# German Credit Data

Modeling is one of the topics I will be writing a lot on this blog. Because of that I thought it would be nice to introduce some datasets that I will use in the illustration of models and methods later on. In this post I describe the German credit data [1], very popular within the machine learning literature.

This dataset contains ${1000}$ rows, where each row has information about the credit status of an individual, which can be good or bad. Besides, it has qualitative and quantitative information about the individuals. Examples of qualitative information are purpose of the loan and sex while examples of quantitative information are duration of the loan and installment rate in percentage of disposable income.

This dataset has also been described and used in [2] and is available in R through the caret package.

require(caret)
data(GermanCredit)


The version above had all the categorical predictors converted to dummy variables (see for ex. Section 3.6 of [2]) and can be displayed using the str function:

str(GermanCredit, list.len=5)

'data.frame':  1000 obs. of  62 variables:
$Duration : int 6 48 12 ...$ Amount                      : int  1169 5951 2096 ...
$InstallmentRatePercentage : int 4 2 2 ...$ ResidenceDuration           : int  4 2 3 ...
$Age : int 67 22 49 ... [list output truncated]  For data exploration purposes, I also like to keep a dataset where the categorical predictors are stored as factors rather than converted to dummy variables. This sometimes facilitates since it provides a grouping effect for the levels of the categorical variable. This grouping effect is lost when we convert them to dummy variables, specially when a non-full rank parametrization of the predictors is used. The response (or target) variable here indicates the credit status of an individual and is stored in the column Class of the GermanCredit dataset as a factor with two levels, “Bad” and “Good”. We can see above (code for Figure here) that the German credit data is a case of unbalanced dataset with ${70\%}$ of the individuals being classified as having good credit. Therefore, the accuracy of a classification model should be superior to ${70\%}$, which would be the accuracy of a naive model that classify every individual as having good credit. The nice thing about this dataset is that it has a lot of challenges faced by data scientists on a daily basis. For example, it is unbalanced, has predictors that are constant within groups and has collinearity among predictors. In order to fit some models to this dataset, like the LDA for example, we must deal with these challenges first. More on that later. References: [1] German credit data hosted by the UCI Machine Learning Repository. [2] Kuhn, M., and Johnson, K. (2013). Applied Predictive Modeling. Springer. # Computing and visualizing LDA in R As I have described before, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) can be seen from two different angles. The first classify a given sample of predictors ${x}$ to the class ${C_l}$ with highest posterior probability ${\pi(y = C_l|x)}$. It minimizes the total probability of misclassification. To compute ${\pi(y = C_l|x)}$ it uses Bayes’ rule and assume that ${\pi(x|y = C_l)}$ follows a Gaussian distribution with class-specific mean ${\mu_l}$ and common covariance matrix ${\Sigma}$. The second tries to find a linear combination of the predictors that gives maximum separation between the centers of the data while at the same time minimizing the variation within each group of data. The second approach [1] is usually preferred in practice due to its dimension-reduction property and is implemented in many R packages, as in the lda function of the MASS package for example. In what follows, I will show how to use the lda function and visually illustrate the difference between Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and LDA when applied to the same dataset. Using lda from MASS R package As usual, we are going to illustrate lda using the iris dataset. The data contains four continuous variables which correspond to physical measures of flowers and a categorical variable describing the flowers’ species. require(MASS) # Load data data(iris) > head(iris, 3) Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa  An usual call to lda contains formula, data and prior arguments [2]. r <- lda(formula = Species ~ ., data = iris, prior = c(1,1,1)/3)  The . in the formula argument means that we use all the remaining variables in data as covariates. The prior argument sets the prior probabilities of class membership. If unspecified, the class proportions for the training set are used. If present, the probabilities should be specified in the order of the factor levels. > r$prior
setosa versicolor  virginica
0.3333333  0.3333333  0.3333333

> r$counts setosa versicolor virginica 50 50 50 > r$means
Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width
setosa            5.006       3.428        1.462       0.246
versicolor        5.936       2.770        4.260       1.326
virginica         6.588       2.974        5.552       2.026

> r$scaling LD1 LD2 Sepal.Length 0.8293776 0.02410215 Sepal.Width 1.5344731 2.16452123 Petal.Length -2.2012117 -0.93192121 Petal.Width -2.8104603 2.83918785 > r$svd
[1] 48.642644  4.579983


As we can see above, a call to lda returns the prior probability of each class, the counts for each class in the data, the class-specific means for each covariate, the linear combination coefficients (scaling) for each linear discriminant (remember that in this case with 3 classes we have at most two linear discriminants) and the singular values (svd) that gives the ratio of the between- and within-group standard deviations on the linear discriminant variables.

prop = r$svd^2/sum(r$svd^2)

> prop
[1] 0.991212605 0.008787395


We can use the singular values to compute the amount of the between-group variance that is explained by each linear discriminant. In our example we see that the first linear discriminant explains more than ${99\%}$ of the between-group variance in the iris dataset.

If we call lda with CV = TRUE it uses a leave-one-out cross-validation and returns a named list with components:

• class: the Maximum a Posteriori Probability (MAP) classification (a factor)
• posterior: posterior probabilities for the classes.
r2 <- lda(formula = Species ~ .,
data = iris,
prior = c(1,1,1)/3,
CV = TRUE)

> head(r2$class) [1] setosa setosa setosa setosa setosa setosa Levels: setosa versicolor virginica > head(r2$posterior, 3)
setosa   versicolor    virginica
1      1 5.087494e-22 4.385241e-42
2      1 9.588256e-18 8.888069e-37
3      1 1.983745e-19 8.606982e-39


There is also a predict method implemented for lda objects. It returns the classification and the posterior probabilities of the new data based on the Linear Discriminant model. Below, I use half of the dataset to train the model and the other half is used for predictions.

train <- sample(1:150, 75)

r3 <- lda(Species ~ ., # training model
iris,
prior = c(1,1,1)/3,
subset = train)

plda = predict(object = r, # predictions
newdata = iris[-train, ])

> head(plda$class) # classification result [1] setosa setosa setosa setosa setosa setosa Levels: setosa versicolor virginica > head(plda$posterior, 3) # posterior prob.
setosa   versicolor    virginica
3      1 1.463849e-19 4.675932e-39
4      1 1.268536e-16 3.566610e-35
5      1 1.637387e-22 1.082605e-42

> head(plda\$x, 3) # LD projections
LD1        LD2
3 7.489828 -0.2653845
4 6.813201 -0.6706311
5 8.132309  0.5144625


Visualizing the difference between PCA and LDA

As I have mentioned at the end of my post about Reduced-rank DA, PCA is an unsupervised learning technique (don’t use class information) while LDA is a supervised technique (uses class information), but both provide the possibility of dimensionality reduction, which is very useful for visualization. Therefore we would expect (by definition) LDA to provide better data separation when compared to PCA, and this is exactly what we see at the Figure below when both LDA (upper panel) and PCA (lower panel) are applied to the iris dataset. The code to generate this Figure is available on github.

Although we can see that this is an easy dataset to work with, it allow us to clearly see that the versicolor specie is well separated from the virginica one in the upper panel while there is still some overlap between them in the lower panel. This kind of difference is to be expected since PCA tries to retain most of the variability in the data while LDA tries to retain most of the between-class variance in the data. Note also that in this example the first LD explains more than ${99\%}$ of the between-group variance in the data while the first PC explains ${73\%}$ of the total variability in the data.

Closing remarks

Although I have not applied it on my illustrative example above, pre-processing [3] of the data is important for the application of LDA. Users should transform, center and scale the data prior to the application of LDA. It is also useful to remove near-zero variance predictors (almost constant predictors across units). Given that we need to invert the covariance matrix, it is necessary to have less predictors than samples. Attention is therefore needed when using cross-validation.

References:

[1] Venables, W. N. and Ripley, B. D. (2002). Modern applied statistics with S. Springer.
[2] lda (MASS) help file.
[3] Kuhn, M. and Johnson, K. (2013). Applied Predictive Modeling. Springer.

# Reduced-rank discriminant analysis

In a previous post, I described linear discriminant analysis (LDA) using the following Bayes’ rule

$\displaystyle \pi(y=C_l | x) = \frac{\pi(y=C_l) \pi(x|y=C_l)}{\sum _{l=1}^{C}\pi(y=C_l) \pi(x|y=C_l)}$

where ${\pi(y=C_l)}$ is the prior probability of membership in class ${C_l}$ and the distribution of the predictors for a given class ${C_l}$, ${\pi(x|y=C_l)}$, is a multivariate Gaussian, ${N(\mu_l, \Sigma)}$, with class-specific mean ${\mu_l}$ and common covariance matrix ${\Sigma}$. We then assign a new sample ${x}$ to the class ${C_k}$ with the highest posterior probability ${\pi(y=C_k | x)}$. This approach minimizes the total probability of misclassification [1].

Fisher [2] had a different approach. He proposed to find a linear combination of the predictors such that the between-class covariance is maximized relative to the within-class covariance. That is [3], he wanted a linear combination of the predictors that gave maximum separation between the centers of the data while at the same time minimizing the variation within each group of data.

Variance decomposition

Denote by ${X}$ the ${n \times p}$ matrix with ${n}$ observations of the ${p}$-dimensional predictor. The covariance matrix ${\Sigma}$ of ${X}$ can be decomposed into the within-class covariance ${W}$ and the between-class covariance ${B}$, so that

$\displaystyle \Sigma = W + B$

where

$\displaystyle W = \frac{(X - GM)^T(X-GM)}{n-C}, \quad B = \frac{(GM - 1\bar{x})^T(GM - 1\bar{x})}{C-1}$

and ${G}$ is the ${n \times C}$ matrix of class indicator variables so that ${g_{ij} = 1}$ if and only if case ${i}$ is assigned to class ${j}$, ${M}$ is the ${C \times p}$ matrix of class means, ${1\bar{x}}$ is the ${n \times p}$ matrix where each row is formed by ${\bar{x}}$ and ${C}$ is the total number of classes.

Fisher’s approach

Using Fisher’s approach, we want to find the linear combination ${Z = a^TX}$ such that the between-class covariance is maximized relative to the within-class covariance. The between-class covariance of ${Z}$ is ${a^TBa}$ and the within-class covariance is ${a^TWa}$.

So, Fisher’s approach amounts to maximizing the Rayleigh quotient,

$\displaystyle \underset{a}{\text{max }} \frac{a^TBa}{a^T W a}$

[4] propose to sphere the data (see page 305 of [4] for information about sphering) so that the variables have the identity as their within-class covariance matrix. That way, the problem becomes to maximize ${a^TBa}$ subject to ${||a|| = 1}$. As we saw in the post about PCA, this is solved by taking ${a}$ to be the eigenvector of B corresponding to the largest eigenvalue. ${a}$ is unique up to a change of sign, unless there are multiple eigenvalues.

Dimensionality reduction

Similar to principal components, we can take further linear components corresponding to the next largest eigenvalues of ${B}$. There will be at most ${r = \text{min}(p, C-1)}$ positive eigenvalues. The corresponding transformed variables are called the linear discriminants.

Note that the eigenvalues are the proportions of the between-class variance explained by the linear combinations. So we can use this information to decide how many linear discriminants to use, just like we do with PCA. In classification problems, we can also decide how many linear discriminants to use by cross-validation.

Reduced-rank discriminant analysis can be useful to better visualize data. It might be that most of the between-class variance is explained by just a few linear discriminants, allowing us to have a meaningful plot in lower dimension. For example, in a three-class classification problem with many predictors, all the between-class variance of the predictors is captured by only two linear discriminants, which is much easier to visualize than the original high-dimensional space of the predictors.

Regarding interpretation, the magnitude of the coefficients ${a}$ can be used to understand the contribution of each predictor to the classification of samples and provide some understanding and interpretation about the underlying problem.

RRDA and PCA

It is important to emphasize the difference between PCA and Reduced-rank DA. The first computes linear combinations of the predictors that retain most of the variability in the data. It does not make use of the class information and is therefore an unsupervised technique. The latter computes linear combinations of the predictors that retain most of the between-class variance in the data. It uses the class information of the samples and therefore belongs to the group of supervised learning techniques.

References:

[1] Welch, B. L. (1939). Note on discriminant functions. Biometrika, 31(1/2), 218-220.
[2] Fisher, R. A. (1936). The use of multiple measurements in taxonomic problems. Annals of eugenics, 7(2), 179-188.
[3] Kuhn, M. and Johnson, K. (2013). Applied Predictive Modeling. Springer.
[4] Venables, W. N. and Ripley, B. D. (2002). Modern applied statistics with S. Springer.

# 4th and 5th week of Coursera’s Machine Learning (neural networks)

The fourth and fifth weeks of the Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course at Coursera were about Neural Networks. From picking a neural network architecture to how to fit them to data at hand, as well as some practical advice. Following are my notes about it.

A simple Neural Network diagram

Figure 1 represents a neural network with three layers. The first (blue) layer, denoted as ${a^{(1)} = (a_1^{(1)}, a_2^{(1)}, a_3^{(1)})^T}$, has three nodes and is called the input layer because its nodes are formed by the covariate/features ${x = (x_1, x_2, x_3)}$, so that ${a^{(1)} = x}$.

Figure 1: An example of a neural network diagram with one output unit for binary classification problems.

The second (red) layer, denoted as ${a^{(2)} = (a_1^{(2)}, a_2^{(2)}, a_3^{(2)})^T}$, is called a hidden layer because we don’t observe but rather compute the value of its nodes. The components of ${a^{(2)}}$ are given by a non-linear function applied to a linear combination of the nodes of the previous layer, so that

$\displaystyle \begin{array}{rcl} a_1^{(2)} & = & g(\Theta_{11}^{(1)} a_1^{(1)} + \Theta_{12}^{(1)} a_2^{(1)} + \Theta_{13}^{(1)} a_3^{(1)}) \\ a_2^{(2)} & = & g(\Theta_{21}^{(1)} a_1^{(1)} + \Theta_{22}^{(1)} a_2^{(1)} + \Theta_{23}^{(1)} a_3^{(1)}) \\ a_3^{(2)} & = & g(\Theta_{31}^{(1)} a_1^{(1)} + \Theta_{32}^{(1)} a_2^{(1)} + \Theta_{33}^{(1)} a_3^{(1)}), \end{array}$

where ${g(x) = 1/(1 + e^{-z})}$ is the sigmoid/logistic function.

The third (green) layer, denoted as ${a^{(3)} = (a_1^{(3)})}$, is called the output layer (later we see that in a multi-class classification the output layer can have more than one element) because it returns the hypothesis function ${h_{\Theta}(x)}$, which is again a non-linear function applied to a linear combination of the nodes of the previous layer,

$\displaystyle h_{\Theta}(x) = a_1^{(3)} = g(\Theta_{11}^{(2)} a_1^{(2)} + \Theta_{12}^{(2)} a_2^{(2)} + \Theta_{13}^{(2)} a_3^{(2)}). \ \ \ \ \ (1)$

So, ${a^{(j)}}$ denotes the elements on layer ${j}$, ${a_i^{(j)}}$ denotes the ${i}$-th unit in layer ${j}$ and ${\Theta^{(j)}}$ denotes the matrix of parameters controlling the mapping from layer ${j}$ to layer ${j+1}$.

What is going on?

Note that Eq. (1) is similar to the formula used in logistic regression with the exception that now ${h_{\theta}(x)}$ equals ${g(\theta^Ta^{(2)})}$ instead of ${g(\theta^Tx)}$. That is, the original features ${x}$ are now replaced by the second layer of the neural network.

Although is hard to see exactly what is going on, Eq. (1) uses the nodes in layer 2, ${a^{(2)}}$, as input to produce the final output of the neural network. And ${a^{(2)}}$ has each element formed by a non-linear combination of the original features. Intuitively, what the neural network does is to create complex non-linear boundaries that will be used in the classification of future features.

In the third week of the course it was mentioned that non-linear classification boundaries could be obtained by using non-linear transformation of the original features, like ${x^2}$ or ${\sqrt(x)}$. However, the type of non-linear transformation had to be hand-picked and varies on a case-by-case basis, getting hard to do in cases with large number of features. In a sense, neural network is automating this process of creating non-linear functions of the features to produce non-linear classification boundaries.

Multi-class classification

In a binary classification problem, the target variable can be represented by ${y \in \{0,1\}}$ and the neural network has one output unit, as represented by Figure 1. In a neural network context, for a multi-class classification problem with ${K}$ classes, the target variable is represented by a vector of length ${K}$ instead of ${y \in \{1, ..., K\}}$. For example, for ${K = 4}$, ${y \in {\mathbb R} ^4}$ and can take one of the following vectors:

and in this case the output layer will have ${K}$ output units, as represented in Figure 2 for ${K = 4}$.

Figure 2: An example of a neural network diagram with K=4 output units for a multi-class classification problem.

The neural network represented in Figure 2 is similar to the one in Figure 1. The only difference is that it has one extra hidden layer and that the dimensions of the layers ${a^{(j)}}$, ${j=1,...,4}$ are different. The math behind it stays exactly the same, as can be seen with the forward propagation algorithm.

Forward propagation: vectorized implementation

Forward propagation shows how to compute ${h_{\Theta}(x)}$, for a given ${x}$. Assume your neural network has ${L}$ layers, then the pseudo-code for forward propagation is given by:

Algorithm 1 (forward propagation)
${1.\ a^{(1)} = x}$
${2.\ \text{for }l = 1,...,L-1\text{ do}}$
${3.\quad z^{(l+1)} = \Theta^{(l)} a^{(l)}}$
${4.\quad a^{(l+1)} = g(z^{(l+1)})}$
${5.\ \text{end}}$
${6.\ h_{\Theta}(x) = a^{(L)}}$

The only thing that changes for different neural networks are the number of layers ${L}$ and the dimensions of the vectors ${a^{(j)}}$, ${z^{(j)}}$, ${j=1,...,L}$ and matrices ${\Theta^{(i)}}$, ${i=1,...,L-1}$.

Cost function

From now on, assume we have a training set with ${m}$ data-points, ${\{(y^{(i)}, x^{(i)})\}_{i=1}^{m}}$. The cost function for a neural network with ${K}$ output units is very similar to the logistic regression one:

$\displaystyle \begin{array}{rcl} J(\Theta) & = & -\frac{1}{m} \bigg[\sum _{i=1}^m \sum_{k=1}^K y_k^{(i)} \log h_{\theta}(x^{(i)})_k + (1-y_k^{(i)})\log(1 - h_{\theta}(x^{(i)})_k) \bigg] \\ & + & \frac{\lambda}{2m} \sum_{l=1}^{L-1} \sum _{i=1}^{s_l} \sum _{j=1}^{s_{l+1}}(\Theta _{ji}^{(l)})^2, \end{array}$

where ${h_{\theta}(x^{(i)})_k}$ is the ${k}$-th unit of the output layer. The main difference is that now ${h_{\theta}(x^{(i)})}$ is computed with the forward propagation algorithm. Technically, everything we have so far is enough for optimization of the cost function above. Many of the modern optimization algorithms allow you to provide just the function to be optimized while derivatives are computed numerically within the optimization routine. However, this can be very inefficient in some cases. The backpropagation algorithm provides an efficient way to compute the gradient of the cost function ${J(\Theta)}$ of a neural network.

Backpropagation algorithm

For the cost function given above, we have that ${\frac{\partial}{\partial \Theta ^{(l)}}J(\Theta) = \delta^{(l+1)}(a^{(l)})^T + \lambda \Theta}$, where ${\delta _j ^{(l)}}$ can be interpreted as the “error” of node ${j}$ in layer ${l}$ and is computed by

Algorithm 2 (backpropagation)
${1.\ \delta^{(L)} = a^{(L)} - y}$
${2.\ \text{for }l = L-1, ..., 2\text{ do}}$
${3.\quad \delta^{(l)} = (\Theta^{(l)})^T \delta^{(l + 1)} .* g'(z^{(l)})}$
${4.\ \text{end}}$

Knowing how to compute the ${\delta}$‘s, the complete pseudo-algorithm to compute the gradient of ${J(\Theta)}$ is given by

Algorithm 3 (gradient of ${J(\Theta)}$)
${1.\ \text{Set }\Delta^{(l)} = 0,\text{ for }l = 1, ..., L-1}$
${2.\ \text{for }i = 1, ..., m\text{ do}}$
${3.\quad \text{Set }a^{(1)} = x^{(i)}}$
${4.\quad \text{Compute }a^{(l)}\text{ for }l=2,...,L\text{ using forward propagation (Algorithm 1)}}$
${5.\quad \text{Using }y^{(i)}, \text{compute } \delta^{(l)} \text{ for } l = L, ..., 2\text{ using the backpropagation algorithm (Algorithm 2)}}$
${6.\quad \Delta^{(l)} = \Delta^{(l)} + \delta^{(l+1)}(a^{(l)})^T \text{ for }l=L-1, ..., 1}$
${7.\ \text{end}}$

Then ${\frac{\partial}{\partial \Theta ^{(l)}}J(\Theta) = \Delta^{(l)} + \lambda \Theta}$

• Pick a network architecture. The number of input units is given by the dimension of the features ${x^{(i)}}$. The number of output units is given by the number of classes. So basically we need to decide the number of hidden layers and how many units in each hidden layer. A reasonable default is to have one hidden layer with the number of units equal to ${2}$ times the number of input units. If more than one hidden layer, use the same number of hidden units in every layer. The more hidden units the better, the constrain here is the burden in computational time that increases with the number of hidden units.
• When using numerical optimization you need initial values for ${\Theta}$. Randomly initialize the parameters ${\Theta}$ so that each ${\theta_{ij} \in [-\epsilon, \epsilon]}$. Initializing ${\theta_{ij} = 0}$ for all ${i,j}$ will result in problems. Basically all hidden units will have the same value, which is clearly undesirable.