k-Nearest Neighbors Classification Exercise

Today we will get to know the package scikit-learn (sklearn). It has many different machine learning algorithms already implemented, so we will be using it for the next five classes. The first algorithm, which we are going to learn today is the k-nearest neighbor algorithm. It can be used for classification as well as for regression.

Take a look at the file src/nn_iris.py. We will implement the TODOs step by step:

Task 1: Loading the data

1. Install the scikit-learn package with

   pip install -r requirements.txt

   or directly via pip install scikit-learn.
   The dataset iris is very popular amongst machine learners in example tasks. For this reason it can be found directly in the sklearn package.

2. Navigate to the __main__ function of src/nn_iris.py and load the iris dataset from sklearn.datasets.
   In the dataset there are several plants of different species of genus Iris. For each of the examples width and length of petal and sepal of the flower were measured.
   

3. Find out how to access the attributes of the database (Hint: set a breakpoint and examine the variable). Print the shape of the data matrix and the number of the target entries. Print the names of the labels. Print the names of the features.

Task 2: Examining the data (optional)

Your goal is to determine the species for an example, based on the dimensions of its petals and sepals. But first we need to inspect the dataset.

1. Use a histogram (classes distribution) to check if the iris dataset is balanced. To plot a histogram you can for example use pandas.Series.hist or matplotlib.pyplot.hist. Fortunately, the iris dataset is balanced, so it has the same number of samples for each species. Balanced datasets make it simple to proceed directly to the classification phase. In the opposite case we would have to take additional steps to reduce the negative effects (e.g. collect more data) or use other algorithms than the k-Nearest Neighbors (e.g. Random Forests).

2. We also can use pandas scatter_matrix to visualize some trends in our data. A scatter matrix (pairs plot) compactly plots all the numeric variables we have in a dataset against each other.
   Plot the scatter matrix. To make the different species visually distinguishable use the parameter c=iris.target in pandas.plotting.scatter_matrix to colorize the datapoints according to their target species.
   In the scatter matrix you can see domains of values as well as the distributions of each of the attributes. It is also possible to compare groups in scatter plots over all pairs of attributes. From those it seems that groups are well separated, two of the groups slightly overlap.

Task 3: Training

First, we need to split the dataset into train and test data. Then we are ready to train the model.

1. Use train_test_split from sklearn.model_selection and create a train and a test set with the ratio 75:25. Print the dimensions of the train and the test set. You can use the parameter random_state to set the seed for the random number generator. That will make your results reproducible. Set this value to 29.

2. Define a classifier knn from the class KNeighborsClassifier and set the hyperparameter n_neighbors value to 1.

3. Train the classifier on the training set. The method fit() is present in all the estimators of the package scikit-learn.

Task 4: Prediction and Evalutation

The trained model is now able to receive the input data and produce predictions of the labels.

1. Predict the labels first for the train and then for the test data.

2. The comparison of a predicted and the true label can tell us valuable information about how well our model performs. The simplest performance measure is the ratio of correct predictions to all predictions, called accuracy. Implement a function compute_accuracy to calculate the accuracy of predictions. Use your function and evaluate your model by calculating the accuracy on the train set and the test set. Print both results.

3. To evaluate, whether our model performs well, its performance is compared to other models. Since we now only know one classifier, we will compare it to dummy models. Most frequent models always predict the label that occurs the most in our train set. If the train set is balanced, we choose one of the classes. Implement the function accuracy_most_frequent to compute the accuracy of the most frequent model. (Hint: the function numpy.bincount might be helpful.) Print the result.

4. (Optional) Another dummy model is a stratified model. A stratified model assigns random labels based on the ratio of the labels in the train set. Implement the function accuracy_stratified to compute the accuracy of the stratified model. (Hint: numpy.random.choice might help.) Call the function several times and print the results. You see that the results are different. In order to reproduce the results, it is usefull to set a seed. Use numpy.random.seed before calling the function to set the seed. Set it to 29.

Task 5: Confusion matrix

Another common method to evaluate the performance of a classifier is constructing a confusion matrix that shows not only accuracies for each of the classes (labels), but what classes the classifier is most confused about.

1. Use the function confusion_matrix to compute the confusion matrix for the test set.

2. (Optional) The accuracy of the prediction can be derived from the confusion matrix as sum of the matrix diagonal over the sum of the whole matrix. Compute the accuracy using the information obtained from the confusion matrix. Print the result.

3. We can also visualize the confusion matrix in form of a heatmap. Use ConfusionMatrixDisplay to plot a heatmap of the confusion matrix for the test set. Use display_labels=iris.target_names for better visualization.

Task 6: Hyperparameter tuning

Now we need to find the best value for our hyperparameter k. We will use a common procedure called grid search to search the space of the possible values. Since our train dataset is small, we will perform cross-validation in order to compute the validation error for each value of k. Implement this hyperparameter tuning in the function cv_knearest_classifier following these steps:

1. Define a second classifier knn2. Define a grid of parameter values for k from 1 to 25 (Hint: numpy.arange). This grid must be stored in a dictionary with n_neighbors as the key in order to use GridSearchCV with it.

2. Use the class GridSearchCV to perform grid search. It gives you the possibility to perform n-fold cross-validation too, so use the attribute cv to set the number of folds to 3. When everything is set, you can train your knn2.

Task 7: Testing

After the training you can access the best parameter best_params_, the corresponding validation accuracy best_score_ and the corresponding estimator best_estimator_.

1. Use the best estimator to compute the accuracy on your train and test sets. Print the results. Has the test accuracy improved after the hyperparameter tuning?

2. Plot the new confusion matrix for the test set.

k-Nearest Neighbors Regression Exercise (Optional)

Navigate to the __main__ function of nn_regression.py in the src directory and fill in the blanks by implementing the TODOs.