1.13. Feature selection¶
The classes in the sklearn.feature_selection
module can be used
for feature selection/dimensionality reduction on sample sets, either to
improve estimators’ accuracy scores or to boost their performance on very
high-dimensional datasets.
1.13.1. Removing features with low variance¶
VarianceThreshold
is a simple baseline approach to feature selection.
It removes all features whose variance doesn’t meet some threshold.
By default, it removes all zero-variance features,
i.e. features that have the same value in all samples.
As an example, suppose that we have a dataset with boolean features, and we want to remove all features that are either one or zero (on or off) in more than 80% of the samples. Boolean features are Bernoulli random variables, and the variance of such variables is given by
so we can select using the threshold .8 * (1 - .8)
:
>>> from sklearn.feature_selection import VarianceThreshold
>>> X = [[0, 0, 1], [0, 1, 0], [1, 0, 0], [0, 1, 1], [0, 1, 0], [0, 1, 1]]
>>> sel = VarianceThreshold(threshold=(.8 * (1 - .8)))
>>> sel.fit_transform(X)
array([[0, 1],
[1, 0],
[0, 0],
[1, 1],
[1, 0],
[1, 1]])
As expected, VarianceThreshold
has removed the first column,
which has a probability \(p = 5/6 > .8\) of containing a zero.
1.13.2. Univariate feature selection¶
Univariate feature selection works by selecting the best features based on
univariate statistical tests. It can be seen as a preprocessing step
to an estimator. Scikit-learn exposes feature selection routines
as objects that implement the transform
method:
SelectKBest
removes all but the \(k\) highest scoring features
SelectPercentile
removes all but a user-specified highest scoring percentage of featuresusing common univariate statistical tests for each feature: false positive rate
SelectFpr
, false discovery rateSelectFdr
, or family wise errorSelectFwe
.
GenericUnivariateSelect
allows to perform univariate feature selection with a configurable strategy. This allows to select the best univariate selection strategy with hyper-parameter search estimator.
For instance, we can perform a \(\chi^2\) test to the samples to retrieve only the two best features as follows:
>>> from sklearn.datasets import load_iris
>>> from sklearn.feature_selection import SelectKBest
>>> from sklearn.feature_selection import chi2
>>> X, y = load_iris(return_X_y=True)
>>> X.shape
(150, 4)
>>> X_new = SelectKBest(chi2, k=2).fit_transform(X, y)
>>> X_new.shape
(150, 2)
These objects take as input a scoring function that returns univariate scores
and p-values (or only scores for SelectKBest
and
SelectPercentile
):
For regression:
f_regression
,mutual_info_regression
For classification:
chi2
,f_classif
,mutual_info_classif
The methods based on F-test estimate the degree of linear dependency between two random variables. On the other hand, mutual information methods can capture any kind of statistical dependency, but being nonparametric, they require more samples for accurate estimation.
Feature selection with sparse data
If you use sparse data (i.e. data represented as sparse matrices),
chi2
, mutual_info_regression
, mutual_info_classif
will deal with the data without making it dense.
Warning
Beware not to use a regression scoring function with a classification problem, you will get useless results.
1.13.3. Recursive feature elimination¶
Given an external estimator that assigns weights to features (e.g., the
coefficients of a linear model), recursive feature elimination (RFE
)
is to select features by recursively considering smaller and smaller sets of
features. First, the estimator is trained on the initial set of features and
the importance of each feature is obtained either through a coef_
attribute
or through a feature_importances_
attribute. Then, the least important
features are pruned from current set of features.That procedure is recursively
repeated on the pruned set until the desired number of features to select is
eventually reached.
RFECV
performs RFE in a cross-validation loop to find the optimal
number of features.
Examples:
Recursive feature elimination: A recursive feature elimination example showing the relevance of pixels in a digit classification task.
Recursive feature elimination with cross-validation: A recursive feature elimination example with automatic tuning of the number of features selected with cross-validation.
1.13.4. Feature selection using SelectFromModel¶
SelectFromModel
is a meta-transformer that can be used along with any
estimator that has a coef_
or feature_importances_
attribute after fitting.
The features are considered unimportant and removed, if the corresponding
coef_
or feature_importances_
values are below the provided
threshold
parameter. Apart from specifying the threshold numerically,
there are built-in heuristics for finding a threshold using a string argument.
Available heuristics are “mean”, “median” and float multiples of these like
“0.1*mean”.
For examples on how it is to be used refer to the sections below.
Examples
Feature selection using SelectFromModel and LassoCV: Selecting the two most important features from the Boston dataset without knowing the threshold beforehand.
1.13.4.1. L1-based feature selection¶
Linear models penalized with the L1 norm have
sparse solutions: many of their estimated coefficients are zero. When the goal
is to reduce the dimensionality of the data to use with another classifier,
they can be used along with feature_selection.SelectFromModel
to select the non-zero coefficients. In particular, sparse estimators useful
for this purpose are the linear_model.Lasso
for regression, and
of linear_model.LogisticRegression
and svm.LinearSVC
for classification:
>>> from sklearn.svm import LinearSVC
>>> from sklearn.datasets import load_iris
>>> from sklearn.feature_selection import SelectFromModel
>>> X, y = load_iris(return_X_y=True)
>>> X.shape
(150, 4)
>>> lsvc = LinearSVC(C=0.01, penalty="l1", dual=False).fit(X, y)
>>> model = SelectFromModel(lsvc, prefit=True)
>>> X_new = model.transform(X)
>>> X_new.shape
(150, 3)
With SVMs and logistic-regression, the parameter C controls the sparsity: the smaller C the fewer features selected. With Lasso, the higher the alpha parameter, the fewer features selected.
Examples:
Classification of text documents using sparse features: Comparison of different algorithms for document classification including L1-based feature selection.
L1-recovery and compressive sensing
For a good choice of alpha, the Lasso can fully recover the exact set of non-zero variables using only few observations, provided certain specific conditions are met. In particular, the number of samples should be “sufficiently large”, or L1 models will perform at random, where “sufficiently large” depends on the number of non-zero coefficients, the logarithm of the number of features, the amount of noise, the smallest absolute value of non-zero coefficients, and the structure of the design matrix X. In addition, the design matrix must display certain specific properties, such as not being too correlated.
There is no general rule to select an alpha parameter for recovery of
non-zero coefficients. It can by set by cross-validation
(LassoCV
or LassoLarsCV
), though this may lead to
under-penalized models: including a small number of non-relevant
variables is not detrimental to prediction score. BIC
(LassoLarsIC
) tends, on the opposite, to set high values of
alpha.
Reference Richard G. Baraniuk “Compressive Sensing”, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine [120] July 2007 http://users.isr.ist.utl.pt/~aguiar/CS_notes.pdf
1.13.4.2. Tree-based feature selection¶
Tree-based estimators (see the sklearn.tree
module and forest
of trees in the sklearn.ensemble
module) can be used to compute
feature importances, which in turn can be used to discard irrelevant
features (when coupled with the sklearn.feature_selection.SelectFromModel
meta-transformer):
>>> from sklearn.ensemble import ExtraTreesClassifier
>>> from sklearn.datasets import load_iris
>>> from sklearn.feature_selection import SelectFromModel
>>> X, y = load_iris(return_X_y=True)
>>> X.shape
(150, 4)
>>> clf = ExtraTreesClassifier(n_estimators=50)
>>> clf = clf.fit(X, y)
>>> clf.feature_importances_
array([ 0.04..., 0.05..., 0.4..., 0.4...])
>>> model = SelectFromModel(clf, prefit=True)
>>> X_new = model.transform(X)
>>> X_new.shape
(150, 2)
Examples:
Feature importances with forests of trees: example on synthetic data showing the recovery of the actually meaningful features.
Pixel importances with a parallel forest of trees: example on face recognition data.
1.13.5. Feature selection as part of a pipeline¶
Feature selection is usually used as a pre-processing step before doing
the actual learning. The recommended way to do this in scikit-learn is
to use a sklearn.pipeline.Pipeline
:
clf = Pipeline([
('feature_selection', SelectFromModel(LinearSVC(penalty="l1"))),
('classification', RandomForestClassifier())
])
clf.fit(X, y)
In this snippet we make use of a sklearn.svm.LinearSVC
coupled with sklearn.feature_selection.SelectFromModel
to evaluate feature importances and select the most relevant features.
Then, a sklearn.ensemble.RandomForestClassifier
is trained on the
transformed output, i.e. using only relevant features. You can perform
similar operations with the other feature selection methods and also
classifiers that provide a way to evaluate feature importances of course.
See the sklearn.pipeline.Pipeline
examples for more details.