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Category: Data Science

Using INLA for Spatial Regression in R

Published 2020-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Lionel Hertzog continues a series on spatial regression:

INLA is a package that allows to fit a broad range of model, it uses Laplace approximation to fit Bayesian models much, much faster than algorithms such as MCMC. INLA allows for fitting geostatistical models via stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE), a good place for more background informations on this are these two gitbooks: spde-gitbook and inla-gitbook.

This is not the gentlest introduction, so if you’re new to the concept go back and read part 1.

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The Basics of A/B Testing with R

Published 2020-06-15 by Kevin Feasel

Holger von Jouanne-Diedrich walks us through a simple example of A/B testing and analysis using R:

The bad news is, that you have to understand a little bit about statistical hypothesis testing, the good news is that if you read the following post, you have everything you need (plus, as an added bonus R has all the tools you need already at hand!): From Coin Tosses to p-Hacking: Make Statistics Significant Again! (ok, reading it would make it over one minute…).

Check out that article and the example in the blog post as well. R makes it really easy to perform this sort of analysis.

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Using Random Cut Forests for Anomaly Detection

Published 2020-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Swierczewski and Lai Jiang have an example of using Random Cut Forests to perform anomaly detection against a dataset stored in Amazon Elasticsearch Service:

Based on these constraints and performance results from internal and publicly available benchmarks across many data domains, we chose the RCF algorithm for computing anomaly scores in data streams.

But this begs the question: How large of an anomaly score is large enough to declare the corresponding data point as an anomaly? The anomaly detector uses a thresholding model to answer this question. This thresholding model combines information from the anomaly scores observed thus far and certain mathematical properties of RCFs. This hybrid information approach allows the model to make anomaly predictions with a low false positive rate when relatively little data has been observed, and effectively adapts to the data in the long run. The model constructs an efficient sketch of the anomaly score distribution using the KLL Quantile Sketch algorithm. For more information, see Optimal Quantile Approximation in Streams.

The linked post is more of an explanation of process than a tutorial, but it’s interesting in seeing how different approaches can find anomalies at different rates.

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Portfolio Optimization with SAS and Python

Published 2020-06-04 by Kevin Feasel

Sophia Rowland shows off the sastopypackage:

I started by declaring my parameters and sets, including my risk threshold, my stock portfolio, the expected return of my stock portfolio, and covariance matrix estimated using the shrinkage estimator of Ledoit and Wolf(2003). I will use these pieces of information in my objective function and constraints. Now I will need SWAT, sasoptpy, and my optimization model object.

Read on for a demo.

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Avoiding Overfitting and Underfitting in Neural Networks

Published 2020-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Manas Narkar provides some advice on optimizing neural network models:

Adding Dropout

Dropout is considered as one of the most effective regularization methods. Dropout is basically randomly zero-ing or dropping out features from your layer during the training process, or introducing some noise in the samples. The key thing to note is that this is only applied at training time. At test time, no values are dropped out. Instead, they are scaled. The typical dropout rate is between 0.2 to 0.5.

Click through for a demo on dropout, as well as coverage of several other techniques.

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Fun with Randomness

Published 2020-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Holger von Jouanne-Diedrich takes us through some random thoughts:

Many a student thinks that the first pic was created by some underlying pattern (because of its points clumping together in some areas while leaving others empty) and that the second one is “more” random. The truth is that technically both are not random (but only pseudo-random) but the first resembles “true” randomness more closely while the second is a low-discrepancy sequence.

While coming to the point of pseudo-randomness in a moment “true” randomness may appear to have a tendency to occur in clusters or clumps (technically called Poisson clumping). This is the effect seen (or shall I say heard) in the iPod shuffling function. Apple changed it to a more regular behaviour (in the spirit of the second picture)… which was then perceived to be more random (as with my students)!

Read the whole thing.

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Text Mining and Sentiment Analysis in R

Published 2020-05-18 by Kevin Feasel

Sanil Mhatre walks us through a sentiment analysis scenario in R:

Sentiments can be classified as positive, neutral or negative. They can also be represented on a numeric scale, to better express the degree of positive or negative strength of the sentiment contained in a body of text.

This example uses the Syuzhet package for generating sentiment scores, which has four sentiment dictionaries and offers a method for accessing the sentiment extraction tool developed in the NLP group at Stanford. The get_sentiment function accepts two arguments: a character vector (of sentences or words) and a method. The selected method determines which of the four available sentiment extraction methods will be used. The four methods are syuzhet (this is the default), bing, afinn and nrc. Each method uses a different scale and hence returns slightly different results. Please note the outcome of nrc method is more than just a numeric score, requires additional interpretations and is out of scope for this article. The descriptions of the get_sentiment function has been sourced from : https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/syuzhet/vignettes/syuzhet-vignette.html?

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Choosing a Recommender

Published 2020-05-15 by Kevin Feasel

Tori Tompkins walks us through four methods for generating models for recommendation systems:

One of the most popular approaches to recommendation problems is Collaborative Filtering (CF).

This approach is based on the assumption that users who have agreed in the past, also tend to agree in the future. For example, if Alice likes Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and Bob likes Stars Wars and Lord of the Rings too. Then it is likely that Bob would also enjoy Harry Potter. The collaborative in Collaborative Filtering is in relation to looking at the way that you multiple users interact with the same data and share the same commonalities.

Read on for a comparison of these four systems as well as a handy chart to help you figure out which system might work best for you.

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The Siren Song of High Accuracy

Published 2020-04-28 by Kevin Feasel

Holger von Jouanne-Diedrich notes that accuracy is not in itself necessarily a good thing for a machine learning model:

In one of my most popular posts So, what is AI really? I showed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) basically boils down to autonomously learned rules, i.e. conditional statements or simply, conditionals.

In this post, I create the simplest possible classifier, called ZeroR, to show that even this classifier can achieve surprisingly high values for accuracy (i.e. the ratio of correctly predicted instances)… and why this is not necessarily a good thing, so read on!

The nuanced answer here is that with classifiers, accuracy is not in itself a great measure in the case of class imbalance. The more balanced your classes are, the more likely it is that a model with high accuracy is a good model. That’s where other measures such as specificity and sensitivity, positive & negative predictive value, etc. come into play.

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