3.9. Ensemble methods¶
The goal of ensemble methods is to combine the predictions of several models built with a given learning algorithm in order to improve generalizability / robustness over a single model.
Two families of ensemble methods are usually distinguished:
In averaging methods, the driving principle is to build several models independently and then to average their predictions. On average, the combined model is usually better than any of the single model because its variance is reduced.
Examples: Bagging methods, Forests of randomized trees...
By contrast, in boosting methods, models are built sequentially and one tries to reduce the bias of the combined model. The motivation is to combine several weak models to produce a powerful ensemble.
Examples: AdaBoost, Least Squares Boosting, Gradient Tree Boosting...
3.9.1. Forests of randomized trees¶
The sklearn.ensemble module includes two averaging algorithms based on randomized decision trees: the RandomForest algorithm and the Extra-Trees method. Both algorithms are perturb-and-combine techniques [B1998] specifically designed for trees. This means a diverse set of classifiers is created by introducing randomness in the classifier construction. The prediction of the ensemble is given as the averaged prediction of the individual classifiers.
As other classifiers, forest classifiers have to be fitted with two arrays: an array X of size [n_samples, n_features] holding the training samples, and an array Y of size [n_samples] holding the target values (class labels) for the training samples:
>>> from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier
>>> X = [[0, 0], [1, 1]]
>>> Y = [0, 1]
>>> clf = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=10)
>>> clf = clf.fit(X, Y)
3.9.1.1. Random Forests¶
In random forests (see RandomForestClassifier and RandomForestRegressor classes), each tree in the ensemble is built from a sample drawn with replacement (i.e., a bootstrap sample) from the training set. In addition, when splitting a node during the construction of the tree, the split that is chosen is no longer the best split among all features. Instead, the split that is picked is the best split among a random subset of the features. As a result of this randomness, the bias of the forest usually slightly increases (with respect to the bias of a single non-random tree) but, due to averaging, its variance also decreases, usually more than compensating for the increase in bias, hence yielding an overall better model.
In contrast to the original publication [B2001], the scikit-learn implementation combines classifiers by averaging their probabilistic prediction, instead of letting each classifier vote for a single class.
3.9.1.2. Extremely Randomized Trees¶
In extremely randomized trees (see ExtraTreesClassifier and ExtraTreesRegressor classes), randomness goes one step further in the way splits are computed. As in random forests, a random subset of candidate features is used, but instead of looking for the most discriminative thresholds, thresholds are drawn at random for each candidate feature and the best of these randomly-generated thresholds is picked as the splitting rule. This usually allows to reduce the variance of the model a bit more, at the expense of a slightly greater increase in bias:
>>> from sklearn.cross_validation import cross_val_score
>>> from sklearn.datasets import make_blobs
>>> from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier
>>> from sklearn.ensemble import ExtraTreesClassifier
>>> from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeClassifier
>>> X, y = make_blobs(n_samples=10000, n_features=10, centers=100,
... random_state=0)
>>> clf = DecisionTreeClassifier(max_depth=None, min_samples_split=1,
... random_state=0)
>>> scores = cross_val_score(clf, X, y)
>>> scores.mean()
0.978...
>>> clf = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=10, max_depth=None,
... min_samples_split=1, random_state=0)
>>> scores = cross_val_score(clf, X, y)
>>> scores.mean()
0.999...
>>> clf = ExtraTreesClassifier(n_estimators=10, max_depth=None,
... min_samples_split=1, random_state=0)
>>> scores = cross_val_score(clf, X, y)
>>> scores.mean() > 0.999
True
3.9.1.3. Parameters¶
The main parameters to adjust when using these methods is n_estimators and max_features. The former is the number of trees in the forest. The larger the better, but also the longer it will take to compute. In addition, note that results will stop getting significantly better beyond a critical number of trees. The latter is the size of the random subsets of features to consider when splitting a node. The lower the greater the reduction of variance, but also the greater the increase in bias. Empiricial good default values are max_features=n_features for regression problems, and max_features=sqrt(n_features) for classification tasks (where n_features is the number of features in the data). The best results are also usually reached when setting max_depth=None in combination with min_samples_split=1 (i.e., when fully developping the trees). Bear in mind though that these values are usually not optimal. The best parameter values should always be cross- validated. In addition, note that bootstrap samples are used by default in random forests (bootstrap=True) while the default strategy is to use the original dataset for building extra-trees (bootstrap=False).
When training on large datasets, where runtime and memory requirements are important, it might also be beneficial to adjust the min_density parameter, that controls a heuristic for speeding up computations in each tree. See Complexity of trees for details.
3.9.1.4. Parallelization¶
Finally, this module also features the parallel construction of the trees and the parallel computation of the predictions through the n_jobs parameter. If n_jobs=k then computations are partitioned into k jobs, and run on k cores of the machine. If n_jobs=-1 then all cores available on the machine are used. Note that because of inter-process communication overhead, the speedup might not be linear (i.e., using k jobs will unfortunately not be k times as fast). Significant speedup can still be achieved though when building a large number of trees, or when building a single tree requires a fair amount of time (e.g., on large datasets).
Examples: