Trying to balance my dataset through sample_weight in scikit-learn - class

Question

I'm using RandomForest for classification, and I got an unbalanced dataset, as: 5830-no, 1006-yes. I try to balance my dataset with class_weight and sample_weight, but I can`t.
My code is:
X_train,X_test,y_train,y_test = train_test_split(arrX,y,test_size=0.25)
cw='auto'
clf=RandomForestClassifier(class_weight=cw)
param_grid = { 'n_estimators': [10,50,100,200,300],'max_features': ['auto', 'sqrt', 'log2']}
sw = np.array([1 if i == 0 else 8 for i in y_train])
CV_clf = GridSearchCV(estimator=clf, param_grid=param_grid, cv= 10,fit_params={'sample_weight': sw})
But I don't get any improvement on my ratios TPR, FPR, ROC when using class_weight and sample_weight.
Why? Am I doing anything wrong?
Nevertheless, if I use the function called balanced_subsample, my ratios obtain a great improvement:
def balanced_subsample(x,y,subsample_size):
class_xs = []
min_elems = None
for yi in np.unique(y):
elems = x[(y == yi)]
class_xs.append((yi, elems))
if min_elems == None or elems.shape[0] < min_elems:
min_elems = elems.shape[0]
use_elems = min_elems
if subsample_size < 1:
use_elems = int(min_elems*subsample_size)
xs = []
ys = []
for ci,this_xs in class_xs:
if len(this_xs) > use_elems:
np.random.shuffle(this_xs)
x_ = this_xs[:use_elems]
y_ = np.empty(use_elems)
y_.fill(ci)
xs.append(x_)
ys.append(y_)
xs = np.concatenate(xs)
ys = np.concatenate(ys)
return xs,ys
My new code is:
X_train_subsampled,y_train_subsampled=balanced_subsample(arrX,y,0.5)
X_train,X_test,y_train,y_test = train_test_split(X_train_subsampled,y_train_subsampled,test_size=0.25)
cw='auto'
clf=RandomForestClassifier(class_weight=cw)
param_grid = { 'n_estimators': [10,50,100,200,300],'max_features': ['auto', 'sqrt', 'log2']}
sw = np.array([1 if i == 0 else 8 for i in y_train])
CV_clf = GridSearchCV(estimator=clf, param_grid=param_grid, cv= 10,fit_params={'sample_weight': sw})

Answer 1

This is not a full answer yet, but hopefully it'll help get there.
First some general remarks:
To debug this kind of issue it is often useful to have a deterministic behavior. You can pass the random_state attribute to RandomForestClassifier and various scikit-learn objects that have inherent randomness to get the same result on every run. You'll also need:
import numpy as np
np.random.seed()
import random
random.seed()
for your balanced_subsample function to behave the same way on every run.
Don't grid search on n_estimators: more trees is always better in a random forest.
Note that sample_weight and class_weight have a similar objective: actual sample weights will be sample_weight * weights inferred from class_weight.
Could you try:
Using subsample=1 in your balanced_subsample function. Unless there's a particular reason not to do so we're better off comparing the results on similar number of samples.
Using your subsampling strategy with class_weight and sample_weight both set to None.
EDIT: Reading your comment again I realize your results are not so surprising!
You get a better (higher) TPR but a worse (higher) FPR.
It just means your classifier tries hard to get the samples from class 1 right, and thus makes more false positives (while also getting more of those right of course!).
You will see this trend continue if you keep increasing the class/sample weights in the same direction.

Answer 2

There is a imbalanced-learn API that helps with oversampling/undersampling data that might be useful in this situation. You can pass your training set into one of the methods and it will output the oversampled data for you. See simple example below
from imblearn.over_sampling import RandomOverSampler
ros = RandomOverSampler(random_state=1)
x_oversampled, y_oversampled = ros.fit_sample(orig_x_data, orig_y_data)
Here it the link to the API: http://contrib.scikit-learn.org/imbalanced-learn/api.html
Hope this helps!