Tag: Supervised Learning

Adv Quant: Compelling Topics

Compelling topics summary/definitions

  • Supervised machine learning algorithms: is a model that needs training and testing data set. However it does need to validate its model on some predetermined output value (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014, Conolly & Begg, 2014).
  • Unsupervised machine learning algorithms: is a model that needs training and testing data set, but unlike supervised learning, it doesn’t need to validate its model on some predetermined output value (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014, Conolly & Begg, 2014). Therefore, unsupervised learning tries to find the natural relationships in the input data (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014).
  • General Least Squares Model (GLM): is the line of best fit, for linear regressions modeling along with its corresponding correlations (Smith, 2015). There are five assumptions to a linear regression model: additivity, linearity, independent errors, homoscedasticity, and normally distributed errors.
  • Overfitting: is stuffing a regression model with so many variables that have little contributional weight to help predict the dependent variable (Field, 2013; Vandekerckhove, Matzke, & Wagenmakers, 2014). Thus, to avoid the over-fitting problem, the use of parsimony is important in big data analytics.
  • Parsimony: is describing a dependent variable with the fewest independent variables as possible (Field, 2013; Huck, 2013; Smith, 2015). The concept of parsimony could be attributed to Occam’s Razor, which states “plurality out never be posited without necessity” (Duignan, 2015).  Vandekerckhove et al. (2014) describe parsimony as a way of removing the noise from the signal to create better predictive regression models.
  • Hierarchical Regression: When the researcher builds a multivariate regression model, they build it in stages, as they tend to add known independent variables first, and add newer independent variables in order to avoid overfitting in a technique called hierarchical regression (Austin, Goel & van Walraven, 2001; Field, 2013; Huck 2013).
  • Logistic Regression: multi-variable regression, where one or more independent variables are continuous or categorical which are used to predict a dichotomous/ binary/ categorical dependent variable (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe, & Coleman, 2014; Field, 2013; Gall, Gall, & Borg, 2006; Huck, 2011).
  • Nearest Neighbor Methods: K-nearest neighbor (i.e. K =5) is when a data point is clustered into a group, by having 5 of the nearest neighbors vote on that data point, and it is particularly useful if the data is a binary or categorical (Berson, Smith, & Thearling, 1999).
  • Classification Trees: aid in data abstraction and finding patterns in an intuitive way (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014; Brookshear & Brylow, 2014; Conolly & Begg, 2014) and aid the decision-making process by mapping out all the paths, solutions, or options available to the decision maker to decide upon.
  • Bayesian Analysis: can be reduced to a conditional probability that aims to take into account prior knowledge, but updates itself when new data becomes available (Hubbard, 2010; Smith, 2015; Spiegelhalter & Rice, 2009; Yudkowsky, 2003).
  • Discriminate Analysis: how should data be best separated into several groups based on several independent variables that create the largest separation of the prediction (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe, & Coleman, 2014; Field, 2013).
  • Ensemble Models: can perform better than a single classifier, since they are created as a combination of classifiers that have a weight attached to them to properly classify new data points (Bauer & Kohavi, 1999; Dietterich, 2000), through techniques like Bagging and Boosting. Boosting procedures help reduce both bias and variance of the different methods, and bagging procedures reduce just the variance of the different methods (Bauer & Kohavi, 1999; Liaw & Wiener, 2002).

 

References

  • Ahlemeyer-Stubbe, Andrea, Shirley Coleman. (2014). A Practical Guide to Data Mining for Business and Industry, 1st Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf Online].
  • Austin, P. C., Goel, V., & van Walraven, C. (2001). An introduction to multilevel regression models. Canadian Journal of Public Health, 92(2), 150.
  • Bauer, E., & Kohavi, R. (1999). An empirical comparison of voting classification algorithms: Bagging, boosting, and variants. Machine learning,36(1-2), 105-139.
  • Berson, A. Smith, S. & Thearling K. (1999). Building Data Mining Applications for CRM. McGraw-Hill. Retrieved from http://www.thearling.com/text/dmtechniques/dmtechniques.htm
  • Brookshear, G., & Brylow, D. (2014). Computer Science: An Overview, 12th Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf Online].
  • Connolly, T., & Begg, C. (2014). Database Systems: A Practical Approach to Design, Implementation, and Management, 6th Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf Online].
  • Dietterich, T. G. (2000). Ensemble methods in machine learning. International workshop on multiple classifier systems (pp. 1-15). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
  • Duignan, B. (2015). Occam’s razor. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Occams-razor
  • Field, Andy. (2013). Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics, 4th Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf Online].
  • Gall, M. D., Gall, J. P., Borg, W. R. (2006). Educational Research: An Introduction, 8th Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf Online].
  • Hubbard, D. W. (2010). How to measure anything: Finding the values of “intangibles” in business. (2nd e.d.) New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
  • Huck, Schuyler W. (2011). Reading Statistics and Research, 6th Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf Online].
  • Liaw, A., & Wiener, M. (2002). Classification and regression by randomForest. R news, 2(3), 18-22.
  • Smith, M. (2015). Statistical analysis handbook. Retrieved from http://www.statsref.com/HTML/index.html?introduction.html
  • Spiegelhalter, D. & Rice, K. (2009) Bayesian statistics. Retrieved from http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Bayesian_statistics
  • Vandekerckhove, J., Matzke, D., & Wagenmakers, E. J. (2014). Model comparison and the principle of parsimony.
  • Yudkowsky, E.S. (2003). An intuitive explanation of Bayesian reasoning. Retrieved from http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

Adv Quant: Statistical Significance and Machine Learning

Statistical significance on large samples sizes can be affected by small differences and can show up as significant, while in smaller samples large differences may be deemed statistically insignificant (Field, 2014).  Statistically significant results allow the researcher to reject a null hypothesis but do not test the importance of the observations made (Huck, 2011). Statistical analysis is highly deductive (Creswell, 2014), and supervised learning is highly inductive (Connolly & Begg, 2014).  Also, statistical analysis tries to identify trends in a given sample size by assuming normality, linearity or constant variance; whereas in machine learning it aims to find a pattern in a large sample of data and it is expected that these statistical analysis assumptions are not met and therefore require a higher random sampling set (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe, & Coleman, 2014).

Machine learning tries to emulate the way humans learn. When humans learn, they create a model based off of observations to help describe key features of a situation and help them predict an outcome, and thus machine learning does predictive modeling of large data sets in a similar fashion (Connolly & Begg, 2014).  The biggest selling point of supervised machine learning is that the machine can build models that identify key patterns in the data when humans can no longer compute the volume, velocity, and variety of the data (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe, & Coleman, 2014). There are many applications that use machine learning: marketing, investments, fraud detection, manufacturing, telecommunication, etc. (Fayyad, Piatetsky-Shapiro, & Smyth, 1996). Figure 1 illustrates how supervised learning can classify data or predict their values through a two-phase process.  The two-phase process consists of (1) training where the model is built by ingesting huge amounts of historical data; and (2) testing where the new model is tested on new current data that helps establish its accuracy, reliability, and validity (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014; Connolly & Begg, 2014). The model that is created by machines through this learning is quickly adaptable to new data (Minelli, Chambers, & Dhiraj, 2013).  These models themselves are a set of rules or formulas, and that depends on which analytical algorithm is used (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014).  Given that the supervised machine learning is trained with known responses (or outputs) to make its future predictions, it is vital to have a clear purpose defined before running the algorithm.  The model is only as good as the data that goes in it.

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Figure 1:  Simplified process diagram on supervised machine learning.

Thus, for classification the machine is learning a function to map data into one or many different defining characteristics, and it could consist of decision trees and neural network induction techniques (Connolly & Begg, 2014; Fayyad et al., 1996).  Fayyad et al. (1996) mentioned that it is impossible to classify data cleanly into one camp versus another. For value prediction, regression is used to map a function to the data that when followed gives an estimate on where the next value would be (Connolly & Begg, 2014; Fayyad et al. 1996).  However, in these regression formulas, it is good to remember that correlation between the data/variables does not imply causation.

Random sampling is core to statistics and the concept of statistical inference (Smith, 2015; Field, 2011), but it also serves a purpose in supervised learning (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014).  Random sampling of data, is selecting a proportion of the data from a population, where each data point has an equal opportunity of being selected (Smith, 2015; Huck, 2013). The larger the sample, on average tends to represent the population fairly well (Field, 2014; Huck, 2013). Given nature big data, high volume, velocity, and variety, it is assumed that there is plenty of data to draw upon and run a supervised machine learning algorithm.  However, too much data that is fed into the machine learning algorithm can increase the process and analysis time.  Also, the bigger the random sampling size used for the learning, the more time it would take to process and analyze the data.

There are also unsupervised learning algorithms, where it also needs training and testing, but unlike supervised learning, it doesn’t need to validate its model on some predetermined output value (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014, Conolly & Begg, 2014).   Therefore, unsupervised learning tries to find the natural relationships in the input data (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014).  Cluster analysis is an example of unsupervised learning, where the model seeks to find a finite set of the cluster that can help describe the data into subsets of similarities (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014, Fayyad et al., 1996). Finally, in supervised learning the results could be checked through estimation error; however it is not so easy with unsupervised learning because of a lack of a target but requires retesting to see if the patterns are similar or repeatable (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014).

References

  • Ahlemeyer-Stubbe, A., & Coleman, S. (2014). A Practical Guide to Data Mining for Business and Industry, 1st Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf Online].
  • Connolly, T., Begg, C. (2014). Database Systems: A Practical Approach to Design, Implementation, and Management, 6th Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf Online].
  • Creswell, J. W. (2014) Research design: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed method approaches (4th ed.). California, SAGE Publications, Inc. VitalBook file.
  • Fayyad, U., Piatetsky-Shapiro, G., & Smyth, P. (1996). From data mining to knowledge discovery in databases. Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 17(3), 37–54.
  • Field, A. (2011) Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics (4th ed.). UK: Sage Publications Ltd. VitalBook file.
  • Huck, S. W. (2013) Reading Statistics and Research (6th ed.). Pearson Learning Solutions. VitalBook file.
  • Minelli, M., Chambers, M., Dhiraj, A. (2013). Big Data, Big Analytics: Emerging Business Intelligence and Analytic Trends for Today’s Businesses, 1st Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf Online].
  • Smith, M. (2015). Statistical analysis handbook. Retrieved from http://www.statsref.com/HTML/index.html?introduction.html