Difference between glmnet() and cv.glmnet() in R? - r

I'm working on a project that would show the potential influence a group of events have on an outcome. I'm using the glmnet() package, specifically using the Poisson feature. Here's my code:
# de <- data imported from sql connection
x <- model.matrix(~.,data = de[,2:7])
y <- (de[,1])
reg <- cv.glmnet(x,y, family = "poisson", alpha = 1)
reg1 <- glmnet(x,y, family = "poisson", alpha = 1)
**Co <- coef(?reg or reg1?,s=???)**
summ <- summary(Co)
c <- data.frame(Name= rownames(Co)[summ$i],
Lambda= summ$x)
c2 <- c[with(c, order(-Lambda)), ]
The beginning imports a large amount of data from my database in SQL. I then put it in matrix format and separate the response from the predictors.
This is where I'm confused: I can't figure out exactly what the difference is between the glmnet() function and the cv.glmnet() function. I realize that the cv.glmnet() function is a k-fold cross-validation of glmnet(), but what exactly does that mean in practical terms? They provide the same value for lambda, but I want to make sure I'm not missing something important about the difference between the two.
I'm also unclear as to why it runs fine when I specify alpha=1 (supposedly the default), but not if I leave it out?
Thanks in advance!

glmnet() is a R package which can be used to fit Regression models,lasso model and others. Alpha argument determines what type of model is fit. When alpha=0, Ridge Model is fit and if alpha=1, a lasso model is fit.
cv.glmnet() performs cross-validation, by default 10-fold which can be adjusted using nfolds. A 10-fold CV will randomly divide your observations into 10 non-overlapping groups/folds of approx equal size. The first fold will be used for validation set and the model is fit on 9 folds. Bias Variance advantages is usually the motivation behind using such model validation methods. In the case of lasso and ridge models, CV helps choose the value of the tuning parameter lambda.
In your example, you can do plot(reg) OR reg$lambda.min to see the value of lambda which results in the smallest CV error. You can then derive the Test MSE for that value of lambda. By default, glmnet() will perform Ridge or Lasso regression for an automatically selected range of lambda which may not give the lowest test MSE. Hope this helps!
Hope this helps!

Between reg$lambda.min and reg$lambda.1se ; the lambda.min obviously will give you the lowest MSE, however, depending on how flexible you can be with the error, you may want to choose reg$lambda.1se, as this value would further shrink the number of predictors. You may also choose the mean of reg$lambda.min and reg$lambda.1se as your lambda value.

Related

Optimizing a GAM for Smoothness

I am currently trying to generate a general additive model in R using a response variable and three predictor variables. One of the predictors is linear, and the dataset consists of 298 observations.
I have run the following code to generate a basic GAM:
GAM <- gam(response~ linearpredictor+ s(predictor2) + s(predictor3), data = data[2:5])
This produces a model with 18 degrees of freedom and seems to substantially overfit the data. I'm wondering how I might generate a GAM that maximizes smoothness and predictive error. I realize that each of these features is going to come at the expense of the other, but is there good a way to find the optimal model that doesn't overfit?
Additionally, I need to perform leave one out cross validation (LOOCV), and I am not sure how to make sure that gam() does this in the MGCV package. Any help on either of these problems uld be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
I've run this to generate a GAM, but it overfits the data.
GAM <- gam(response~ linearpredictor+ s(predictor2) + s(predictor3), data = data[2:5])
I have also generated 1,000,000 GAMs with varying combinations of smoothing parameters and ranged the maximum degrees of freedom allowed from 10 (as shown in the code below) to 19. The variable "combinations2" is a list of all 1,000,000 combinations of smoothers I selected. This code is designed to try and balance degrees of freedom and AIC score. It does function, but I'm not sure that I'm actually going to be able to find the optimal model from this. I also cannot tell how to make sure that it uses LOOCV.
BestGAM <- gam(response~ linearpredictor+ predictor2+ predictor3, data = data[2:5])
for(i in 1:100000){
PotentialGAM <- gam(response~ linearpredictor+ s(predictor2) + s(predictor3), data = data[2:5], sp=c(combinations2[i,]$Var1,combinations2[i,]$Var2))
if (AIC(PotentialGAM,BestGAM)$df[1] <= 10 & AIC(PotentialGAM,BestGAM)$AIC[1] < AIC(PotentialGAM,BestGAM)$AIC[2]){
BestGAM <<- PotentialGAM
listNumber <- i
}
}
You are fitting your GAM using generalised cross validation (GCV) smoothness selection. GCV is a way to get around the invariance problem of ordinary cross validation (OCV; what you also call LOOCV) when estimating GAMs. Note that GCV is the same as OCV on a rotated version of the fitting problem (rotating y - Xβ by Q, any orthogonal matrix), and while when fitting with GCV {mgcv} doesn't actually need to do the rotation and the expected GCV score isn't affected by the rotation, GCV is just OCV (wood 2017, p. 260)
It has been shown that GCV can undersmooth (resulting in more wiggly models) as the objective function (GCV profile) can become flat around the optimum. Instead it is preferred to estimate GAMs (with penalized smooths) using REML or ML smoothness selection; add method = "REML" (or "ML") to your gam() call.
If the REML or ML fit is as wiggly as the GCV one with your data, then I'd be likely to presume gam() is not overfitting, but that there is something about your response data that hasn't been explained here (are the data ordered in time, for example?)
As to your question
how I might generate a GAM that maximizes smoothness and [minimize?] predictive error,
you are already doing that using GCV smoothness selection and for a particular definition of "smoothness" (in this case it is squared second derivatives of the estimated smooths, integrated over the range of the covariates, and summed over smooths).
If you want GCV but smoother models, you can increase the gamma argument above 1; gamma 1.4 is often used for example, which means that each EDF costs 40% more in the GCV criterion.
FWIW, you can get the LOOCV (OCV) score for your model without actually fitting 288 GAMs through the use of the influence matrix A. Here's a reproducible example using my {gratia} package:
library("gratia")
library("mgcv")
df <- data_sim("eg1", seed = 1)
m <- gam(y ~ s(x0) + s(x1) + s(x2) + s(x3), data = df, method = "REML")
A <- influence(m)
r <- residuals(m, type = "response")
ocv_score <- mean(r^2 / (1 - A))

Type measure differences in glmnet package?

What is the difference between using "mse" and "class" in the glmnet package?
log_x <- model.matrix(response~.,train)
log_y <- ifelse(train$response=="good",1,0)
log_cv <- cv.glmnet(log_x,log_y,alpha=1,family="binomial", type.measure = "class")
summary(log_cv)
plot(log_cv)
vs.
log_x <- model.matrix(response~.,train)
log_y <- ifelse(train$response=="good",1,0)
log_cv <- cv.glmnet(log_x,log_y,alpha=1,family="binomial", type.measure = "mse")
summary(log_cv)
plot(log_cv)
I'm noticing that I'm getting a slightly different curve, or smootness in my plot, and a few % difference in accuracy. But for predicting a binnomial class response is one type measure more appropriate than the other?
It depends on your case study and what you want to learn from your model. From the help files
The default is type.measure="deviance", which uses squared-error
for gaussian models (a.k.a type.measure="mse" there) [...]. type.measure="class"
applies to binomial and multinomial logistic regression only, and gives misclassification
error
Therefore, you have to ask yourself whether, in your problem, you want to minimize misclassification error or the mean squared error.
There is no straight forward answer to which is best. They are two different statistics from which the model decides what is the best penalization parameter to go for given the different models generated by the cross validation.

How to build regression models and then compare their fits with data held out from the model training-testing?

I have been building a couple different regression models using the caret package in R in order to make predictions about how fluorescent certain genetic sequences will become under certain experimental conditions.
I have followed the basic protocol of splitting my data into two sets: one "training-testing set" (80%) and one "hold-out set" (20%), the former of which would be utilized to build the models, and the latter would be used to test them in order to compare and pick the final model, based on metrics such as their R-squared and RMSE values. One such guide of the many I followed can be found here (http://www.kimberlycoffey.com/blog/2016/7/16/compare-multiple-caret-run-machine-learning-models).
However, I run into a block in that I do not know how to test and compare the different models based on how well they can predict the scores in the hold-out set. In the guide I linked to above, the author uses a ConfusionMatrix in order to calculate the specificity and accuracy for each model after building a predict.train object that applied the recently built models on the hold-out set of data (which is referred to as test in the link). However, ConfusionMatrix can only be applied to classification models, wherein the outcome (or response) is a categorical value (as far as my research has indicated. Please correct me if this is incorrect, as I have not been able to conclude without any doubt that this is the case).
I have found that the resamples method is capable of comparing multiple models against each other (source: https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/caret/versions/6.0-77/topics/resamples), but it cannot take into account how the new models fit with the data that I excluded from the training-testing sessions.
I tried to create predict objects using the recently built models and hold-out data, then calculate Rsquared and RMSE values using caret's R2 and RMSE methods. But I'm not sure if such an approach is best possible way for comparing and picking the best model.
At this point, I should note that all the model building methods I am using are based on linear regression, since I need to be able to extract the coefficients and apply them in a separate Python script.
Another option I considered was setting a threshold in my outcome, wherein any genetic sequence that had a fluorescence value over 100 was considered useful, while sequences scoring values under 100 were not. This would allow me utilize the ConfusionMatrix. But I'm not sure how I should implement this within my R code to make these two classes in my outcome variable. I'm further concerned that this approach might make it difficult to apply my regression models to other data and make predictions.
For what it's worth, each of the predictors is either an integer or a float, and have ranges that are not normally distributed.
Here is the code I thus far been using:
library(caret)
data <- read.table("mydata.csv")
sorted_Data<- data[order(data$fluorescence, decreasing= TRUE),]
splitprob <- 0.8
traintestindex <- createDataPartition(sorted_Data$fluorescence, p=splitprob, list=F)
holdoutset <- sorted_Data[-traintestindex,]
trainingset <- sorted_Data[traintestindex,]
traindata<- trainingset[c('x1', 'x2', 'x3', 'x4', 'x5', 'fluorescence')]
cvCtrl <- trainControl(method = "repeatedcv", number= 20, repeats = 20, verboseIter = FALSE)
modelglmStepAIC <- train(fluorescence~., traindata, method = "glmStepAIC", preProc = c("center","scale"), trControl = cvCtrl)
model_rlm <- train(fluorescence~., traindata, method = "rlm", preProc = c("center","scale"), trControl = cvCtrl)
pred_glmStepAIC<- predict.lm(modelglmStepAIC$finalModel, holdoutset)
pred_rlm<- predict.lm(model_rlm$finalModel, holdoutset)
glmStepAIC_r2<- R2(pred_glmStepAIC, holdoutset$fluorescence)
glmStepAIC_rmse<- RMSE(pred_glmStepAIC, holdoutset$fluorescence)
rlm_r2<- R2(pred_rlm, holdoutset$fluorescence)
rlm_rmse<- RMSE(pred_rlm, holdoutset$fluorescence)
The out-of-sample performance measures offered by Caret are RMSE, MAE and squared correlation between fitted and observed values (called R2). See more info here https://topepo.github.io/caret/measuring-performance.html
At least in time series regression context, RMSE is the standard measure for out-of-sample performance of regression models.
I would advise against discretising continuous outcome variable, because you are essentially throwing away information by discretising.

Implementing Monte Carlo Cross Validation on linear regression in R

I'm having a dataset of 90 stations with a variety of different covariates which I would like to take for prediction by using a step-wise forward multiple regression. Therefore I would like to use Monte Carlo Cross Validation to estimate the performance of my linear model by splitting into test- and training tests for many times.
How can I implement the MCCV in R to test my model for certain iterations? I found the package WilcoxCV which gives me the observation number for each iteration. I also found the CMA-package which doesn't helps me a lot so far.
I checked all threads about MCCV but didn't find the answer.
You can use the caret package. The MCCV is called 'LGOCV' in this package (i.e Leave Group Out CV). It randomly selects splits between training and test sets.
Here is an example use training a L1-regularized regression model (you should look into regularization instead of step-wise btw), validating the selection of the penalizing lambda parameter using MCCV:
library(caret)
library(glmnet)
n <- 1000 # nbr of observations
m <- 20 # nbr of features
# Generate example data
x <- matrix(rnorm(m*n),n,m)
colnames(x) <- paste0("var",1:m)
y <- rnorm(n)
dat <- as.data.frame(cbind(y,x))
# Set up training settings object
trControl <- trainControl(method = "LGOCV", # Leave Group Out CV (MCCV)
number = 10) # Number of folds/iterations
# Set up grid of parameters to test
params = expand.grid(alpha=c(0,0.5,1), # L1 & L2 mixing parameter
lambda=2^seq(1,-10, by=-0.3)) # regularization parameter
# Run training over tuneGrid and select best model
glmnet.obj <- train(y ~ ., # model formula (. means all features)
data = dat, # data.frame containing training set
method = "glmnet", # model to use
trControl = trControl, # set training settings
tuneGrid = params) # set grid of params to test over
# Plot performance for different params
plot(glmnet.obj, xTrans=log, xlab="log(lambda)")
# Plot regularization paths for the best model
plot(glmnet.obj$finalModel, xvar="lambda", label=T)
You can use glmnet to train linear models. If you want to use step-wise caret supports that too using e.g method = 'glmStepAIC' or similar.
a list of the feature selection wrappers can be found here: http://topepo.github.io/caret/Feature_Selection_Wrapper.html
Edit
alphaand lambda arguments in the expand.grid function are glmnet specific parameters. If you use another model it will have a different set of parameters to optimize over.
lambda is the amount of regularization, i.e the amount of penalization on the beta values. Larger values will give "simpler" models, less prone to overfit, and smaller values more complex models that will tend to overfit if not enough data is available. The lambda values I supplied are just an example. Supply the grid you are interested in. But in general it is nice to supply an exponentially decreasing sequence for lambda.
alpha is the mixing parameter between L1 and L2 regularization. alpha=1 is L1 and alpha=0 is L2 regularization. I only supplied one value in the grid for this parameter. It is of course possible to supply several, like e.g alpha=c(0,0.5,1) which would test L1, L2 and an even mix of the two.
expand.grid creates a grid of potential parameter values we want to run the MCCV procedure over. Essentially, the MCCV procedure will evaluate performance for each of the different values in the grid and select the best one for you.
You can read more about glmnet, caret and parameter tuning here:
An Introduction to Glmnet
glmnet documentation
Model Training and Parameter Tuning with Caret

Leave one out cross validation with lm function in R

I have a dataset of 506 rows on which I am performing Leave-one-out Cross Validation, once I get the mean squared errors , I am computing the mean of the mean squared errors I found. This is changing everytime I run it. Is this expected ? If so, Can someone please explain why is it changing everytime I run it ?
To do leave one out CV, I shuffle the rows first , df is the data frame
df <-df[sample.int(nrow(df)),]
Then, I split the dataframe into 506 data frames and send it to lm() and get the MSE for each data frame (in this case, each row)
fit <- lm(train[,lastcolumn] ~.,data = train)
pred <- predict(fit,test)
pred <- mean((pred - test[,lastcolumn])^2)
And then I take the mean of all the MSEs I got.
Everytime I run all this , I get a different mean. Is this expected ?
Leave-one-out cross-validation is a validation paradigm. You have to state what algorithm you are using for your predictions and you have to look whether there is some random initialization of the parameters in the prediction algorithm. If that initialization changes randomly that could explain a different result everytime the underlying algorithm is run. You have to mention which estimator / prediction algorithm you are using. If you use a Gaussian Mixture Model e.g. for classification with different initialization for means and covariances that would be a possible algorithm where performance is not necessarily always the same in a LOOCV. Gaussian mixture models and K-means algorithms typically randomize the selection of data points to represent a mean. Also the number of Gaussians in the mixture could change with different initializations if an information theoretic criterion i used for estimating the number of Gaussians.

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