Machine Learning Girgis Midterm
Grow a forest.
1. Continuing the previous exercise, generate 1,000 subsets of the training set, each containing 100 instances selected randomly. Hint: you can use Scikit- Learn's ShuffleSplit class for this. 2. Train one Decision Tree on each subset, using the best hyperparameter values found above. Evaluate these 1,000 Decision Trees on the test set. Since they were trained on smaller sets, these Decision Trees will likely perform worse than the first Decision Tree, achieving only about 80% accuracy. 3. Now comes the magic. For each test set instance, generate the predictions of the 1,000 Decision Trees, and keep only the most frequent prediction (you can use SciPy's mode() function for this). This gives you majority-vote predictions over the test set. 4. Evaluate these predictions on the test set: you should obtain a slightly higher accuracy than your first model (about 0.5 to 1.5% higher). Congratulations, you have trained a Random Forest classifier!
Train and fine-tune a Decision Tree for the moons dataset.
1.Generate a moons dataset using make_moons(n_samples=10000, noise=0.4). 2.Split it into a training set and a test set using train_test_split(). 3.Use grid search with cross-validation (with the help of the GridSearchCV class) to find good hyperparameter values for a DecisionTreeClassifier. Hint: try various values for max_leaf_nodes. 4.Train it on the full training set using these hyperparameters, and measure your model's performance on the test set. You should get roughly 85% to 87% accuracy
What is a Gaussian mixture? What tasks can you use it for?
A Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is a probabilistic model that assumes that the instances were generated from a mixture of several Gaussian distributions whose parameters are unknown. In other words, the assumption is that the data is grouped into a finite number of clusters, each with an ellipsoidal shape (but the clusters may have different ellipsoidal shapes, sizes, orientations, and densities), and we don't know which cluster each instance belongs to. This model is useful for density estimation, clustering, and anomaly detection.
What is the difference between hard and soft voting classifiers?
A hard voting classifier just counts the votes of each classifier in the ensemble and picks the class that gets the most votes. A soft voting classifier computes the average estimated class probability for each class and picks the class with the highest probability. This gives high-confidence votes more weight and often performs better, but it works only if every classifier is able to estimate class probabilities (e.g., for the SVM classifiers in Scikit-Learn you must set probability=True).
What is a labeled training set?
A labeled training set is a training set that contains the desired solution (a.k.a. a label) for each instance.
What is the difference between a model parameter and a learning algorithm's hyperparameter?
A model has one or more model parameters that determine what it will predict given a new instance (e.g., the slope of a linear model). A learning algorithm tries to find optimal values for these parameters such that the model generalizes well to new instances. A hyperparameter is a parameter of the learning algorithm itself, not of the model (e.g., the amount of regularization to apply).
Why would you want to use: · Ridge Regression instead of plain Linear Regression (i.e., without any regulari‐ zation)?
A model with some regularization typically performs better than a model without any regularization, so you should generally prefer Ridge Regression over plain Linear Regression.
Is a node's Gini impurity generally lower or greater than its parent's? Is it gener‐ ally lower/greater, or always lower/greater?
A node's Gini impurity is generally lower than its parent's. This is due to the CART training algorithm's cost function, which splits each node in a way that minimizes the weighted sum of its children's Gini impurities. However, it is possible for a node to have a higher Gini impurity than its parent, as long as this increase is more than compensated for by a decrease in the other child's impurity. For example, consider a node containing four instances of class A and one of class B. Its Gini impurity is 1 - (1/5)2 - (4/5)2 = 0.32. Now suppose the dataset is one-dimensional and the instances are lined up in the following order: A, B, A, A, A. You can verify that the algorithm will split this node after the second instance, producing one child node with instances A, B, and the other child node with instances A, A, A. The first child node's Gini impurity is 1 - (1/2)2 - (1/2)2 = 0.5, which is higher than its parent's. This is compensated for by the fact that the other node is pure, so its overall weighted Gini impurity is 2/5 × 0.5 + 3/5 × 0 = 0.2, which is lower than the parent's Gini impurity.
What is a test set and why would you want to use it?
A test set is used to estimate the generalization error that a model will make on new instances, before the model is launched in production.
What is the purpose of a validation set?
A validation set is used to compare models. It makes it possible to select the best model and tune the hyperparameters.
Can you think of a use case where active learning would be useful? How would you implement it?
Active learning is useful whenever you have plenty of unlabeled instances but labeling is costly. In this case (which is very common), rather than randomly selecting instances to label, it is often preferable to perform active learning, where human experts interact with the learning algorithm, providing labels for specific instances when the algorithm requests them. A common approach is uncertainty sampling (see the description in "Active Learning").
What is a support vector?
After training an SVM, a support vector is any instance located on the "street" (see the previous answer), including its border. The decision boundary is entirely determined by the support vectors. Any instance that is not a support vector (i.e., is off the street) has no influence whatsoever; you could remove them, add more instances, or move them around, and as long as they stay off the street they won't affect the decision boundary. Computing the predictions only involves the support vectors, not the whole training set.
Can an SVM classifier output a confidence score when it classifies an instance? What about a probability?
An SVM classifier can output the distance between the test instance and the decision boundary, and you can use this as a confidence score. However, this score cannot be directly converted into an estimation of the class probability. If you set probability=True when creating an SVM in Scikit-Learn, then after training it will calibrate the probabilities using Logistic Regression on the SVM's scores (trained by an additional five-fold cross-validation on the training data). This will add the predict_proba() and predict_log_proba() methods to the SVM.
What type of learning algorithm relies on a similarity measure to make predictions?
An instance-based learning system learns the training data by heart; then, when given a new instance, it uses a similarity measure to find the most similar learned instances and uses them to make predictions.
What is an online learning system?
An online learning system can learn incrementally, as opposed to a batch learning system. This makes it capable of adapting rapidly to both changing data and autonomous systems, and of training on very large quantities of data.
Can you name four common unsupervised tasks?
Common unsupervised tasks include clustering, visualization, dimensionality reduction, and association rule learning.
If a Decision Tree is underfitting the training set, is it a good idea to try scaling the input features?
Decision Trees don't care whether or not the training data is scaled or centered; that's one of the nice things about them. So if a Decision Tree underfits the training set, scaling the input features will just be a waste of time.
Is it a good idea to stop Mini-batch Gradient Descent immediately when the vali‐ dation error goes up?
Due to their random nature, neither Stochastic Gradient Descent nor Mini-batch Gradient Descent is guaranteed to make progress at every single training iteration. So if you immediately stop training when the validation error goes up, you may stop much too early, before the optimum is reached. A better option is to save the model at regular intervals; then, when it has not improved for a long time (meaning it will probably never beat the record), you can revert to the best saved model.
Why would you want to use: Elastic Net instead of Lasso?
Elastic Net is generally preferred over Lasso since Lasso may behave erratically in some cases (when several features are strongly correlated or when there are more features than training instances). However, it does add an extra hyperparameter to tune. If you want Lasso without the erratic behavior, you can just use Elastic Net with an l1_ratio close to 1.
Can Gradient Descent get stuck in a local minimum when training a Logistic Regression model?
Gradient Descent cannot get stuck in a local minimum when training a Logistic Regression model because the cost function is convex.
If a Decision Tree is overfitting the training set, is it a good idea to try decreasing max_depth?
If a Decision Tree is overfitting the training set, it may be a good idea to decrease max_depth, since this will constrain the model, regularizing it.
If your model performs great on the training data but generalizes poorly to new instances, what is happening? Can you name three possible solutions?
If a model performs great on the training data but generalizes poorly to new instances, the model is likely overfitting the training data (or we got extremely lucky on the training data). Possible solutions to overfitting are getting more data, simplifying the model (selecting a simpler algorithm, reducing the number of parameters or features used, or regularizing the model), or reducing the noise in the training data.
Say you trained an SVM classifier with an RBF kernel. It seems to underfit the training set: should you increase or decrease γ (gamma)? What about C?
If an SVM classifier trained with an RBF kernel underfits the training set, there might be too much regularization. To decrease it, you need to increase gamma or C (or both).
Suppose you are using Ridge Regression and you notice that the training error and the validation error are almost equal and fairly high. Would you say that the model suffers from high bias or high variance? Should you increase the regulari‐ zation hyperparameter α or reduce it?
If both the training error and the validation error are almost equal and fairly high, the model is likely underfitting the training set, which means it has a high bias. You should try reducing the regularization hyperparameter α.
Suppose the features in your training set have very different scales. What algorithms might suffer from this, and how? What can you do about it?
If the features in your training set have very different scales, the cost function will have the shape of an elongated bowl, so the Gradient Descent algorithms will take a long time to converge. To solve this you should scale the data before training the model. Note that the Normal Equation or SVD approach will work just fine without scaling. Moreover, regularized models may converge to a suboptimal solution if the features are not scaled: since regularization penalizes large weights, features with smaller values will tend to be ignored compared to features with larger values.
Do all Gradient Descent algorithms lead to the same model provided you let them run long enough?
If the optimization problem is convex (such as Linear Regression or Logistic Regression), and assuming the learning rate is not too high, then all Gradient Descent algorithms will approach the global optimum and end up producing fairly similar models. However, unless you gradually reduce the learning rate, Stochastic GD and Mini-batch GD will never truly converge; instead, they will keep jumping back and forth around the global optimum. This means that even if you let them run for a very long time, these Gradient Descent algorithms will produce slightly different models.
Suppose you use Batch Gradient Descent and you plot the validation error at every epoch. If you notice that the validation error consistently goes up, what is likely going on? How can you fix this?
If the validation error consistently goes up after every epoch, then one possibility is that the learning rate is too high and the algorithm is diverging. If the training error also goes up, then this is clearly the problem and you should reduce the learning rate. However, if the training error is not going up, then your model is overfitting the training set and you should stop training.
Suppose you are using Polynomial Regression. You plot the learning curves and you notice that there is a large gap between the training error and the validation error. What is happening? What are three ways to solve this?
If the validation error is much higher than the training error, this is likely because your model is overfitting the training set. One way to try to fix this is to reduce the polynomial degree: a model with fewer degrees of freedom is less likely to overfit. Another thing you can try is to regularize the model—for example, by adding an ℓ2 penalty (Ridge) or an ℓ1 penalty (Lasso) to the cost function. This will also reduce the degrees of freedom of the model. Lastly, you can try to increase the size of the training set.
What type of algorithm would you use to segment your customers into multiple groups?
If you don't know how to define the groups, then you can use a clustering algorithm (unsupervised learning) to segment your customers into clusters of similar customers. However, if you know what groups you would like to have, then you can feed many examples of each group to a classification algorithm (supervised learning), and it will classify all your customers into these groups.
What Linear Regression training algorithm can you use if you have a training set with millions of features?
If you have a training set with millions of features you can use Stochastic Gradient Descent or Mini-batch Gradient Descent, and perhaps Batch Gradient Descent if the training set fits in memory. But you cannot use the Normal Equation or the SVD approach because the computational complexity grows quickly (more than quadratically) with the number of features.
If you have trained five different models on the exact same training data, and they all achieve 95% precision, is there any chance that you can combine these models to get better results? If so, how? If not, why?
If you have trained five different models and they all achieve 95% precision, you can try combining them into a voting ensemble, which will often give you even better results. It works better if the models are very different (e.g., an SVM classifier, a Decision Tree classifier, a Logistic Regression classifier, and so on). It is even better if they are trained on different training instances (that's the whole point of bagging and pasting ensembles), but if not this will still be effective as long as the models are very different.
What is repeated cross-validation and why would you prefer it to using a single validation set?
If you tune hyperparameters using the test set, you risk overfitting the test set, and the generalization error you measure will be optimistic (you may launch a model that performs worse than you expect).
Suppose you want to classify pictures as outdoor/indoor and daytime/nighttime. Should you implement two Logistic Regression classifiers or one Softmax Regres‐ sion classifier?
If you want to classify pictures as outdoor/indoor and daytime/nighttime, since these are not exclusive classes (i.e., all four combinations are possible) you should train two Logistic Regression classifiers.
If your AdaBoost ensemble underfits the training data, what hyperparameters should you tweak and how?
If your AdaBoost ensemble underfits the training data, you can try increasing the number of estimators or reducing the regularization hyperparameters of the base estimator. You may also try slightly increasing the learning rate.
If your Gradient Boosting ensemble overfits the training set, should you increase or decrease the learning rate?
If your Gradient Boosting ensemble overfits the training set, you should try decreasing the learning rate. You could also use early stopping to find the right number of predictors (you probably have too many).
How would you define clustering? Can you name a few clustering algorithms?
In Machine Learning, clustering is the unsupervised task of grouping similar instances together. The notion of similarity depends on the task at hand: for example, in some cases two nearby instances will be considered similar, while in others similar instances may be far apart as long as they belong to the same densely packed group. Popular clustering algorithms include K-Means, DBSCAN, agglomerative clustering, BIRCH, Mean-Shift, affinity propagation, and spectral clustering.
How can you evaluate the performance of a dimensionality reduction algorithm on your dataset?
Intuitively, a dimensionality reduction algorithm performs well if it eliminates a lot of dimensions from the dataset without losing too much information. One way to measure this is to apply the reverse transformation and measure the reconstruction error. However, not all dimensionality reduction algorithms provide a reverse transformation. Alternatively, if you are using dimensionality reduction as a preprocessing step before another Machine Learning algorithm (e.g., a Random Forest classifier), then you can simply measure the performance of that second algorithm; if dimensionality reduction did not lose too much information, then the algorithm should perform just as well as when using the original dataset.
Does it make any sense to chain two different dimensionality reduction algorithms?
It can absolutely make sense to chain two different dimensionality reduction algorithms. A common example is using PCA to quickly get rid of a large number of useless dimensions, then applying another much slower dimensionality reduction algorithm, such as LLE. This two-step approach will likely yield the same performance as using LLE only, but in a fraction of the time.
Is it possible to speed up training of a bagging ensemble by distributing it across multiple servers? What about pasting ensembles, boosting ensembles, random forests, or stacking ensembles?
It is quite possible to speed up training of a bagging ensemble by distributing it across multiple servers, since each predictor in the ensemble is independent of the others. The same goes for pasting ensembles and Random Forests, for the same reason. However, each predictor in a boosting ensemble is built based on the previous predictor, so training is necessarily sequential, and you will not gain anything by distributing training across multiple servers. Regarding stacking ensembles, all the predictors in a given layer are independent of each other, so they can be trained in parallel on multiple servers. However, the predictors in one layer can only be trained after the predictors in the previous layer have all been trained.
Can you name two clustering algorithms that can scale to large datasets? And two that look for regions of high density?
K-Means and BIRCH scale well to large datasets. DBSCAN and Mean-Shift look for regions of high density.
What is label propagation? Why would you implement it, and how?
Labeling a dataset is costly and time-consuming. Therefore, it is common to have plenty of unlabeled instances, but few labeled instances. Label propagation is a technique that consists in copying some (or all) of the labels from the labeled instances to similar unlabeled instances. This can greatly extend the number of labeled instances, and thereby allow a supervised algorithm to reach better performance (this is a form of semi-supervised learning). One approach is to use a clustering algorithm such as K-Means on all the instances, then for each cluster find the most common label or the label of the most representative instance (i.e., the one closest to the centroid) and propagate it to the unlabeled instances in the same cluster.
Why would you want to use: · Lasso instead of Ridge Regression?
Lasso Regression uses an ℓ1 penalty, which tends to push the weights down to exactly zero. This leads to sparse models, where all weights are zero except for the most important weights. This is a way to perform feature selection automatically, which is good if you suspect that only a few features actually matter. When you are not sure, you should prefer Ridge Regression.
How should you set the QP parameters (H, f, A, and b) to solve the soft margin linear SVM classifier problem using an off-the-shelf QP solver?
Let's call the QP parameters for the hard margin problem H′, f′, A′, and b′ (see "Quadratic Programming"). The QP parameters for the soft margin problem have m additional parameters (np = n + 1 + m) and m additional constraints (nc = 2m). They can be defined like so: 1. H is equal to H′, plus m columns of 0s on the right and m rows of 0s at the bottom: 2. f is equal to f′ with m additional elements, all equal to the value of the hyperparameter C. 3. b is equal to b′ with m additional elements, all equal to 0. 4. A is equal to A′ with -Im appended to the right (where Im is an m × m identity matrix), and appending -Im again just below that, and finally filling the rest with 0s: A=A'-Im0-Im
How would you define Machine Learning?
Machine Learning is about building systems that can learn from data. Learning means getting better at some task, given some performance measure.
Can you name four types of problems where it shines?
Machine Learning is great for complex problems for which we have no algorithmic solution, to replace long lists of hand-tuned rules, to build systems that adapt to fluctuating environments, and finally to help humans learn (e.g., data mining).
What is the difference between anomaly detection and novelty detection?
Many people use the terms anomaly detection and novelty detection interchangeably, but they are not exactly the same. In anomaly detection, the algorithm is trained on a dataset that may contain outliers, and the goal is typically to identify these outliers (within the training set), as well as outliers among new instances. In novelty detection, the algorithm is trained on a dataset that is presumed to be "clean," and the objective is to detect novelties strictly among new instances. Some algorithms work best for anomaly detection (e.g., Isolation Forest), while others are better suited for novelty detection (e.g., one-class SVM).
What do model-based learning algorithms search for? What is the most common strategy they use to succeed? How do they make predictions?
Model-based learning algorithms search for an optimal value for the model parameters such that the model will generalize well to new instances. We usually train such systems by minimizing a cost function that measures how bad the system is at making predictions on the training data, plus a penalty for model complexity if the model is regularized. To make predictions, we feed the new instance's features into the model's prediction function, using the parameter values found by the learning algorithm.
Once a dataset's dimensionality has been reduced, is it possible to reverse the operation? If so, how? If not, why?
Once a dataset's dimensionality has been reduced using one of the algorithms we discussed, it is almost always impossible to perfectly reverse the operation, because some information gets lost during dimensionality reduction. Moreover, while some algorithms (such as PCA) have a simple reverse transformation procedure that can reconstruct a dataset relatively similar to the original, other algorithms (such as T-SNE) do not.
Can you name two techniques to find the right number of clusters when using a Gaussian mixture model?
One way to find the right number of clusters when using a Gaussian mixture model is to plot the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) or the Akaike information criterion (AIC) as a function of the number of clusters, then choose the number of clusters that minimizes the BIC or AIC. Another technique is to use a Bayesian Gaussian mixture model, which automatically selects the number of clusters.
What is out-of-core learning?
Out-of-core algorithms can handle vast quantities of data that cannot fit in a computer's main memory. An out-of-core learning algorithm chops the data into mini-batches and uses online learning techniques to learn from these mini-batches.
Can PCA be used to reduce the dimensionality of a highly nonlinear dataset?
PCA can be used to significantly reduce the dimensionality of most datasets, even if they are highly nonlinear, because it can at least get rid of useless dimensions. However, if there are no useless dimensions—as in a Swiss roll dataset—then reducing dimensionality with PCA will lose too much information. You want to unroll the Swiss roll, not squash it.
If your training set contains 100,000 instances, will setting presort=True speed up training?
Presorting the training set speeds up training only if the dataset is smaller than a few thousand instances. If it contains 100,000 instances, setting presort=True will considerably slow down training.
In what cases would you use vanilla PCA, Incremental PCA, Randomized PCA, or Kernel PCA?
Regular PCA is the default, but it works only if the dataset fits in memory. Incremental PCA is useful for large datasets that don't fit in memory, but it is slower than regular PCA, so if the dataset fits in memory you should prefer regular PCA. Incremental PCA is also useful for online tasks, when you need to apply PCA on the fly, every time a new instance arrives. Randomized PCA is useful when you want to considerably reduce dimensionality and the dataset fits in memory; in this case, it is much faster than regular PCA. Finally, Kernel PCA is useful for nonlinear datasets.
What type of Machine Learning algorithm would you use to allow a robot to walk in various unknown terrains?
Reinforcement Learning is likely to perform best if we want a robot to learn to walk in various unknown terrains, since this is typically the type of problem that Reinforcement Learning tackles. It might be possible to express the problem as a supervised or semi supervised learning problem, but it would be less natural.
Why is it important to scale the inputs when using SVMs?
SVMs try to fit the largest possible "street" between the classes (see the first answer), so if the training set is not scaled, the SVM will tend to neglect small features (see Figure 5-2).
Can you name four of the main challenges in Machine Learning?
Some of the main challenges in Machine Learning are the lack of data, poor data quality, nonrepresentative data, uninformative features, excessively simple models that underfit the training data, and excessively complex models that overfit the data.
Would you frame the problem of spam detection as a supervised learning problem or an unsupervised learning problem?
Spam detection is a typical supervised learning problem: the algorithm is fed many emails along with their labels (spam or not spam).
Which Gradient Descent algorithm (among those we discussed) will reach the vicinity of the optimal solution the fastest? Which will actually converge? How can you make the others converge as well?
Stochastic Gradient Descent has the fastest training iteration since it considers only one training instance at a time, so it is generally the first to reach the vicinity of the global optimum (or Mini-batch GD with a very small mini-batch size). However, only Batch Gradient Descent will actually converge, given enough training time. As mentioned, Stochastic GD and Mini-batch GD will bounce around the optimum, unless you gradually reduce the learning rate.
Suppose you perform PCA on a 1,000-dimensional dataset, setting the explained variance ratio to 95%. How many dimensions will the resulting dataset have?
That's a trick question: it depends on the dataset. Let's look at two extreme examples. First, suppose the dataset is composed of points that are almost perfectly aligned. In this case, PCA can reduce the dataset down to just one dimension while still preserving 95% of the variance. Now imagine that the dataset is composed of perfectly random points, scattered all around the 1,000 dimensions. In this case roughly 950 dimensions are required to preserve 95% of the variance. So the answer is, it depends on the dataset, and it could be any number between 1 and 950. Plotting the explained variance as a function of the number of dimensions is one way to get a rough idea of the dataset's intrinsic dimensionality.
If it takes one hour to train a Decision Tree on a training set containing 1 million instances, roughly how much time will it take to train another Decision Tree on a training set containing 10 million instances?
The computational complexity of training a Decision Tree is O(n × m log(m)). So if you multiply the training set size by 10, the training time will be multiplied by K = (n × 10m × log(10m)) / (n × m × log(m)) = 10 × log(10m) / log(m). If m = 106, then K ≈ 11.7, so you can expect the training time to be roughly 11.7 hours.
What is the curse of dimensionality?
The curse of dimensionality refers to the fact that many problems that do not exist in low-dimensional space arise in high-dimensional space. In Machine Learning, one common manifestation is the fact that randomly sampled high-dimensional vectors are generally very sparse, increasing the risk of overfitting and making it very difficult to identify patterns in the data without having plenty of training data.
What is the approximate depth of a Decision Tree trained (without restrictions) on a training set with 1 million instances?
The depth of a well-balanced binary tree containing m leaves is equal to log2(m),2 rounded up. A binary Decision Tree (one that makes only binary decisions, as is the case with all trees in Scikit-Learn) will end up more or less well balanced at the end of training, with one leaf per training instance if it is trained without restrictions. Thus, if the training set contains one million instances, the Decision Tree will have a depth of log2(106) ≈ 20 (actually a bit more since the tree will generally not be perfectly well balanced).
Describe two techniques to select the right number of clusters when using K-Means.
The elbow rule is a simple technique to select the number of clusters when using K-Means: just plot the inertia (the mean squared distance from each instance to its nearest centroid) as a function of the number of clusters, and find the point in the curve where the inertia stops dropping fast (the "elbow"). This is generally close to the optimal number of clusters. Another approach is to plot the silhouette score as a function of the number of clusters. There will often be a peak, and the optimal number of clusters is generally nearby. The silhouette score is the mean silhouette coefficient over all instances. This coefficient varies from +1 for instances that are well inside their cluster and far from other clusters, to -1 for instances that are very close to another cluster. You may also plot the silhouette diagrams and perform a more thorough analysis.
What is the fundamental idea behind Support Vector Machines?
The fundamental idea behind Support Vector Machines is to fit the widest possible "street" between the classes. In other words, the goal is to have the largest possible margin between the decision boundary that separates the two classes and the training instances. When performing soft margin classification, the SVM searches for a compromise between perfectly separating the two classes and having the widest possible street (i.e., a few instances may end up on the street). Another key idea is to use kernels when training on nonlinear datasets.
What are some of the main applications of clustering algorithms?
The main applications of clustering algorithms include data analysis, customer segmentation, recommender systems, search engines, image segmentation, semi-supervised learning, dimensionality reduction, anomaly detection, and novelty detection.
What are the main motivations for reducing a dataset's dimensionality? What are the main drawbacks?
The main motivations for dimensionality reduction are: · To speed up a subsequent training algorithm (in some cases it may even remove noise and redundant features, making the training algorithm perform better) · To visualize the data and gain insights on the most important features · To save space (compression) The main drawbacks are: · Some information is lost, possibly degrading the performance of subsequent training algorithms. · It can be computationally intensive. · It adds some complexity to your Machine Learning pipelines. · Transformed features are often hard to interpret.
What can go wrong if you tune hyperparameters using the test set?
The train-dev set is used when there is a risk of mismatch between the training data and the data used in the validation and test datasets (which should always be as close as possible to the data used once the model is in production). The train-dev set is a part of the training set that's held out (the model is not trained on it). The model is trained on the rest of the training set, and evaluated on both the train-dev set and the validation set. If the model performs well on the training set but not on the train-dev set, then the model is likely overfitting the training set. If it performs well on both the training set and the train-dev set, but not on the validation set, then there is probably a significant data mismatch between the training data and the validation + test data, and you should try to improve the training data to make it look more like the validation + test data.
What are the two most common supervised tasks?
The two most common supervised tasks are regression and classification.
Should you use the primal or the dual form of the SVM problem to train a model on a training set with millions of instances and hundreds of features?
This question applies only to linear SVMs since kernelized SVMs can only use the dual form. The computational complexity of the primal form of the SVM problem is proportional to the number of training instances m, while the computational complexity of the dual form is proportional to a number between m2 and m3. So if there are millions of instances, you should definitely use the primal form, because the dual form will be much too slow.
What makes Extra-Trees more random than regular Random Forests? How can this extra randomness help? Are Extra-Trees slower or faster than regular Ran‐ dom Forests?
When you are growing a tree in a Random Forest, only a random subset of the features is considered for splitting at each node. This is true as well for Extra-Trees, but they go one step further: rather than searching for the best possible thresholds, like regular Decision Trees do, they use random thresholds for each feature. This extra randomness acts like a form of regularization: if a Random Forest overfits the training data, Extra-Trees might perform better. Moreover, since Extra-Trees don't search for the best possible thresholds, they are much faster to train than Random Forests. However, they are neither faster nor slower than Random Forests when making predictions.
What is the benefit of out-of-bag evaluation?
With out-of-bag evaluation, each predictor in a bagging ensemble is evaluated using instances that it was not trained on (they were held out). This makes it possible to have a fairly unbiased evaluation of the ensemble without the need for an additional validation set. Thus, you have more instances available for training, and your ensemble can perform slightly better.