Preserve Order for Cross Validation in Weka - weka

I am using the Weka GUI for classifying sensor data.
I have measures of 10 people, the data is sorted. So the first 10% correspond to participant 1, the second 10% to participant 2 etc.
I would like to use 10 fold cross validation to build a model on 9 participants and test it on the remaining participant. In my case I believe I could accomplish this by simply not randomizing the data splits.
How would I best go about doing this?

I don't know how to do this in the Explorer.
In the KnowledgeFlow GUI, there is a CrossValidationFoldMaker used to create cross-validation folds. This has an option to Preserve instances order, which says it preserves the order of instances rather than randomly shuffling.
There's a video describing the KnowledgeFlow interface here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHSgoVX9z-8&t=7s

Related

What can be inferred from two datasets using k-means or k-nn

I am wondering what you could infer using data mining from two large datasets that have similar properties. Say you have two datasets containing detailed information about schools in a country and each dataset belongs to a school stage for a particular year. What sorts of things can you do with these datasets using data mining?
I know how to use and apply the algorithms in pandas but I am having problems with getting the motivation behind the k-means especially.
I know you use the k-means to put the unlabeled data into clusters based on number of factors from the dataset and based on the property values of each data element, they are being placed in one of the clusters created. But then what do you do with these clusters? How can you use them for analysing the data? I read that it can even be used for cleaning the data or relating two datasets to each other, but I'm just having hard time to imagine how would you go about to do these things.
Any help is well appreciated. Thanks..
You could do many things with those datasets including:
See which students from a lower stage are more likely to be in which group (successful, unsuccessful etc.) when they reach a higher stage based on some factors
See what factors are affecting the success of the students at different stages (assuming the datasets contain this information)
You can do many different comparisons based on different factors
..and many more. The issue is that it is not really possible to say what can be inferred from your datasets without seeing what information they contain. My suggestion is you should look carefully in two datasets and see if they have some columns that are common and pick the ones that are interest you the most.

Training and Test Set in Weka InCompatible in Text Classification

I have two datasets regarding whether a sentence contains a mention of a drug adverse event or not, both the training and test set have only two fields the text and the labels{Adverse Event, No Adverse Event} I have used weka with the stringtoWordVector filter to build a model using Random Forest on the training set.
I want to test the model built with removing the class labels from the test data set, applying the StringToWordVector filter on it and testing the model with it. When I try to do that it gives me the error saying training and test set not compatible probably because the filter identifies a different set of attributes for the test dataset. How do I fix this and output the predictions for the test set.
The easiest way to do this for a one off test is not to pre-filter the training set, but to use Weka's FilteredClassifier and configure it with the StringToWordVector filter, and your chosen classifier to do the classification. This is explained well in this video from the More Data Mining with Weka online course.
For a more general solution, if you want to build the model once then evaluate it on different test sets in future, you need to use InputMappedClassifier:
Wrapper classifier that addresses incompatible training and test data
by building a mapping between the training data that a classifier has
been built with and the incoming test instances' structure. Model
attributes that are not found in the incoming instances receive
missing values, so do incoming nominal attribute values that the
classifier has not seen before. A new classifier can be trained or an
existing one loaded from a file.
Weka requires a label even for the test data. It uses the labels or „ground truth“ of the test data to compare the result of the model against it and measure the model performance. How would you tell whether a model is performing well, if you don‘t know whether its predictions are right or wrong. Thus, the test data needs to have the very same structure as the training data in WEKA, including the labels. No worries, the labels are not used to help the model with its predictions.
The best way to go is to select cross validation (e.g. 10 fold cross validation) which automatically will split your data into 10 parts, using 9 for training and the remaining 1 for testing. This procedure is repeated 10 times so that each of the 10 parts has once been used as test data. The final performance verdict will be an average of all 10 rounds. Cross validation gives you a quite realistic estimate of the model performance on new, unseen data.
What you were trying to do, namely using the exact same data for training and testing is a bad idea, because the measured performance you end up with is way too optimistic. This means, you‘ll get very impressive figures like 98% accuracy during testing - but as soon as you use the model against new unseen data your accuracy might drop to a much worse level.

AWS Machine Learning Data

I'm using the AWS Machine Learning regression to predict the waiting time in a line of a restaurant, in a specific weekday/time.
Today I have around 800k data.
Example Data:
restaurantID (rowID)weekDay (categorical)time (categorical)tablePeople (numeric)waitingTime (numeric - target)1 sun 21:29 2 23
2 fri 20:13 4 43
...
I have two questions:
1)
Should I use time as Categorical or Numeric?
It's better to split into two fields: minutes and seconds?
2)
I would like in the same model to get the predictions for all my restaurants.
Example:
I expected to send the rowID identifier and it returns different predictions, based on each restaurant data (ignoring others data).
I tried, but it's returning the same prediction for any rowID. Why?
Should I have a model for each restaurant?
There are several problems with the way you set-up your model
1) Time in the form you have it should never be categorical. Your model treats times 12:29 and 12:30 as two completely independent attributes. So it will never use facts it learn about 12:29 to predict what's going to happen at 12:30. In your case you either should set time to be numeric. Not sure if amazon ML can convert it for you automatically. If not just multiply hour by 60 and add minutes to it. Another interesting thing to do is to bucketize your time, by selecting which half hour or wider interval. You do it by dividing (h*60+m) by some number depending how many buckets you want. So to try 120 to get 2 hr intervals. Generally the more data you have the smaller intervals you can have. The key is to have a lot of samples in each bucket.
2) You should really think about removing restaurantID from your input data. Having it there will cause the model to over-fit on it. So it will not be able to make predictions about restaurant with id:5 based on the facts it learn from restaurants with id:3 or id:9. Having restaurant id there might be okay if you have a lot of data about each restaurant and you don't care about extrapolating your predictions to the restaurants that are not in the training set.
3) You never send restaurantID to predict data about it. The way it usually works you need to pick what are you trying to predict. In your case probably 'waitingTime' is most useful attribute. So you need to send weekDay, time and number of people and the model will output waiting time.
You should think what is relevant for the prediction to be accurate, and you should use your domain expertise to define the features/attributes you need to have in your data.
For example, time of the day, is not just a number. From my limited understanding in restaurant, I would drop the minutes, and only focus on the hours.
I would certainly create a model for each restaurant, as the popularity of the restaurant or the type of food it is serving is having an impact on the wait time. With Amazon ML it is easy to create many models as you can build the model using the SDK, and even schedule retraining of the models using AWS Lambda (that mean automatically).
I'm not sure what the feature called tablePeople means, but a general recommendation is to have as many as possible relevant features, to get better prediction. For example, month or season is probably important as well.
In contrast with some answers to this post, I think resturantID helps and it actually gives valuable information. If you have a significant amount of data per each restaurant then you can train a model per each restaurant and get a good accuracy, but if you don't have enough data then resturantID is very informative.
1) Just imagine what if you had only two columns in your dataset: restaurantID and waitingTime. Then wouldn't you think the restaurantID from the testing data helps you to find a rough waiting time? In the simplest implementation, your waiting time per each restaurantID would be the average of waitingTime. So definitely restaurantID is a valuable information. Now that you have more features in your dataset, you need to check if restaurantID is as effective as the other features or not.
2) If you decide to keep restaurantID then you must use it as a categorical string. It should be a non-parametric feature in your dataset and maybe that's why you did not get a proper result.
On the issue with day and time I agree with other answers and considering that you are building your model for the restaurant, hourly time may give a more accurate result.

Association rule mining

I have a dataset with mostly integer values. I want to apply association rule mining on it. I have taken a look at the popular algorithms like Apriori, etc. but all of them work on data which have boolean values, i.e., either the item exists in the transaction or doesn't.
Is there an algorithm which lets us account for values of the attributes in addition to their counts? (I plan to normalize the data to have values between 0 and 1)
You can "hack" around this limitation if your nubers are integer (why normalize to 0 1?) and small:
apple banana apple
becomes
apple banana apple_2
which would allow to find association rules like
banana => apple, apple_2
but you need to mix in some clever filters to not get useless rules like
apple_2 => apple
Item-item collaborative filtering is quite similar to similarity-based data mining techniques like association rule mining. Moreover, collaborative filtering was built to handle continuous and ordinal values, such as star ratings or a Likert scale: this is usually preference information from users.
Content-based filtering is probably your best bet for the situation you describe. It allows for item attributes and weights (that do not change per user for that item), then takes in user preference for each item (that does change per user for that item).
If you want both preference (counts) and attributes to change for each user-item pair, I don't know of an algorithm that handles that. Usually algorithms are built for one input per user-item pair.
Yes. There are some variations of the itemset mining problem that will let you specify additional information. For example, high utility itemset mining algorithms let you specify a quantity for each item occuring in a transaction, as well as a weight for each item.

How does data mining actually work?

Suppose I want to do some data mining on the database of a supermarket. What does that actually mean?
1) What will the output/results be like?
2) Will the output be different every day or change over time?
3) Before applying data mining, do I need to know what I want or will data mining give everything I want automatically?
Data Mining is a general category of techniques that can be applied to different kinds of datasets, just like programming is a general category of techniques that can be applied using different languages to do different things.
None of your questions make any sense.
A1: Data mining will give us an accurate reports about your queries of database of supermarket.
A2: Sure, because Data mining depend on analyzing during time, in this case it depend on your problems or goals that you want to reach it. if your database was very big also you built data warehouse in right way you will get the different output over time.
A3: yes you should determine what are the problems you have to mine then use tools of Data mining to get the results or indicators automatically.
To answer your first question: For the case of supermarket customer data, I could image the following questions:
how many products X are usually sold on Fridays ?
(helps you to determine how many X you should have in stock)
which customers bought product X often in the last month/year ?
Useful when when you introduce a new X-like product: send advertising material (which has a given cost) only to those customers.
given a customer buys product X (e.g. beer) what's the probability that he/she also buys product Y (e.g. chips) ?
useful for the following: make sure X and Y never are on promotional offer at the same time (X and Y are bought together often). Get the customers into the store by offering a rebate on X knowing they'll also by Y at the same time. Or: put a high price X-like product right next to Y, putting the cheaper X somewhere else.
which neighborhoods have the smallest number of customers ?
helps to find out which neighborhoods you could target with advertising to bring more customers into the store.
Often, by 'asking certain questions to the data' one discovers some features and comes up with new questions.
Data mining is a set of techniques. It refers to discovering interesting and unexpected patterns in data.
If you want to apply some data mining techniques, you need to know which one and you should know why. The answer to questions 1, 2 and 3 depends on the techniques that you choose.
For example, if i want to find associations between items sold in a supermarket, i may use association rule mining. If i want to find groups of similar customers, I might use a clustering algorithm. etc.
There is not just ONE technique in data mining.