PermutationFeatureImportanceExtensions.PermutationFeatureImportanceNonCalibrated Method

Definition

Namespace:

Microsoft.ML

Assembly:

Microsoft.ML.Transforms.dll

Package:

Microsoft.ML v3.0.1

Permutation Feature Importance (PFI) for Binary Classification.

public static System.Collections.Immutable.ImmutableDictionary<string,Microsoft.ML.Data.BinaryClassificationMetricsStatistics> PermutationFeatureImportanceNonCalibrated (this Microsoft.ML.BinaryClassificationCatalog catalog, Microsoft.ML.ITransformer model, Microsoft.ML.IDataView data, string labelColumnName = "Label", bool useFeatureWeightFilter = false, int? numberOfExamplesToUse = default, int permutationCount = 1);

static member PermutationFeatureImportanceNonCalibrated : Microsoft.ML.BinaryClassificationCatalog * Microsoft.ML.ITransformer * Microsoft.ML.IDataView * string * bool * Nullable<int> * int -> System.Collections.Immutable.ImmutableDictionary<string, Microsoft.ML.Data.BinaryClassificationMetricsStatistics>

<Extension()>
Public Function PermutationFeatureImportanceNonCalibrated (catalog As BinaryClassificationCatalog, model As ITransformer, data As IDataView, Optional labelColumnName As String = "Label", Optional useFeatureWeightFilter As Boolean = false, Optional numberOfExamplesToUse As Nullable(Of Integer) = Nothing, Optional permutationCount As Integer = 1) As ImmutableDictionary(Of String, BinaryClassificationMetricsStatistics)

Parameters

catalog

BinaryClassificationCatalog

The binary classification catalog.

model

ITransformer

The model on which to evaluate feature importance.

data

IDataView

The evaluation data set.

labelColumnName

String

Label column name. The column data must be Boolean.

useFeatureWeightFilter

Boolean

Use features weight to pre-filter features.

numberOfExamplesToUse

Nullable<Int32>

Limit the number of examples to evaluate on. means up to ~2 bln examples from will be used.

permutationCount

Int32

The number of permutations to perform.

Returns

ImmutableDictionary<String,BinaryClassificationMetricsStatistics>

Dictionary mapping each feature to its per-feature 'contributions' to the score.

Examples

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using Microsoft.ML;

namespace Samples.Dynamic.Trainers.BinaryClassification
{
    public static class PermutationFeatureImportance
    {
        public static void Example()
        {
            // Create a new context for ML.NET operations. It can be used for
            // exception tracking and logging, as a catalog of available operations
            // and as the source of randomness.
            var mlContext = new MLContext(seed: 1);

            // Create sample data.
            var samples = GenerateData();

            // Load the sample data as an IDataView.
            var data = mlContext.Data.LoadFromEnumerable(samples);

            // Define a training pipeline that concatenates features into a vector,
            // normalizes them, and then trains a linear model.
            var featureColumns =
                new string[] { nameof(Data.Feature1), nameof(Data.Feature2) };
            var pipeline = mlContext.Transforms
                .Concatenate("Features", featureColumns)
                .Append(mlContext.Transforms.NormalizeMinMax("Features"))
                .Append(mlContext.BinaryClassification.Trainers
                .SdcaLogisticRegression());

            // Fit the pipeline to the data.
            var model = pipeline.Fit(data);

            // Transform the dataset.
            var transformedData = model.Transform(data);

            // Extract the predictor.
            var linearPredictor = model.LastTransformer;

            // Compute the permutation metrics for the linear model using the
            // normalized data.
            var permutationMetrics = mlContext.BinaryClassification
                .PermutationFeatureImportance(linearPredictor, transformedData,
                permutationCount: 30);

            // Now let's look at which features are most important to the model
            // overall. Get the feature indices sorted by their impact on AUC.
            var sortedIndices = permutationMetrics
                .Select((metrics, index) => new { index, metrics.AreaUnderRocCurve })
                .OrderByDescending(
                feature => Math.Abs(feature.AreaUnderRocCurve.Mean))
                .Select(feature => feature.index);

            Console.WriteLine("Feature\tModel Weight\tChange in AUC"
                + "\t95% Confidence in the Mean Change in AUC");
            var auc = permutationMetrics.Select(x => x.AreaUnderRocCurve).ToArray();
            foreach (int i in sortedIndices)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("{0}\t{1:0.00}\t{2:G4}\t{3:G4}",
                    featureColumns[i],
                    linearPredictor.Model.SubModel.Weights[i],
                    auc[i].Mean,
                    1.96 * auc[i].StandardError);
            }

            // Expected output:
            //  Feature     Model Weight Change in AUC  95% Confidence in the Mean Change in AUC
            //  Feature2        35.15     -0.387        0.002015
            //  Feature1        17.94     -0.1514       0.0008963
        }

        private class Data
        {
            public bool Label { get; set; }

            public float Feature1 { get; set; }

            public float Feature2 { get; set; }
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Generate an enumerable of Data objects, creating the label as a simple
        /// linear combination of the features.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="nExamples">The number of examples.</param>
        /// <param name="bias">The bias, or offset, in the calculation of the label.
        /// </param>
        /// <param name="weight1">The weight to multiply the first feature with to
        /// compute the label.</param>
        /// <param name="weight2">The weight to multiply the second feature with to
        /// compute the label.</param>
        /// <param name="seed">The seed for generating feature values and label
        /// noise.</param>
        /// <returns>An enumerable of Data objects.</returns>
        private static IEnumerable<Data> GenerateData(int nExamples = 10000,
            double bias = 0, double weight1 = 1, double weight2 = 2, int seed = 1)
        {
            var rng = new Random(seed);
            for (int i = 0; i < nExamples; i++)
            {
                var data = new Data
                {
                    Feature1 = (float)(rng.Next(10) * (rng.NextDouble() - 0.5)),
                    Feature2 = (float)(rng.Next(10) * (rng.NextDouble() - 0.5)),
                };

                // Create a noisy label.
                var value = (float)(bias + weight1 * data.Feature1 + weight2 *
                    data.Feature2 + rng.NextDouble() - 0.5);

                data.Label = Sigmoid(value) > 0.5;
                yield return data;
            }
        }

        private static double Sigmoid(double x) => 1.0 / (1.0 + Math.Exp(-1 * x));
    }
}

Remarks

Permutation feature importance (PFI) is a technique to determine the global importance of features in a trained machine learning model. PFI is a simple yet powerful technique motivated by Breiman in his Random Forest paper, section 10 (Breiman. "Random Forests." Machine Learning, 2001.) The advantage of the PFI method is that it is model agnostic -- it works with any model that can be evaluated -- and it can use any dataset, not just the training set, to compute feature importance metrics.

PFI works by taking a labeled dataset, choosing a feature, and permuting the values for that feature across all the examples, so that each example now has a random value for the feature and the original values for all other features. The evaluation metric (e.g. AUC) is then calculated for this modified dataset, and the change in the evaluation metric from the original dataset is computed. The larger the change in the evaluation metric, the more important the feature is to the model. PFI works by performing this permutation analysis across all the features of a model, one after another.

In this implementation, PFI computes the change in all possible binary classification evaluation metrics for each feature, and an ImmutableArray of BinaryClassificationMetrics objects is returned. See the sample below for an example of working with these results to analyze the feature importance of a model.