Simple binary logistic regression using MATLAB - matlab

I'm working on doing a logistic regression using MATLAB for a simple classification problem. My covariate is one continuous variable ranging between 0 and 1, while my categorical response is a binary variable of 0 (incorrect) or 1 (correct).
I'm looking to run a logistic regression to establish a predictor that would output the probability of some input observation (e.g. the continuous variable as described above) being correct or incorrect. Although this is a fairly simple scenario, I'm having some trouble running this in MATLAB.
My approach is as follows: I have one column vector X that contains the values of the continuous variable, and another equally-sized column vector Y that contains the known classification of each value of X (e.g. 0 or 1). I'm using the following code:
[b,dev,stats] = glmfit(X,Y,'binomial','link','logit');
However, this gives me nonsensical results with a p = 1.000, coefficients (b) that are extremely high (-650.5, 1320.1), and associated standard error values on the order of 1e6.
I then tried using an additional parameter to specify the size of my binomial sample:
glm = GeneralizedLinearModel.fit(X,Y,'distr','binomial','BinomialSize',size(Y,1));
This gave me results that were more in line with what I expected. I extracted the coefficients, used glmval to create estimates (Y_fit = glmval(b,[0:0.01:1],'logit');), and created an array for the fitting (X_fit = linspace(0,1)). When I overlaid the plots of the original data and the model using figure, plot(X,Y,'o',X_fit,Y_fit'-'), the resulting plot of the model essentially looked like the lower 1/4th of the 'S' shaped plot that is typical with logistic regression plots.
My questions are as follows:
1) Why did my use of glmfit give strange results?
2) How should I go about addressing my initial question: given some input value, what's the probability that its classification is correct?
3) How do I get confidence intervals for my model parameters? glmval should be able to input the stats output from glmfit, but my use of glmfit is not giving correct results.
Any comments and input would be very useful, thanks!
UPDATE (3/18/14)
I found that mnrval seems to give reasonable results. I can use [b_fit,dev,stats] = mnrfit(X,Y+1); where Y+1 simply makes my binary classifier into a nominal one.
I can loop through [pihat,lower,upper] = mnrval(b_fit,loopVal(ii),stats); to get various pihat probability values, where loopVal = linspace(0,1) or some appropriate input range and `ii = 1:length(loopVal)'.
The stats parameter has a great correlation coefficient (0.9973), but the p values for b_fit are 0.0847 and 0.0845, which I'm not quite sure how to interpret. Any thoughts? Also, why would mrnfit work over glmfit in my example? I should note that the p-values for the coefficients when using GeneralizedLinearModel.fit were both p<<0.001, and the coefficient estimates were quite different as well.
Finally, how does one interpret the dev output from the mnrfit function? The MATLAB document states that it is "the deviance of the fit at the solution vector. The deviance is a generalization of the residual sum of squares." Is this useful as a stand-alone value, or is this only compared to dev values from other models?

It sounds like your data may be linearly separable. In short, that means since your input data is one dimensional, that there is some value of x such that all values of x < xDiv belong to one class (say y = 0) and all values of x > xDiv belong to the other class (y = 1).
If your data were two-dimensional this means you could draw a line through your two-dimensional space X such that all instances of a particular class are on one side of the line.
This is bad news for logistic regression (LR) as LR isn't really meant to deal with problems where the data are linearly separable.
Logistic regression is trying to fit a function of the following form:
This will only return values of y = 0 or y = 1 when the expression within the exponential in the denominator is at negative infinity or infinity.
Now, because your data is linearly separable, and Matlab's LR function attempts to find a maximum likelihood fit for the data, you will get extreme weight values.
This isn't necessarily a solution, but try flipping the labels on just one of your data points (so for some index t where y(t) == 0 set y(t) = 1). This will cause your data to no longer be linearly separable and the learned weight values will be dragged dramatically closer to zero.

Related

MATLAB: polyval function for N greater than 1

I am trying trying to graph the polynomial fit of a 2D dataset in Matlab.
This is what I tried:
rawTable = readtable('Test_data.xlsx','Sheet','Sheet1');
x = rawTable.A;
y = rawTable.B;
figure(1)
scatter(x,y)
c = polyfit(x,y,2);
y_fitted = polyval(c,x);
hold on
plot(x,y_fitted,'r','LineWidth',2)
rawTable.A and rawTable.A are randomly generated numbers. (i.e. the x dataset cannot be represented in the following form : x=0:0.1:100)
The result:
second-order polynomial
But the result I expect looks like this (generated in Excel):
enter image description here
How can I graph the second-order polynomial fit in MATLAB?
I sense some confusion regarding what the output of each of those Matlab function mean. So I'll clarify. And I think we need some details as well. So expect some verbosity. A quick answer, however, is available at the end.
c = polyfit(x,y,2) gives the coefficient vectors of the polynomial fit. You can get the fit information such as error estimate following the documentation.
Name this polynomial as P. P in Matlab is actually the function P=#(x)c(1)*x.^2+c(2)*x+c(3).
Suppose you have a single point X, then polyval(c,X) outputs the value of P(X). And if x is a vector, polyval(c,x) is a vector corresponding to [P(x(1)), P(x(2)),...].
Now that does not represent what the fit is. Just as a quick hack to see something visually, you can try plot(sort(x),polyval(c,sort(x)),'r','LineWidth',2), ie. you can first sort your data and try plotting on those x-values.
However, it is only a hack because a) your data set may be so irregularly spaced that the spline doesn't represent function or b) evaluating on the whole of your data set is unnecessary and inefficient.
The robust and 'standard' way to plot a 2D function of known analytical form in Matlab is as follows:
Define some evenly-spaced x-values over the interval you want to plot the function. For example, x=1:0.1:10. For example, x=linspace(0,1,100).
Evaluate the function on these x-values
Put the above two components into plot(). plot() can either plot the function as sampled points, or connect the points with automatic spline, which is the default.
(For step 1, quadrature is ambiguous but specific enough of a term to describe this process if you wish to communicate with a single word.)
So, instead of using the x in your original data set, you should do something like:
t=linspace(min(x),max(x),100);
plot(t,polyval(c,t),'r','LineWidth',2)

Using Linear Prediction Over Time Series to Determine Next K Points

I have a time series of N data points of sunspots and would like to predict based on a subset of these points the remaining points in the series and then compare the correctness.
I'm just getting introduced to linear prediction using Matlab and so have decided that I would go the route of using the following code segment within a loop so that every point outside of the training set until the end of the given data has a prediction:
%x is the data, training set is some subset of x starting from beginning
%'unknown' is the number of points to extend the prediction over starting from the
%end of the training set (i.e. difference in length of training set and data vectors)
%x_pred is set to x initially
p = length(training_set);
coeffs = lpc(training_set, p);
for i=1:unknown
nextValue = -coeffs(2:end) * x_pred(end-unknown-1+i:-1:end-unknown-1+i-p+1)';
x_pred(end-unknown+i) = nextValue;
end
error = norm(x - x_pred)
I have three questions regarding this:
1) Does this appropriately do what I have described? I ask because my error seems rather large (>100) when predicting over only the last 20 points of a dataset that has hundreds of points.
2) Am I interpreting the second argument of lpc correctly? Namely, that it means the 'order' or rather number of points that you want to use in predicting the next point?
3) If this is there a more efficient, single line function in Matlab that I can call to replace the looping and just compute all necessary predictions for me given some subset of my overall data as a training set?
I tried looking through the lpc Matlab tutorial but it didn't seem to do the prediction as I have described my needs require. I have also been using How to use aryule() in Matlab to extend a number series? as a reference.
So after much deliberation and experimentation I have found the above approach to be correct and there does not appear to be any single Matlab function to do the above work. The large errors experienced are reasonable since I am using a linear prediction algorithm for a problem (i.e. sunspot prediction) that has inherent nonlinear behavior.
Hope this helps anyone else out there working on something similar.

Using large input values with Auto Encoders

I have created an Auto Encoder Neural Network in MATLAB. I have quite large inputs at the first layer which I have to reconstruct through the network's output layer. I cannot use the large inputs as it is,so I convert it to between [0, 1] using sigmf function of MATLAB. It gives me a values of 1.000000 for all the large values. I have tried using setting the format but it does not help.
Is there a workaround to using large values with my auto encoder?
The process of convert your inputs to the range [0,1] is called normalization, however, as you noticed, the sigmf function is not adequate for this task. This link maybe is useful to you.
Suposse that your inputs are given by a matrix of N rows and M columns, where each row represent an input pattern and each column is a feature. If your first column is:
vec =
-0.1941
-2.1384
-0.8396
1.3546
-1.0722
Then you can convert it to the range [0,1] using:
%# get max and min
maxVec = max(vec);
minVec = min(vec);
%# normalize to -1...1
vecNormalized = ((vec-minVec)./(maxVec-minVec))
vecNormalized =
0.5566
0
0.3718
1.0000
0.3052
As #Dan indicates in the comments, another option is to standarize the data. The goal of this process is to scale the inputs to have mean 0 and a variance of 1. In this case, you need to substract the mean value of the column and divide by the standard deviation:
meanVec = mean(vec);
stdVec = std(vec);
vecStandarized = (vec-meanVec)./ stdVec
vecStandarized =
0.2981
-1.2121
-0.2032
1.5011
-0.3839
Before I give you my answer, let's think a bit about the rationale behind an auto-encoder (AE):
The purpose of auto-encoder is to learn, in an unsupervised manner, something about the underlying structure of the input data. How does AE achieves this goal? If it manages to reconstruct the input signal from its output signal (that is usually of lower dimension) it means that it did not lost information and it effectively managed to learn a more compact representation.
In most examples, it is assumed, for simplicity, that both input signal and output signal ranges in [0..1]. Therefore, the same non-linearity (sigmf) is applied both for obtaining the output signal and for reconstructing back the inputs from the outputs.
Something like
output = sigmf( W*input + b ); % compute output signal
reconstruct = sigmf( W'*output + b_prime ); % notice the different constant b_prime
Then the AE learning stage tries to minimize the training error || output - reconstruct ||.
However, who said the reconstruction non-linearity must be identical to the one used for computing the output?
In your case, the assumption that inputs ranges in [0..1] does not hold. Therefore, it seems that you need to use a different non-linearity for the reconstruction. You should pick one that agrees with the actual range of you inputs.
If, for example, your input ranges in (0..inf) you may consider using exp or ().^2 as the reconstruction non-linearity. You may use polynomials of various degrees, log or whatever function you think may fit the spread of your input data.
Disclaimer: I never actually encountered such a case and have not seen this type of solution in literature. However, I believe it makes sense and at least worth trying.

Normalize in Adaboost without numerical error - Matlab

I'm implementing AdaBoost on Matlab. This algorithm requires that in every iteration the weights of each data point in the training set sum up to one.
If I simply use the following normalization v = v / sum(v) I get a vector whose 1-norm is 1 except some numerical error which later leads to the failure of the algorithm.
Is there a matlab function for normalizing a vector so that it's 1-norm is EXACTLY 1?
Assuming you want identical values to be normalised with the same factor, this is not possible. Simple counter example:
v=ones(21,1);
v = v / sum(v);
sum(v)-1
One common way to deal with it, is enforce values sum(v)>=1 or sum(v)<=1 if your algorithm can deal with a derivation to one side:
if sum(v)>1
v=v-eps(v)
end
Alternatively you can try using vpa, but this will drastically increase your computation time.

How do I use scipy.optimize to minimize a set of functions?

[EDIT: The fmin() method is a good choice for my problem. However, my problem was that one of the axes was a sum of the other axes. I wasn't recalculating the y axis after applying the multiplier. Thus, the value returned from my optimize function was always returning the same value. This gave fmin no direction so it's chosen multipliers were very close together. Once the calculations in my optimize function were corrected fmin chose a larger range.]
I have two datasets that I want to apply multipliers to to see what values could 'improve' their correlation coefficients.
For example, say data set 1 has a correlation coefficient of -.6 and data set 2 has .5.
I can apply different multipliers to each of these data sets that might improve the coefficient. I would like to find a set of multipliers to choose for these two data sets that optimizing the correlation coefficients of each set.
I have written an objective function that takes a list of multipliers, applies them to the data sets, calculates the correlation coefficient (scipy.stats.spearmanr()), and sums these coefficients. So I need to use something from scipy.optimize to pass a set of multipliers to this function and find the set that optimizes this sum.
I have tried using optimize.fmin and several others. However, I want the optimization technique to use a much larger range of multipliers. For example, my data sets might have values in the millions, but fmin will only choose multipliers around 1.0, 1.05, etc. This isn't a big enough value to modify these correlation coefficients in any meaningful way.
Here is some sample code of my objective function:
def objective_func(multipliers):
for multiplier in multipliers:
for data_set in data_sets():
x_vals = getDataSetXValues()
y_vals = getDataSetYValues()
xvals *= muliplier
coeffs.append(scipy.stats.spearmanr(x_vals, y_vals)
return -1 * sum(coeffs)
I'm using -1 because I actually want the biggest value, but fmin is for minimization.
Here is a sample of how I'm trying to use fmin:
print optimize.fmin(objective_func)
The multipliers start at 1.0 and just range between 1.05, 1.0625, etc. I can see in the actual fmin code where these values are chosen. I ultimately need another method to call to give the minimization a range of values to check for, not all so closely related.
Multiplying the x data by some factor won't really change the Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient, though.
>>> x = numpy.random.uniform(-10,10,size=(20))
>>> y = numpy.random.uniform(-10,10,size=(20))
>>> scipy.stats.spearmanr(x,y)
(-0.24661654135338346, 0.29455199407204263)
>>> scipy.stats.spearmanr(x*10,y)
(-0.24661654135338346, 0.29455199407204263)
>>> scipy.stats.spearmanr(x*1e6,y)
(-0.24661654135338346, 0.29455199407204263)
>>> scipy.stats.spearmanr(x*1e-16,y)
(-0.24661654135338346, 0.29455199407204263)
>>> scipy.stats.spearmanr(x*(-2),y)
(0.24661654135338346, 0.29455199407204263)
>>> scipy.stats.spearmanr(x*(-2e6),y)
(0.24661654135338346, 0.29455199407204263)
(The second term in the tuple is the p value.)
You can change its sign, if you flip the signs of the terms, but the whole point of Spearman correlation is that it tells you the degree to which any monotonic relationship would capture the association. Probably that explains why fmin isn't changing the multiplier much: it's not getting any feedback on direction, because the returned value is constant.
So I don't see how what you're trying to do can work.
I'm also not sure why you've chosen the sum of all the the Spearman coefficients and the p values as what you're trying to maximize: the Spearman coefficients can be negative, so you probably want to square them, and you haven't mentioned the p values, so I'm not sure why you're throwing them in.
[It's possible I guess that we're working with different scipy versions and our spearmanr functions return different things. I've got 0.9.0.]
You probably don't want to minimize the sum of coefficients but the sum of squares. Also, if the multipliers can be chosen independently, why are you trying to optimize them all at the same time? Can you post your current code and some sample data?