Classification
editClassification
editThis functionality is in beta and is subject to change. The design and code is less mature than official GA features and is being provided as-is with no warranties. Beta features are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.
Classification is a machine learning process that enables you to predict the class or category of a data point in your data set. Typical examples of classification problems are predicting loan risk, classifying music, or detecting the potential for cancer in a DNA sequence. In the first case, for example, the data set might contain the investment history, employment status, debit status, and other financial details for loan applicants. Based on this data, you could use classification analysis to create a model that predicts whether it is safe or risky to lend money to applicants. In the second case, the data contains song details that enable you to classify music into genres like hip-hop, country, or classical, for example. Classification is for predicting discrete, categorical values, whereas regression analysis predicts continuous, numerical values.
When you create a classification job, you must specify which field contains the classes that you want to predict. This field is known as the dependent variable. It must contain no more than 30 classes. By default, all other supported fields are included in the analysis and are known as feature variables. The runtime and resources used by the job increase with the number of feature variables. Therefore, you can optionally include or exclude fields from the analysis. For more information about field selection, see the explain data frame analytics API.
Training the classification model
editClassification – just like regression – is a supervised machine learning process.
When you create the data frame analytics job, you must provide a data set that contains
the ground truth. That is to say, your data set must contain the dependent variable
and the feature variables fields that are related to it. You can divide the data
set into training and testing data by specifying a training_percent. By
default when you use the
create data frame analytics jobs API, 100% of the
eligible documents in the
data set are used for training. If you divide your data set, the job stratifies
the data to ensure that both the training and testing data sets contains classes
in proportions that are representative of the class proportions in the full data
set.
When you are collecting a data set to train your model, ensure that it captures information for all of the classes. If some classes are poorly represented in the training data set (that is, you have very few data points per class), the model might be unaware of them. In general, complex decision boundaries between classes are harder to learn and require more data points per class in the training data.
Classification algorithms
editClassification analysis uses an ensemble algorithm that is a type of boosting called boosted tree regression model which combines multiple weak models into a composite one. It uses decision trees to learn to predict the probability that a data point belongs to a certain class. A sequence of decision trees are trained and every decision tree learns from the mistakes of the previous one. Every tree is an iteration of the last one, hence it improves the decision made by the previous tree.
Deploying the model
editThe model that you created is stored as Elasticsearch documents in internal indices. In other words, the characteristics of your trained model are saved and ready to be deployed and used as functions. The inference feature enables you to use your model in a preprocessor of an ingest pipeline or in a pipeline aggregation of a search query to make predictions about your data.
Classification performance
editAs a rule of thumb, a classification analysis with many classes takes more time to run than a binary classification process when there are only two classes. The relationship between the number of classes and the runtime is roughly linear.
The runtime also scales approximately linearly with the number of involved documents below 200,000 data points. Therefore, if you double the number of documents, then the runtime of the analysis doubles respectively.
To improve the performance of your classification analysis, consider using a smaller
training_percent value when you create the job. That is to say, use a smaller
percentage of your documents to train the model more quickly. It is a good
strategy to make progress iteratively: use a smaller training percentage first,
run the analysis, and evaluate the performance. Then, based on the results,
decide if it is necessary to increase the training_percent value. If possible,
prepare your input data such that it has less classes. You can also remove the
fields that are not relevant from the analysis by specifying excludes patterns
in the analyzed_fields object when configuring the data frame analytics job.
Interpreting classification results
editThe following sections help you understand and interpret the results of a classification analysis. To see example results, refer to Viewing classification results.
class_probability
editThe class_probability is a value between 0 and 1, which indicates how likely
it is that a given data point belongs to a certain class. The higher the number,
the higher the probability that the data point belongs to the named class. This
information is stored in the top_classes array for each document in your
destination index.
class_score
editThe class_score is a function of the class_probability and has a value that
is greater than or equal to zero. It takes into consideration your objective (as
defined in the class_assignment_objective job configuration option):
accuracy or recall.
If your objective is to maximize accuracy, the scores are weighted to maximize
the proportion of correct predictions in the training data set. For example, in
the context of a binary confusion matrix
with classes false and true, the predictions of interest are the cells where
the actual and predicted labels are both true (also known as a true positive
(TP)) or both false (also known as a true negative (TN)):
If there is an imbalanced distribution of classes in your training data set, focusing on accuracy can decrease your model’s sensitivity to incorrect predictions in the classes that are under-represented in your data.
By default, classification analysis jobs accept a slight degradation of the overall accuracy in return for greater sensitivity to classes that are predicted incorrectly. That is to say, their objective is to maximize the minimum recall. For example, in the context of a multi-class confusion matrix, the predictions of interest are in each row:
For each class, the recall is calculated as the number of correct predictions (where the actual label matches the predicted label) divided by the sum of all the other predicted labels in that row. This value is represented as a percentage in each cell of the confusion matrix. The class scores are then weighted to favor predictions that result in the highest recall values across the training data. This objective typically performs better than accuracy when you have highly imbalanced data.
To learn more about choosing the class assignment objective that fits your goal, refer to this Jupyter notebook.
Feature importance
editFeature importance provides further information about the results of an analysis and helps to interpret the results in a more subtle way. If you want to learn more about feature importance, click here.
Measuring model performance
editYou can measure how well the model has performed on your data set by using the
classification evaluation type of the
evaluate data frame analytics API. The metric that the
evaluation provides you is a confusion matrix. The more classes you have, the
more complex the confusion matrix is. The matrix tells you how many data points
that belong to a given class were classified correctly and incorrectly.
If you split your data set into training and testing data, you can determine how well your model performs on data it has never seen before and compare the prediction to the actual value.
For more information, see Evaluating data frame analytics.