Meaning of correctly classified instances weka - weka

I recently started using weka and I'm trying to classify tweets into positive or negative using Naive Bayes. So I have a training set with tweets that I gave the label for and a test set with tweets that all have the label "positive". When I ran Naive Bayes, I get the following results:
Correctly classified instances: 69 92%
Incorrectly classified instances: 6 8%
Then if I change the labels of the tweets in the test set to "negative" and ran again Naive Bayes, the results are inversed:
Correctly classified instances: 6 8%
Incorrectly classified instances: 69 92%
I thought that correctly classified instances show the accuracy of Naive Bayes and that it should be the same no matter the labels of the tweets in test set. Is there something wrong with my data or I don't understand correctly the meaning of correctly classified instances?
Thanks a lot for your time,
Nantia

The labels on the test set are supposed to be the actual correct classification. Performance is computed by asking the classifier to give its best guess about the classification for each instance in the test set. Then the predicted classifications are compared to the actual classifications to determine accuracy. Therefore, if you flip the 'correct' values that you give it, the results will be flipped as well.

Based on your training set, 69.92% of your instances are classified as positive. If the labels for the test set, that is the correct answers, indicate that they are all positive, then that makes 69.92% correct. If the test set (and thus the classification) is the same, but you switch the correct answers, then of course, the percentage correct will also be the opposite.
Keep in mind that in order to evaluate a classifier, you need the true labels of the test set. Otherwise you can't compare the classifier's answers with the true answers. It seems to me that you might have misunderstood this. You can obtain the labels for unseen data, if that is what you want, but in that case you can't evaluate classifier accuracy.

Related

Overfitting with random forest though very successful cross validation results

I have moderate experience with data science. I have a data set with 9500 observations and more than 4500 features most of which are highly correlated. Here is briefly what I have tried: I have dropped columns where there are less than 6000 non-NAs and have imputed NAs with their corresponding columns' median values when there are at least 6000 non-NAs. As for correlation, I have kept only features having at most 0.7 correlation with others. By doing so, I have reduced the number of features to about 750. Then I have used those features in my binary classification task in random forest.
My data set is highly unbalanced where ratio of (0:1) is (10:1). So when I apply RF with 10-fold cv, I observe too good results in each cv (AUC of 99%) which is to good to be true and in my test set I got way worse results such as 0.7. Here is my code:
import h2o
from h2o.estimators import H2ORandomForestEstimator
h2o.init(port=23, nthreads=4)
train = fs_rf[fs_rf['Year'] <= '201705']
test = fs_rf[fs_rf['Year'] > '201705']
train = train.drop('Year',axis=1)
test = test.drop('Year',axis=1)
test.head()
train = h2o.H2OFrame(train)
train['BestWorst2'] = train['BestWorst2'].asfactor()
test = h2o.H2OFrame(test)
test['BestWorst2'] = test['BestWorst2'].asfactor()
training_columns = train.drop('BestWorst2',axis=1).col_names
response_column = 'BestWorst2'
model = H2ORandomForestEstimator(ntrees=100, max_depth=20, nfolds=10, balance_classes=True)
model.train(x=training_columns, y=response_column, training_frame=train)
performance = model.model_performance(test_data=test)
print(performance)
How could I avoid this over-fitting? I have tried many different parameters in grid search but none of them improved the results.
This is not what I would call "overfitting". The reason you are seeing really good cross-validation metrics compared to your test metrics is that you have time-series data and so you can't use k-fold cross-validation to give you an accurate estimate of performance.
Performing k-fold cross-validation on a time-series dataset will give you overly-optimistic performance metrics because you are not respecting the time-series component in your data. Regular k-fold cross-validation will randomly sample from your whole dataset to create a train & validation set. Essentially, your validation strategy is "cheating" because you have "future" data included in your CV training sets (if that makes any sense).
I can see by your code that you understand that you need to train with "past" data and predict on "future" data, but if you want to read more about this topic, I'd recommend this article or this article.
One solution is to simply look at test set performance as way to evaluate your model. Another option is to use what's called "rolling" or "time-series" cross-validation, but H2O does not currently support that (though it seems like it might be added soon). Here's a ticket for this if you want to keep track of the progress.

Imbalance between errors in data summary and tree visualization in Weka

I tried to run a simple classification on the iris.arff dataset in Weka, using the J48 algorithm. I used cross-validation with 10 folds and - if I'm not wrong - all the default settings for J48.
The result is a 96% accuracy with 6 incorrectly classified instances.
Here's my question: according to this the second number in the tree visualization is the number of the wrongly classified instances in each leaf, but then why their sum isn't 6 but 3?
EDIT: running the algorithm with different test options I obtain different results in terms of accuracy (and therefore number of errors), but when I visualize the tree I get always the same tree with the same 3 errors. I still can't explain why.
The second number in the tree visualization is not the number of the wrongly classified instances in each leaf - it's the total weight of those wrongly classified instances.
Did you, by any chance, weigh some of those instances with 0.5 instead of 1?
Another option is that you are actually executing two different models. One where you use the full training set to build the classifier (classifier.buildClassifier(instances)) and another one where you run Cross-validation (eval.crossValidateModel(...)) with 10 train/test folds. The first model will produce the visualised tree with less errors (larger trainingset) while the second model from CV produces the output statistics with more errors. This would explain why you get different stats when changing the test set but still the same tree that is built on the full set.
For the record: if you train (and visualise) the tree with the full dataset, you will appear to have less errors, but your model will actually be overfitted and the obtained performance measures will probably not be realistic. As such, your results from CV are much more useful and you should visualise the tree from that model.

Weka Resample to balance instances in binary dataset

I've only been using Weka for a couple of weeks but I am absolutely blown away by how great it is!
But I have a question, I have a dataset with a target column which is either True or False.
6709 instances in my dataset are True
25318 instances are False.
I want to randomly add duplicates of my True instances to produce a new dataset with 25318 True and 25318 False.
The only filter I can find which does this is the supervised Resample filter however I am having trouble understanding what parameters I should use.
(there might be a better filter to do what I want)
I've got some success with these parameters
biasToUniformClass = 1.0
invertSelection = False
noReplacement = False
randomSeed = 1
sampleSizePercent = 157.5 (a magic number I've arrived at by trial and error)
This produces 25277 True and 25165 False. Not exactly what I want, but quite close.
The problem is that I cant figure out how to arrive at the magic number. I'm also not getting exactly the numbers of instances that I really want.
Is there a better filter for this purpose?
If not, is there a way to calculate the sampleSizePercent magic number?
Any help is greatly appreciated :)
Supplemental question, am I best to run NominalToBinary on my boolean columns to ensure they are Binary? I'm using a NaiveBayes classifier (at the moment) and I don't have any missing instances.
Jason
I think the tricky part of this question is getting a perfect balance using the Resample Filter. This is because, as it is stated in the description, it 'Produces a random sub-sample of a dataset using either sampling with replacement or without replacement'. If these cases are being drawn randomly, there is no guarantee that you will get an equal measure between the two classes.
As for the magic number, this would be associated with the total number of cases that you would like to have when the filter is applied. In your case, it would be 50636 instead of 32027. In this case, your magic number would be 50636 / 32027 = 1.581. However, as stated above, you may not get an exact match of true and false cases.
If you really need an exact figure, you could use your favourite spreadsheet and preprocess the data. One possible method is to randomise the true cases (in a separate column), sort and copy all of the cases until the number matches the false one. It's not an automated solution, and the solution is outside of Weka, but I have used this method before and does the job reasonably quickly.
Hope this Helps!

Does the weka RandomForest use bootstrap to take trainset

i use weka explorer,it has the train/test split percentage item.It take dataset into trainset and testset in given percentage.i dont know whether it will have repeated instance in trainset in weka RF.and whether the repeated will effect the result.
the RandomForest i know use bootstrap and the trainset have repeated instance and have same size with dataset.
whether it will have repeated instance in trainset in weka RF
yes, it makes bootstrap sample, so there will be repeated instances, have a look at the answer here: Exact implementation of RandomForest in Weka 3.7
and whether the repeated will effect the result
Well, it is the nature of Random Forest, it's how it works. But remember it just learns on repeated instance, the test set used for evaluation is left untouched.

WEKA: how to get the score from classifyInstance?

I'm using a FilteredClassifier.classifyInstance() to classify my instances in weka.
I have 2 classes (true and false) and I have many positives, so I actually need to know the score of each isntance to get the best positive.
You know how I could get the score from my weka classifier ?
thanks
Update: I've also tried to use distributionForInstance, but for each instance I always get an array with [1.0, 0.0].
I actually need to compare several instances to see which one is the most reliable, which one has more changes to have been classified correctly.
distributionForInstance(Instance anInstance) is the method you need. It gives you a Double array showing the confidence for each of your classes. I am using Weka 3.6. and it works well for me. If you always get the same values, your classifier is not trained well and not discriminative at all. In that case, you should always get the same class predicted. Did you balance your training set?
distributionForInstance(Instance anInstance) seems right.
Maybe it is not working for you because the classifier doesn't know you'd need the confidence values? For example for LibSVM on Weka Java, you need to set setProbabilityEstimates to true, in order to use the scores.
After you have run the classifier on your data, you can visualize the data by right clicking on the test in the " Result list " There are lots of other funcitons on this right click menu that will allow you to gain scores from weka classifiers.
Suppose that your model is already trained.
Then, you can make predictions with distributionForInstance. This command produces an array consisting of two items (because there are two classes on your dataset: true and false)
double[] distributions = model.distributionForInstance(new_instance);
After then, index of the greatest item in distributions array would be classification result.
Assume that distributions = {0.9638458988630731, 0.03615410113692686}. In this case, your new instance would be classified as class_0 because 1st item is greater than 2nd item in distributions array.
You can also get this index with classifyInstance command.
double classifiedIndex = model.classifyInstance(new_instance);
classifiedIndex value would be 0 for distributions = {0.9638458988630731, 0.03615410113692686}.
Finally, you can get the class name as true or false instead of class index.
new_instance.setClassValue(classifiedIndex); //firstly, assigned classified index to new_instance.
String classifiedText = new_instance.stringValue(new_instance.numAttributes());
This code block produces false.
You might examine this GitHub project for both regression and classification.