Evaluating convergence of SGD classifier in scikit learn - python

Is there any automated way to evaluate convergence of the SGDClassifier?
I'm trying to run an elastic net logit in python and am using scikit learn's SGDClassifier with log loss and elastic net penalty. When I fit the model in python, I get all zeros for my coefficients. When I run glmnet in R, I get significant non-zero coefficients.
After some twiddling I found that the scikit learn coefficients approach the R coefficients after around 1000 iterations.
Is there any method that I'm missing in scikit learn to iterate until the change in coefficients is relatively small (or a max amount of iterations has been performed), or do I need to do this myself via cross-validation.

This a known limitation of the current implementation of scikit-learn's SGD classifier, there is currently no automated convergence check on that model. You can set verbose=1 to get some feedback when running though.

Related

Online version of Ridge Regression Classifier in ski-kitlearn?

I'm trying a range of Online classifiers in the ski-kitlearn library to train a model from huge data. I found there are many classifiers supporting the partial_fit allowing for incremental learning. I want to use the Ridge Regression classifier in this setting, but could not find it in the implementation. Is there an alternative model that can do this in sklearn?
sklearn.linear_model.SGDClassifier, its loss function contain ‘hinge’, ‘log’, ‘modified_huber’, ‘squared_hinge’, ‘perceptron’
sklearn.linear_model.SGDRegressor, its default loss function is squared_loss, The possible values are ‘squared_loss’, ‘huber’, ‘epsilon_insensitive’, or ‘squared_epsilon_insensitive’

How to do regression as opposed to classification using logistic regression and scikit learn

The target variable that I need to predict are probabilities (as opposed to labels). The corresponding column in my training data are also in this form. I do not want to lose information by thresholding the targets to create a classification problem out of it.
If I train the logistic regression classifier with binary labels, sk-learn logistic regression API allows obtaining the probabilities at prediction time. However, I need to train it with probabilities. Is there a way to do this in scikits-learn, or a suitable Python package that scales to 100K data points of 1K dimension.
I want the regressor to use the structure of the problem. One such
structure is that the targets are probabilities.
You can't have cross-entropy loss with non-indicator probabilities in scikit-learn; this is not implemented and not supported in API. It is a scikit-learn's limitation.
In general, according to scikit-learn's docs a loss function is of the form Loss(prediction, target), where prediction is the model's output, and target is the ground-truth value.
In the case of logistic regression, prediction is a value on (0,1) (i.e., a "soft label"), while target is 0 or 1 (i.e., a "hard label").
For logistic regression you can approximate probabilities as target by oversampling instances according to probabilities of their labels. e.g. if for given sample class_1 has probability 0.2, and class_2 has probability0.8, then generate 10 training instances (copied sample): 8 withclass_2as "ground truth target label" and 2 withclass_1`.
Obviously it is workaround and is not extremely efficient, but it should work properly.
If you're ok with upsampling approach, you can pip install eli5, and use eli5.lime.utils.fit_proba with a Logistic Regression classifier from scikit-learn.
Alternative solution is to implement (or find implementation?) of LogisticRegression in Tensorflow, where you can define loss function as you like it.
In compiling this solution I worked using answers from scikit-learn - multinomial logistic regression with probabilities as a target variable and scikit-learn classification on soft labels. I advise those for more insight.
This is an excellent question because (contrary to what people might believe) there are many legitimate uses of logistic regression as.... regression!
There are three basic approaches you can use if you insist on true logistic regression, and two additional options that should give similar results. They all assume your target output is between 0 and 1. Most of the time you will have to generate training/test sets "manually," unless you are lucky enough to be using a platform that supports SGD-R with custom kernels and X-validation support out-of-the-box.
Note that given your particular use case, the "not quite true logistic regression" options may be necessary. The downside of these approaches is that it is takes more work to see the weight/importance of each feature in case you want to reduce your feature space by removing weak features.
Direct Approach using Optimization
If you don't mind doing a bit of coding, you can just use scipy optimize function. This is dead simple:
Create a function of the following type:
y_o = inverse-logit (a_0 + a_1x_1 + a_2x_2 + ...)
where inverse-logit (z) = exp^(z) / (1 + exp^z)
Use scipy minimize to minimize the sum of -1 * [y_t*log(y_o) + (1-y_t)*log(1 - y_o)], summed over all datapoints. To do this you have to set up a function that takes (a_0, a_1, ...) as parameters and creates the function and then calculates the loss.
Stochastic Gradient Descent with Custom Loss
If you happen to be using a platform that has SGD regression with a custom loss then you can just use that, specifying a loss of y_t*log(y_o) + (1-y_t)*log(1 - y_o)
One way to do this is just to fork sci-kit learn and add log loss to the regression SGD solver.
Convert to Classification Problem
You can convert your problem to a classification problem by oversampling, as described by #jo9k. But note that even in this case you should not use standard X-validation because the data are not independent anymore. You will need to break up your data manually into train/test sets and oversample only after you have broken them apart.
Convert to SVM
(Edit: I did some testing and found that on my test sets sigmoid kernels were not behaving well. I think they require some special pre-processing to work as expected. An SVM with a sigmoid kernel is equivalent to a 2-layer tanh Neural Network, which should be amenable to a regression task structured where training data outputs are probabilities. I might come back to this after further review.)
You should get similar results to logistic regression using an SVM with sigmoid kernel. You can use sci-kit learn's SVR function and specify the kernel as sigmoid. You may run into performance difficulties with 100,000s of data points across 1000 features.... which leads me to my final suggestion:
Convert to SVM using Approximated Kernels
This method will give results a bit further away from true logistic regression, but it is extremely performant. The process is the following:
Use a sci-kit-learn's RBFsampler to explicitly construct an approximate rbf-kernel for your dataset.
Process your data through that kernel and then use sci-kit-learn's SGDRegressor with a hinge loss to realize a super-performant SVM on the transformed data.
The above is laid out with code here
Instead of using predict in the scikit learn library use predict_proba function
refer here:
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.linear_model.LogisticRegression.html#sklearn.linear_model.LogisticRegression.predict_proba

What are the initial estimates taken in Logistic regression in Scikit-learn for the first iteration?

I am trying out logistic regression from scratch in python.(through finding probability estimates,cost function,applying gradient descent for increasing the maximum likelihood).But I have a confusion regarding which estimates should I take for the first iteration process.I took all the estimates as 0(including the intercept).But the results are different from that we get in Scikit-learn.I want to know which are the initial estimates taken in Scikit-learn for logistic regression?
First of all scikit learn's LogsiticRegerssion uses regularization. So unless you apply that too , it is unlikely you will get exactly the same estimates. if you really want to test your method versus scikit's , it is better to use their gradient decent implementation of Logistic regersion which is called SGDClassifier . Make certain you put loss='log' for logistic regression and set alpha=0 to remove regularization, but again you will need to adjust the iterations and eta as their implementation is likely to be slightly different than yours.
To answer specifically about the initial estimates, I don't think it matters, but most commonly you set everything to 0 (including the intercept) and should converge just fine.
Also bear in mind GD (gradient Decent) models are hard to tune sometimes and you may need to apply some scaling(like StandardScaler) to your data beforehand as very high values are very likely to drive your gradient out of its slope. Scikit's implementation adjusts for that.

Difference in Randomized Lasso and logistic regression in sklearn?

In python sklearn library, both RandomizedLogisticRegression and RandomizedLasso are supported as feature selection methods.
However, they are all using L1(Lasso) penalty, and I am not sure why both of them are implemented. In fact, I though that Lasso regression is the other term of L1-regularized logistic regression, but maybe there seems to be some difference.
I think even Linear SVM with L1 penalty(combined with resampling) will also produce the similar result.
Are there significant difference among them?
From: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/feature_selection.html#randomized-l1
RandomizedLasso implements this strategy for regression settings, using the Lasso, while RandomizedLogisticRegression uses the logistic regression and is suitable for classification tasks. To get a full path of stability scores you can use lasso_stability_path.
RandomizedLasso is used for regression in which the outcome is continuous. RandomizedLogisticRegression on the other hand is for classification in which the outcome is a class label.

Scikit-learn categorisation: binomial log regression?

I have texts that are rated on a continous scale from -100 to +100. I am trying to classify them as positive or negative.
How can you perform binomial log regression to get the probability that test data is -100 or +100?
The closest I have got is the SGDClassifier( penalty='l2',alpha=1e-05, n_iter=10), but this doesn't provide the same results as SPSS when I use binomial log regression to predict the probability of -100 and +100. So I'm guessing this is not the right function?
SGDClassifier provides access to several linear classifiers, all trained with stochastic gradient decent. It will default to a linear support vector machine, unless you call it with a different loss function. loss='log' will provide a probabilistic logistic regression.
See the documentation at:
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.linear_model.SGDClassifier.html#sklearn.linear_model.SGDClassifier
Alternatively, you could use sklearn.linear_model.LogisticRegression to classify your texts with a logistic regression.
It's not clear to me that you will get exactly the same results as you do with SPSS due to differences in implementation. However, I would not expect to see statistically significant differences.
Edited to add:
My suspicion is that the 99% accuracy you're getting with the SPSS logistic regression is training set accuracy, while the 87% that you're seeing with scikits-learn logistic regression is test set accuracy. I found this question on the datascience stack exchange where a different person is attempting and extremely similar problem, and getting ~99% accuracy on training sets and 90% test set accuracy.
https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/987/text-categorization-combining-different-kind-of-features
My recommended path forwards is a follows: Try several different basic classifiers in scikits-learn, including the standard logistic regression and a linear SVM, and also rerun the SPSS logistic regression several times with different train/test subsets of your data and compare the results. If you continue to see a large divergence across classifiers that can't be accounted for by ensuring similar train/test data splits, then post the results that you're seeing into your question, and we can move forward from there.
Good luck!
If pos/neg, or the probability of pos, is really the only thing you need as output, then you can derive binary labels y as
y = score > 0
assuming you have the scores in a NumPy array score.
You can then feed this to a LogisticRegression instance, using the continuous score to derive relative weights for the samples:
clf = LogisticRegression()
sample_weight = np.abs(score)
sample_weight /= sample_weight.sum()
clf.fit(X, y, sample_weight)
This gives maximum weight to tweets with scores ±100, and a weight of zero to tweets that are labeled neutral, varying linearly between the two.
If the dataset is very large, then as #brentlance showed, you can use SGDClassifier, but you have to give it loss="log" if you want a logistic regression model; otherwise, you'll get a linear SVM.

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