able to recognize over-adaptation. So, they
should be picked from the data basis fully randomly.
Consequently, a 50/25/25 or 60/20/20 partitioning is quite common. But if your total amount of data is small in relation to the total number of weights of your chosen topology (e.g. 10 weights in your net and only 200 cases in the data), then 70/15/15 or even 80/10/10 might be better choices.
Concerning your 2nd question "what's the point of having a validation test?":
Typically, you train the chosen model on your training data and then estimate the "success" by applying the trained model to unseen data - the validation set.
If you now would completely stop your efforts to improve accuracy, you indeed don't need three partitions of your data. But typically, you feel that you can improve the success of your model by e.g. changing the number of weights or hidden layers or ... and now a big loops starts to run with many iterations:
1) change weights and topology, 2) train, 3) validate, not satisfied, goto 1)
The long-term effect of this loop is, that you increasingly adapt your model to the validation data, so the results get better not because you so intelligently improve your topology but because you unconsciously learn the properties of the validation set and how to cope with them.
Now, the final and only valid accuracy of your neural net is estimated on really unseen data: the test set. This is done only once and is also useful to reveal over-adaption. You are not allowed to start a second even bigger loop now to prohibit any adaption to the test set!
I tried to go through this paper which describes the ECT algorithm but could not make much out of it.
I know it is different from one-against-al (oaa) and even performs better than oaa.I wanted a simple explanation about how ect works.
ECT and Filter trees are useful (only) if you have a very big number of output labels (classes), let's say N=1000. With OAA (one-against-all), it would mean to do N binary classification tasks for each example (during both training and testing). With ECT you can make the prediction much faster: log(N). You can imagine Filter trees (which are the basis of ECT) as a decision tree where in each node you ask whether the example belongs to one set of labels or another set of labels (using all the features, unlike original decision trees).
In general, ECT is worse (in terms of loss or accuracy) than OAA (but in some cases it may be almost as good as OAA). With N=10 labels, you should try OAA first. With N>1000, OAA is too slow (and even the accuracy is low), you should try ECT (or --log_multi or --csoaa_ldf in VW, if you can preselect a smaller number of labels which are relevant for each example).
See http://cilvr.cs.nyu.edu/diglib/lsml/logarithmic.pdf