Regression
How to choose machine learning algorithms
The answer to the question "What machine learning algorithm should I use?" is always "It depends." It depends on the size, quality, and nature of the data. It depends what you want to do with the answer. It depends on how the math of the algorithm was translated into instructions for the computer you are using. And it depends on how much time you have. Even the most experienced data scientists can't tell which algorithm will perform best before trying them. The Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Algorithm Cheat Sheet helps you choose the right machine learning algorithm for your predictive analytics solutions from the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning library of algorithms.
Understanding Linear Regression
Abstract: Although Linear Regression is arguably one of the most popular analytical techniques, I believe it isn't understood well. Several fundamental assumptions are violated during application. The objective of this note is to provide an overview of the assumptions and possible fixes. Linear regression is arguably one of the most widely used techniques in the data science world. But, a comprehensive understanding of this technique is not universal and it is at a level that is less than desired.
Jackknife and linear regression in Excel: implementation and comparison
The comparison is performed on a data set where linear regression works well: salary offered to a candidate, based on programming language requirements in the job ad: Python, R or SQL. This is a follow-up to the article highest paying programming skills. The increased accuracy of linear regression estimates is negligible, and well below the noise level present in the data set. The Jackknife method has the advantage to be more stable, easy to code, easy to understand (no need to know matrix algebra), and easy to interpret (meaningful coefficients). Jackknife is not the first regression approximation developed by the author: check my book pages 172-176 for other examples.
A Benchmark and Comparison of Active Learning for Logistic Regression
Various active learning methods based on logistic regression have been proposed. In this paper, we investigate seven state-of-the-art strategies, present an extensive benchmark, and provide a better understanding of their underlying characteristics. Experiments are carried out both on 3 synthetic datasets and 43 real-world datasets, providing insights into the behaviour of these active learning methods with respect to classification accuracy and their computational cost.
Mastering R Programming [Video] PACKT Books
R is a statistical programming language that allows you to build probabilistic models, perform data science, and build machine learning algorithms. R has a great package ecosystem that enables developers to conduct data visualization to data analysis.This video covers advanced-level concepts in R programming and demonstrates industry best practices. This is an advanced R course with an intensive focus on machine learning concepts in depth and applying them in the real world with R. We start off with pre-model-building activities such as univariate and bivariate analysis, outlier detection, and missing value treatment featuring the mice package. We then take a look linear and non-linear regression modeling and classification models, and check out the math behind the working of classification algorithms. We then shift our focus to unsupervised learning algorithms, time series analysis and forecasting models, and text analytics.
Scalable Approximations for Generalized Linear Problems
Erdogdu, Murat A., Bayati, Mohsen, Dicker, Lee H.
In stochastic optimization, the population risk is generally approximated by the empirical risk. However, in the large-scale setting, minimization of the empirical risk may be computationally restrictive. In this paper, we design an efficient algorithm to approximate the population risk minimizer in generalized linear problems such as binary classification with surrogate losses and generalized linear regression models. We focus on large-scale problems, where the iterative minimization of the empirical risk is computationally intractable, i.e., the number of observations $n$ is much larger than the dimension of the parameter $p$, i.e. $n \gg p \gg 1$. We show that under random sub-Gaussian design, the true minimizer of the population risk is approximately proportional to the corresponding ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator. Using this relation, we design an algorithm that achieves the same accuracy as the empirical risk minimizer through iterations that attain up to a cubic convergence rate, and that are cheaper than any batch optimization algorithm by at least a factor of $\mathcal{O}(p)$. We provide theoretical guarantees for our algorithm, and analyze the convergence behavior in terms of data dimensions. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on well-known classification and regression problems, through extensive numerical studies on large-scale datasets, and show that it achieves the highest performance compared to several other widely used and specialized optimization algorithms.
Private Empirical Risk Minimization Beyond the Worst Case: The Effect of the Constraint Set Geometry
Talwar, Kunal, Thakurta, Abhradeep, Zhang, Li
Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) is a standard technique in machine learning, where a model is selected by minimizing a loss function over constraint set. When the training dataset consists of private information, it is natural to use a differentially private ERM algorithm, and this problem has been the subject of a long line of work started with Chaudhuri and Monteleoni 2008. A private ERM algorithm outputs an approximate minimizer of the loss function and its error can be measured as the difference from the optimal value of the loss function. When the constraint set is arbitrary, the required error bounds are fairly well understood \cite{BassilyST14}. In this work, we show that the geometric properties of the constraint set can be used to derive significantly better results. Specifically, we show that a differentially private version of Mirror Descent leads to error bounds of the form $\tilde{O}(G_{\mathcal{C}}/n)$ for a lipschitz loss function, improving on the $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{p}/n)$ bounds in Bassily, Smith and Thakurta 2014. Here $p$ is the dimensionality of the problem, $n$ is the number of data points in the training set, and $G_{\mathcal{C}}$ denotes the Gaussian width of the constraint set that we optimize over. We show similar improvements for strongly convex functions, and for smooth functions. In addition, we show that when the loss function is Lipschitz with respect to the $\ell_1$ norm and $\mathcal{C}$ is $\ell_1$-bounded, a differentially private version of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm gives error bounds of the form $\tilde{O}(n^{-2/3})$. This captures the important and common case of sparse linear regression (LASSO), when the data $x_i$ satisfies $|x_i|_{\infty} \leq 1$ and we optimize over the $\ell_1$ ball. We show new lower bounds for this setting, that together with known bounds, imply that all our upper bounds are tight.
Regression (LR and MLR) and differences, not for the Economy. Professional analyst should be able to answer these three questions.
To produce a regression analysis of inference that can be justified or trustworthy in the sense that helpful. The term in the statistical methods that generate a linear the best estimator is not bias (best linear unbiased estimator) abbreviated BLUE. Then there are some other things that are also important to note, in which the data to be processed, must meet certain requirements. All terms or phases of the classical assumptions that must be met, in order to build a regression model that could be accounted for. Thus, the need to test that assumption is intended to meet some of the elements of the accuracy of the parameter estimator is not biased to reflect the efficient level of analysis results are consistent so that the regression equation can be trusted.
Analyzing Vocabulary Intersections of Expert Annotations and Topic Models for Data Practices in Privacy Policies
Liu, Frederick (Carnegie Mellon University) | Wilson, Shomir (University of Cincinnati) | Schaub, Florian (University of Michigan) | Sadeh, Norman (Carnegie Mellon University)
Privacy policies are commonly used to inform users about the data collection and use practices of websites, mobile apps, and other products and services. However, the average Internet user struggles to understand the contents of these documents and generally does not read them. Natural language and machine learning techniques offer the promise of automatically extracting relevant statements from privacy policies to help generate succinct summaries, but current techniques require large amounts of annotated data. The highest quality annotations require law experts, but their efforts do not scale efficiently. In this paper, we present results on bridging the gap between privacy practice categories defined by law experts with topics learned from Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). To do this, we investigate the intersections between vocabulary sets identified as most significant for each category, using a logistic regression model, and vocabulary sets identified by topic modeling. The intersections exhibit strong matches between some categories and topics, although other categories have weaker affinities with topics. Our results show a path forward for applying unsupervised methods to the determination of data practice categories in privacy policy text.