Here we use survival on the Titanic to demonstrate a model-based method to select the most important features.
Reducing the number of features we use can have three benefits:
- Simplifies model explanation
- Model fit may be improved by the removal of features that add no value
- Model will be faster to fit
In this notebook we will use a model-based approach whereby we incrementally remove features that least reduce model performance.
Two key advantages of this method are:
- It is relatively simple.
- It is tailored to the model in question.
Some key disadvantage of this method are:
- It may be slow if there are many parameters (though the loop to select features could be limited in the number of features to select).
- The selection of features may be dependent on model meta-parameters (such as level of regularisation).
- The selection of features may not transfer between models (e.g. a model that does not allow for feature interactions may not detect features which do not add much value independently).
We will assess performance using k-fold stratification for better measurement of performance. If you are not familiar with k-fold stratification, have a look here.
And we will assess performance with a Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) curve. See here.
Load data
The section below downloads pre-processed data, and saves it to a subfolder (from where this code is run). If data has already been downloaded that cell may be skipped.
Code that was used to pre-process the data ready for machine learning may be found at: https://github.com/MichaelAllen1966/1804_python_healthcare/blob/master/titanic/01_preprocessing.ipynb
download_required = True
if download_required:
# Download processed data:
address = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MichaelAllen1966/' + \
'1804_python_healthcare/master/titanic/data/processed_data.csv'
data = pd.read_csv(address)
# Create a data subfolder if one does not already exist
import os
data_directory ='./data/'
if not os.path.exists(data_directory):
os.makedirs(data_directory)
# Save data
data.to_csv(data_directory + 'processed_data.csv', index=False)
Load data:
data = pd.read_csv('data/processed_data.csv')
The first column is a passenger index number. We will remove this, as this is not part of the original Titanic passenger data.
# Drop Passengerid (axis=1 indicates we are removing a column rather than a row)
# We drop passenger ID as it is not original data
data.drop('PassengerId', inplace=True, axis=1)
Divide into X (features) and y (lables)
We will separate out our features (the data we use to make a prediction) from our label (what we are truing to predict). By convention our features are called X (usually upper case to denote multiple features), and the label (survive or not) y.
X = data.drop('Survived',axis=1) # X = all 'data' except the 'survived' column
y = data['Survived'] # y = 'survived' column from 'data'
Forward feature selection
Define data standardisation function.
def standardise_data(X_train, X_test):
# Initialise a new scaling object for normalising input data
sc = StandardScaler()
# Set up the scaler just on the training set
sc.fit(X_train)
# Apply the scaler to the training and test sets
train_std=sc.transform(X_train)
test_std=sc.transform(X_test)
return train_std, test_std
The forward selection method:
- Keeps a list of selected features
- Keeps a list of features still available for selection
- Loops through available features:
- Calculates added value for each feature (using stratified k-fold validation)
- Selects feature that adds most value
- Adds selected feature to selected features list and removes it from available features list
This method uses a while lop to keep exploring features until no more are available. An alternative would be to use a for loop with a maximum number of features to select.In [8]:
# Create list to store accuracies and chosen features
roc_auc_by_feature_number = []
chosen_features = []
# Initialise chosen features list and run tracker
available_features = list(X)
run = 0
number_of_features = len(list(X))
# Creat einitial reference performance
reference_auc = 1.0 # used to compare reduction in AUC
# Loop through feature list to select next feature
while len(available_features)> 1:
# Track and pront progress
run += 1
print ('Feature run {} of {}'.format(run, number_of_features-1))
# Convert DataFrames to NumPy arrays
y_np = y.values
# Reset best feature and accuracy
best_result = 1.0
best_feature = ''
# Loop through available features
for feature in available_features:
# Create copy of already chosen features to avoid orginal being changed
features_to_use = available_features.copy()
# Create a list of features to use by removing 1 feature
features_to_use.remove(feature)
# Get data for features, and convert to NumPy array
X_np = X[features_to_use].values
# Set up lists to hold results for each selected features
test_auc_results = []
# Set up k-fold training/test splits
number_of_splits = 5
skf = StratifiedKFold(n_splits = number_of_splits)
skf.get_n_splits(X_np, y)
# Loop through the k-fold splits
for train_index, test_index in skf.split(X_np, y_np):
# Get X and Y train/test
X_train, X_test = X_np[train_index], X_np[test_index]
y_train, y_test = y[train_index], y[test_index]
# Get X and Y train/test
X_train_std, X_test_std = standardise_data(X_train, X_test)
# Set up and fit model
model = LogisticRegression(solver='lbfgs')
model.fit(X_train_std,y_train)
# Predict test set labels
y_pred_test = model.predict(X_test_std)
# Calculate accuracy of test sets
accuracy_test = np.mean(y_pred_test == y_test)
# Get ROC AUC
probabilities = model.predict_proba(X_test_std)
probabilities = probabilities[:, 1] # Probability of 'survived'
fpr, tpr, thresholds = roc_curve(y_test, probabilities)
roc_auc = auc(fpr, tpr)
test_auc_results.append(roc_auc)
# Get average result from all k-fold splits
feature_auc = np.mean(test_auc_results)
# Update chosen feature and result if this feature is a new best
# We are looking for the smallest drop in performance
drop_in_performance = reference_auc - feature_auc
if drop_in_performance < best_result:
best_result = drop_in_performance
best_feature = feature
best_auc = feature_auc
# k-fold splits are complete
# Add mean accuracy and AUC to record of accuracy by feature number
roc_auc_by_feature_number.append(best_auc)
chosen_features.append(best_feature)
available_features.remove(best_feature)
reference_auc = best_auc
# Add last remaining feature
chosen_features += available_features
roc_auc_by_feature_number.append(0)
# Put results in DataFrame
# Reverse order of lists with [::-1] so best features first
results = pd.DataFrame()
results['feature removed'] = chosen_features[::-1]
results['ROC AUC'] = roc_auc_by_feature_number[::-1]
Show results
The table is now in the order of preferred features, though our code worked in the reverse direction, incrementally removing the feature that made least difference to the model.In [9]:
results
| feature removed | ROC AUC | |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | male | 0.000000 |
| 1 | Pclass | 0.766733 |
| 2 | Age | 0.833036 |
| 3 | SibSp | 0.843055 |
| 4 | Embarked_S | 0.848686 |
| 5 | CabinNumberImputed | 0.853125 |
| 6 | CabinLetter_C | 0.855046 |
| 7 | CabinLetter_missing | 0.855504 |
| 8 | CabinLetterImputed | 0.855506 |
| 9 | Embarked_missing | 0.855533 |
| 10 | EmbarkedImputed | 0.855479 |
| 11 | CabinLetter_T | 0.855479 |
| 12 | CabinLetter_F | 0.855159 |
| 13 | CabinLetter_B | 0.855124 |
| 14 | Embarked_Q | 0.854781 |
| 15 | Embarked_C | 0.853826 |
| 16 | Fare | 0.853760 |
| 17 | CabinNumber | 0.853030 |
| 18 | CabinLetter_E | 0.852737 |
| 19 | CabinLetter_A | 0.852083 |
| 20 | AgeImputed | 0.851654 |
| 21 | CabinLetter_D | 0.850486 |
| 22 | CabinLetter_G | 0.848673 |
| 23 | Parch | 0.847432 |
Plot results
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
chart_x = list(range(1, number_of_features+1))
plt.plot(chart_x, roc_auc_by_feature_number,
label = 'ROC AUC')
plt.xlabel('Number of features removed')
plt.ylabel('Accuracy (ROC AUC)')
plt.legend()
plt.grid(True)
plt.show()
From the above results it looks like we could eliminate all but 5-6 features in this model. It may also be worth examining the same method using other performance scores (such as simple accuracy, or f1) in place of ROC AUC.
