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Category: Data Science

Data Modeling And Neural Networks

Published 2018-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

I have two new posts in my launching a data science project series.  The first one covers data modeling theory:

Wait, isn’t self-supervised learning just a subset of supervised learning?  Sure, but it’s pretty useful to look at on its own.  Here, we use heuristics to guesstimate labels and train the model based on those guesstimates.  For example, let’s say that we want to train a neural network or Markov chain generator to read the works of Shakespeare and generate beautiful prose for us.  The way the recursive model would work is to take what words have already been written and then predict the most likely next word or punctuation character.

We don’t have “labeled” data within the works of Shakespeare, though; instead, our training data’s “label” is the next word in the play or sonnet.  So we train our model based on the chains of words, treating the problem as interdependent rather than a bunch of independent words just hanging around.

Then, we implement a data model using a neural network:

At this point, I want to build the Keras model. I’m creating a build_model function in case I want to run this over and over. In a real-life scenario, I would perform various optimizations, do cross-validation, etc. In this scenario, however, I am just going to run one time against the full training data set, and then evaluate it against the test data set.

Inside the function, we start by declaring a Keras model. Then, I add three layers to the model. The first layer is a dense (fully-connected) layer which accepts the training data as inputs and uses the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation mechanism. This is a decent first guess for activation mechanisms. We then have a dropout layer, which reduces the risk of overfitting on the training data. Finally, I have a dense layer for my output, which will give me the salary.

I compile the model using the RMSProp optimizer. This is a good default optimizer for neural networks, although you might try Adagrad, Adam, or AdaMax as well. Our loss function is Mean Squared Error, which is good for dealing with finding the error in a regression. Finally, I’m interested in the Mean Absolute Error–that is, the dollar amount difference between our function’s prediction and the actual salary. The closer to $0 this is, the better.

Click through for those two posts, including seeing how close I get to a reasonable model with my neural network.

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Be Wary Of Colliders When Analyzing Data

Published 2018-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Keith Goldfeld has an interesting demonstration of a collider variable and how it can lead us to incorrect conclusions during analysis:

In this (admittedly thoroughly made-up though not entirely implausible) network diagram, the test score outcome is a collider, influenced by a test preparation class and socio-economic status (SES). In particular, both the test prep course and high SES are related to the probability of having a high test score. One might expect an arrow of some sort to connect SES and the test prep class; in this case, participation in test prep is randomized so there is no causal link (and I am assuming that everyone randomized to the class actually takes it, a compliance issue I addressed in a series of posts starting with this one.)

The researcher who carried out the randomization had a hypothesis that test prep actually is detrimental to college success down the road, because it de-emphasizes deep thinking in favor of wrote memorization. In reality, it turns out that the course and subsequent college success are not related, indicated by an absence of a connection between the course and the long term outcome.

Read the whole thing.  H/T R-Bloggers

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XGBoost In R

Published 2018-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Fisseha Berhane explains how to implement Extreme Gradient Boosting in R:

What makes it so popular are its speed and performance. It gives among the best performances in many machine learning applications. It is optimized gradient-boosting machine learning library. The core algorithm is parallelizable and hence it can use all the processing power of your machine and the machines in your cluster. In R, according to the package documentation, since the package can automatically do parallel computation on a single machine, it could be more than 10 times faster than existing gradient boosting packages.

xgboost shines when we have lots of training data where the features are numeric or a mixture of numeric and categorical fields. It is also important to note that xgboost is not the best algorithm out there when all the features are categorical or when the number of rows is less than the number of fields (columns).

xgboost is a nice complement to neural networks, as they tend to be great at different things.

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Data Cleansing With R

Published 2018-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

I continue my series on launching a data science project:

Now that we’ve performed some basic analysis, we will clean up the data set. I’m doing most of the cleanup in a single operation, but I do have some comment notes here, particularly around the oddities with SalaryUSD. The SalaryUSD column has a few problems:

  • Some people put in pennies, which aren’t really that important at the level we’re discussing. I want to strip them out.
  • Some people put in delimiters like commas or decimal points (which act as commas in countries like Germany). I want to strip them out, particularly because the decimal point might interfere with my analysis, turning 100.000 to $100 instead of $100K.
  • Some people included the dollar sign, so remove that, as well as any spaces.

It’s not a perfect regex, but it did seem to fix the problems in this data set at least.

Something I’ve liked about the data professionals survey is that there are a few places with room for data cleansing, but not everything is awful.  It’s neither artificially clean nor beyond repair, so it’s good for use as an example.

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Investigating London Crime Data

Published 2018-03-02 by Kevin Feasel

Carl Goodwin digs into London crime data by borough and sees if he can predict crime rates:

Optimal predictions sit close to, or on, the dashed line in the graphic below, i.e. where the prediction for each observation equals the actual. The Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) measures the average differences, so should be as small as possible. And R-squared measures the correlation between prediction and actual, where 0 reflects no correlation, and 1 perfect positive correlation.

Our supervised machine learning outcomes from the CART and GLMmodels have weaker RMSEs, and visually exhibit some dispersion in the predictions at higher counts. Stochastic Gradient Boosting, Cubist and Random Forest have handled the higher counts better as we see from the visually tighter clustering.

It was Random Forest that produced marginally the smallest prediction error. And it was a parameter unique to the Random Forest model which almost tripped me up as discussed in the supporting documentation.

Also be sure to read his notebook to get the full story.  H/T R-Bloggers

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The Process Of Processing Data

Published 2018-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

I continue my series on launching a data science project:

This next category of data cleansing has to do with specific values.  I want to look at three particular sub-categories:  mislabeled data, mismatched data, and incorrect data.

Mislabeled data happens when the label is incorrect.  In a data science problem, the label is the thing that we are trying to explain or predict.  For example, in our data set, we want to predict SalaryUSD based on various inputs.  If somebody earns $50,000 per year but accidentally types 500000 instead of 50000, it can potentially affect our analysis.  If you can fix the label, this data becomes useful again, but if you cannot, it increases the error, which means we have a marginally lower capability for accurate prediction.

Mismatched data happens when we join together data from sources which should not have been joined together.  Let’s go back to the product title and UPC/MFC example.  As we fuss with the data to try to join together these two data sets, we might accidentally write a rule which joins a product + UPC to the wrong product + MFC.  We might be able to notice this with careful observation, but if we let it through, then we will once again thwart reality and introduce some additional error into our analysis.  We could also end up with the opposite problem, where we have missed connections and potentially drop useful data out of our sample.

Finally, I’m calling incorrect data where something other than the label is wrong.  For example, in the data professional salary survey, there’s a person who works 200 hours per week.  While I admire this person’s dedication and ability to create 1.25 extra days per week that the rest of us don’t experience, I think that person should have held out for more than just $95K/year.  I mean, if I had the ability to generate spare days, I’d want way more than that.

In this series, I’ve found myself writing a bit more than expected, so I’m breaking out theory from implementation.  This is the theory post, with implementation coming next week.

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Image Recognition Using Viola-Jones

Published 2018-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ellen Talbot lays out some of the basics of image recognition:

Aggregate channel features (ACF) is a variation of channel features, which extracts features directly as pixel values in extended channels without computing rectangular sums at various locations and scales.

Common channels include the colour channels, such as grey-scale and RBG, but many other channels can be encoded, depending on the difficulty of your problem (e.g. gradient magnitude and gradient histograms).

ACF has advantages, such as a richer representation, accelerated detection speed and more accurate localisation of objects in the images when used in conjunction with a boosting method.

Click through for more, including a few resources around the Viola-Jones algorithm.

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Starting A Data Science Project: Business Understanding

Published 2018-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

I continue my data science project series:

As you listen to these types of questions, your goal is to nail down a specific problem with a specific answer.  You want to narrow down the scope to something that your team can achieve, ideally something with a built-in measure for success.  For example, here are a few specific problems that we could go solve:

  • Find a model which predicts quarterly sales to within 5% no later than 30 days into the quarter.
  • Given a title and description for a product, tell me a listing category which Amazon will, with at least 90% confidence, consider valid for this product.
  • Determine the top three factors which most affect the number of years the first owner holds onto our mid-range sedan.

With a specific problem in mind, you can look for relevant data.  Of course, you’ll probably need to modify the scope of this problem over time as you gather new information, but this gives you a starting point for success.  Also, don’t expect something as clear-cut as the above early on; instead, people will hem and haw, not quite sure what they really want.  You can take a fuzzy goal into data acquisition, but as you acquire data, you will want to work with the champion to focus down to a targeted and valuable problem.

Read on for several references to big sacks of cash.  After becoming a manager, I’ve become much more attuned to the idea of receiving big sacks of cash.

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Reviewing The Team Data Science Process

Published 2018-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

I am starting a new series on launching a data science project, and my presentation quickly veers into a pessimistic place:

The concept of “clean” data is appealing to us—I have a talk on the topic and spend more time than I’m willing to admit trying to clean up data.  But the truth is that, in a real-world production scenario, we will never have truly clean data.  Whenever there is the possibility of human interaction, there is the chance of mistyping, misunderstanding, or misclicking, each of which can introduce invalid results.  Sometimes we can see these results—like if we allow free-form fields and let people type in whatever they desire—but other times, the error is a bit more pernicious, like an extra 0 at the end of a line or a 10-key operator striking 4 instead of 7.

Even with fully automated processes, we still run the risk of dirty data:  sensors have error ranges, packets can get dropped or sent out of order, and services fail for a variety of reasons.  Each of these can negatively impact your data, leaving you with invalid entries.

Read on for a few more adages which shape the way we work on projects, followed by an overview of the Microsoft Team Data Science Process.

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Methods To Improve Model Accuracy

Published 2018-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Tristan Robinson shows how to go back to the drawing board when your model’s accuracy isn’t cutting it:

One of the reoccurring principles that appears with machine learning is that of Ockham’s razor, which states that the best models are simple models that fit the data well; this is not an irrefutable principle of logic, but a preference for simplicity. Therefore there is a need of balance between accuracy and simplicity to limit the feature set which tends to lead to better predictions. Simpler models are also more interpretable to humans which also helps. While the data I was working with was limited to around 35 features, there are many data science problems which have thousands of features and so this technique is even more crucial.

There are multiple methods to perform feature selection, of which a few will be covered here. The first method is greedy backward selection which starts with all the features and then finds the feature that hurts predictive power the least when removed, and you remove it. This is done iteratively until a point is met (which will be discussed later). Its known as greedy since it never looks back after removing the feature each time.

An alternative method is greedy forward selection which is basically the inverse, starts with no features, and looks for the feature that by itself is the best model. This then carries on in a similar vein to the backward selection but adding features. The point at which you stop with forward selection is that of diminishing returns for your accuracy.

Read the whole thing.  This is explanation rather than demonstration, but the explanation applies to pretty much any implementation you’re using.

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