## The Base ML Model

12 Jul

The days of the artisanal ML model are mostly over. The artisanal model builds off domain “knowledge” (it can often be considerably less than that, bordering on misinformation). The artisan has long discussions with domain experts about what variables to include and how to include them in the model, often making idiosyncratic decisions about both. Or the artisan thinks deeply and draws on his own well. And then applies a couple of methods to the final feature set of 10s of variables, and out pops “the” model. This is borderline farcical when the datasets are both long and wide. For supervised problems, the low cost, scalable, common sense thing to do is to implement the following workflow:

1. Get good univariate summaries of each column in the data: mean, median, min., max, sd, n_missing for numerics, and the number of unique values, n_missing, frequency count for categories, etc. Use this to diagnose and understand the data. What stuff is common? On what variables do we have bad data? (see pysum.)

2. Get good bivariate summaries. Correlations for continuous variables and differences in means for categorical variables are reasonable. Use this to understand how the variables are related. Use this to understand the data.

3. Create a dummy vector for missing values for each variable

4. Subset on non-sparse columns

5. Regress on all non-sparse columns, ideally using NN, so that you are not in the business of creating interactions and such.

I have elided over a lot of detail. So let’s take a more concrete example. Say you are predicting whether someone will be diagnosed with diabetes in year y given the claims they make in year y-1, y-2, y-3, etc. Say claim for each service and medicine is a unique code. Tokenize all the claim data so that each unique code gets its own column, and filter on the non-sparse codes. How much information about time you want to preserve depends on you. But for the first cut, roll up the data so that code X made in any year is treated equally. Voila! You have your baseline model.

## Code 44: How to Read Ahler and Sood

27 Jun

This is a follow-up to the hilarious Twitter thread about the sequence of 44s. Numbers in Perry’s 538 piece come from this paper.

First, yes 44s are indeed correct. (Better yet, look for yourself.) But what do the 44s refer to? 44 is the average of all the responses. When Perry writes “Republicans estimated the share at 46 percent,” (we have similar language in the paper, which is regrettable as it can be easily misunderstood), it doesn’t mean that every Republican thinks so. It may not even mean that the median Republican thinks so. See OA 1.7 for medians, OA 1.8 for distributions, but see also OA 2.8.1, Table OA 2.18, OA 2.8.2, OA 2.11 and Table OA 2.23.

Key points =

1. Large majorities overestimate the share of party-stereotypical groups in the party, except for Evangelicals and Southerners.

2. Compared to what people think is the share of a group in the population, people still think the share of the group in the stereotyped party is greater. (But how much more varies a fair bit.)

3. People also generally underestimate the share of counter-stereotypical groups in the party.

## Automating Understanding, Not Just ML

27 Jun

Some of the most complex parts of Machine Learning are largely automated. The modal ML person types in simple commands for very complex operations and voila! Some companies, like Microsoft (Azure) and DataRobot, also provide a UI for this. And this has generally not turned out well. Why? Because this kind of system does too little for the modal ML person and expects too much from the rest. So the modal ML person doesn’t use it. And the people who do use it, generally use it badly. The black box remains the black box. But not much is needed to place a lamp in this black box. Really, just two things are needed:

1. A data summarization and visualization engine, preferably with some chatbot feature that guides people smartly through the key points, including the problems. For instance, start with univariate summaries, highlighting ranges, missing data, sparsity, and such. Then, if it is a supervised problem, give people a bunch of loess plots or explain the ‘best fitting’ parametric approximations with y in plain English, such as, “people who eat 1 more cookie live 5 minutes shorter on average.”

2. An explanation engine, including what the explanations of observational predictions mean. We already have reasonable implementations of this.

When you have both, you have automated complexity thoughtfully, in a way that empowers people, rather than create a system that enables people to do fancy things badly.

## Talking On a Tangent

22 Jun

What is the trend over the last X months? One estimate of the ‘trend’ over the last k time periods is what I call the ‘hold up the ends’ method. Look at t_k and t_0, get the difference between the two, and divide by the number of time periods. If t_k > t_0, you say that things are going up. If t_k < t_0, you say things are going down. And if they are the same, then you say that things are flat. But this method can elide over important non-linearity. For instance, say unemployment went down in the first 9 months and then went up over the last 3 but ended with t_k < t_0. What is the trend? If by trend, we mean average slope over the last t time periods, and if there is no measurement error, then 'hold up the ends' method is reasonable. If there is measurement error, we would want to smooth the time series first before we hold up the ends. Often people care about 'consistency' in the trend. One estimate of consistency is the following: the proportion of times we get a number of the same sign when we do pairwise comparison of any two time consecutive time periods. Often people also care more about later time periods than earlier time periods. And one could build on that intuition by weighting later changes more.

## Optimal Targeting 101

22 Jun

Say you make k products and have a list of potential customers. Assume that you can show each of these potential customers one ad. And that showing them an ad costs nothing. Assume also that you get profits $p_1, ..., p_k$ from each of the k products. What is the optimal targeting strategy?

The goal is to maximize profit. If you didn’t know the probability each customer will buy a product if shown an ad or assume it to be the same across products, then the strategy reduces to showing the ad for the most profitable product to everyone.

If we can estimate the probability the customer will buy each product if they are shown an ad for the product well, we can do better. (We assume that customers won’t buy the product if they don’t see the ad for it.)

When k = 1, the optimal strategy is to target everyone. Now let’s solve it for when k = 2. A customer can either buy $$k_0$$ or k_1 or buy nothing at all.

If everyone is shown k_0, the profits are p_0*prob_i_0_true where prob_i_0_true gives the true probability of the ith person buying k_0 when shown an ad for it. And if everyone is shown k_1 ad, the profits are p_1*prob_i_1_true. The net utility calc. for each customer = p_1*prob_i_1 – p_0*prob_i_0. (We generally won’t know prob_i but would estimate it from data and hence the subscript true is not there.) You can recover two numbers from this. One is how to target—pick whichever number is bigger for each customer. Another is in what order to target in: sort by absolute value.

Calculating the Benefits of Targeting

If you don’t target, the best case scenario is that you earn the bigger of the two numbers: p_1*prob_i_1_true, p_0*prob_i_0_true

If you target well (estimate probabilities well), you will recover something that is as good or better than that.

Since we generally won’t have the true probabilities, the best way to estimate the benefit of targeting is via A/B testing. But if you can’t do that, one estimate =

No Targeting estimate = Larger of p_1*prob_i_1, p_0*prob_i_0
Targeting estimate = Sum over all i
p_1*prob_i_1 if p_1*prob_i_1 > p_0*prob_i_0
p_0*prob_i_0 if p_1*prob_i_1 < p_0*prob_i_0
Similar calculations can be done for deriving estimates of the value of better targeting.

## Estimating Bias and Error in Perceptions of Group Composition

14 Nov

People’s reports of perceptions of the share of various groups in the population are typically biased. The bias is generally greater for smaller groups. The bias also appears to vary by how people feel about the group—they are likelier to think that the groups they don’t like are bigger—and by stereotypes about the groups (see here and here).

A new paper makes a remarkable claim: “explicit estimates are not direct reflections of perceptions, but systematic transformations of those perceptions. As a result, surveys and polls that ask participants to estimate demographic proportions cannot be interpreted as direct measures of participants’ (mis)information, since a large portion of apparent error on any particular question will likely reflect rescaling toward a more moderate expected value…”

The claim is supported by a figure that takes the form of plotting a curve over averages. (It also reports results from other papers that base their inferences on similar such figures.)

The evidence doesn’t seem right for the claim. Ideally, we want to plot curves within people and show that the curves are roughly the same. (I doubt it to be the case.)

Second, it is one thing to claim that the reports of perceptions follow a particular rescaling formula, and another to claim that people are aware of what they are doing. I doubt that people are.

Third, if the claim that ‘a large portion of apparent error on any particular question will likely reflect rescaling toward a more moderate expected value’ is true, then presenting people correct information ought not to change how people think about groups, for e.g., perceived threat from immigrants. The calibrated error should be a much better moderator than raw error. Again, I doubt it.

But I could be proven wrong about each. And I am ok with that. The goal is to learn the right thing, not to be proven right.

## Measuring Segregation

31 Aug

Dissimilarity index is a measure of segregation. It runs as follows:

$\frac{1}{2} \sum\limits_{i=1}^{n} \frac{g_{i1}}{G_1} - \frac{g_{i2}}{G_2}$
where:

$g_{i1}$ is population of $g_1$ in the ith area
$G_{i1}$ is population of $g_1$ in the larger area
from which dissimilarity is being measured against

The measure suffers from a couple of issues:

1. Concerns about lumpiness. Even in a small area, are black people at one end, white people at another?
2. Choice of baseline. If the larger area (say a state) is 95\% white (Iowa is 91.3% White), dissimilarity is naturally likely to be small.

One way to address the concern about lumpiness is to provide an estimate of the spatial variance of the quantity of interest. But to measure variance, you need local measures of the quantity of interest. One way to arrive at local measures is as follows:

1. Create a distance matrix across all addresses. Get latitude and longitude. And start with Euclidean distances, though smart measures that take account of physical features are a natural next step. (For those worried about computing super huge matrices, the good news is that computation can be parallelized.)
2. For each address, find n closest addresses and estimate the quantity of interest. Where multiple houses are similar distance apart, sample randomly or include all. One advantage of n closest rather than addresses in a particular area is that it naturally accounts for variations in density.

But once you have arrived at the local measure, why just report variance? Why not report means of compelling common-sense metrics, like the proportion of addresses (people) for whom the closest house has people of another race?

As for baseline numbers (generally just a couple of numbers): they are there to help you interpret. They can be brought in later.

## Sample This: Sampling Randomly from the Streets

23 Jun

Say you want to learn about the average number of potholes per unit paved street in a city. To estimate that quantity, the following sampling plan can be employed:

1. Get all the streets in a city from Google Maps or OSM
2. Starting from one end of the street, split each street into .5 km segments till you reach the end of the street. The last segment, or if the street is shorter than .5km, the only segment, can be shorter than .5 km.
3. Get the lat/long of start/end of the segments.
4. Create a database of all the segments: segment_id, street_name, start_lat, start_long, end_lat, end_long
5. Sample from rows of the database
6. Produce a CSV of the sampled segments (subset of step 4)
7. Plot the lat/long on Google Map — filling all the area within the segment.
8. Collect data on the highlighted segments.

For Python package that implements this, see https://github.com/soodoku/geo_sampling.

## Clustering and then Classifying: Improving Prediction for Crudely-labeled and Mislabeled Data

8 Jun

Mislabeled and crudely labeled data are common problems in data science. Supervised prediction of such data expectedly yields poor results—coefficients are biased, and accuracy with regards to the true label is poor. One solution to the problem is to hand code labels of an `adequate’ sample and infer true labels based on a model trained on that data.

Another solution relies on the intuition (assumption) that distance between rows (covariates) of a label will be lower than the distance between the distance between rows of different labels. One way to leverage that intuition is to cluster the data within each label, infer true labels from erroneous labels and then predict inferred true labels. For a class of problems, the method can be shown to always improve accuracy. (You can also predict just the cluster labels.)

Here’s one potential solution for a scenario where we have a binary dependent variable:

Assume a mis_labeled vector called mis_label that codes some true 0s as 1 and some true 1s as 0s.

1. For each mis_label (1 and 0), use k-means with k = 2 to get 2 clusters within each label for a total of 4 labels
2. Assuming mislabeling rate < 50%, create a new col. = est_true_label, which takes: 1 when mis_label = 1 and cluster label is of the majority class (that is cluster label class is more than 50% of the mis_label = 1), otherwise 0. 0 when mis_label = 0 and cluster label is of the majority class (that is cluster label class is more than 50% of the mis_label = 0), otherwise 1.
3. Predict est_true_label using a logistic regression and produce accuracy estimates based on true_labels and bias estimates in coefficient estimates (compared to coefficients from logistic regression coefficients from true labels)

## The Missing Plot

27 May

Datasets often contain missing values. And often enough—at least in social science data—values are missing systematically. So how do we visualize missing values? After all, they are missing.

Some analysts simply list-wise delete points with missing values. Others impute, replacing missing values with mean or median. Yet others use sophisticated methods to impute missing values. None of the methods, however, automatically acknowledge that any of the data are missing in the visualizations.

It is important to acknowledge missing data.

One can do it is by providing a tally of how much data are missing on each of the variables in a small table in the graph. Another, perhaps better, method is to plot the missing values as a function of a covariate. For bivariate graphs, the solution is pretty simple. Create a dummy vector that tallies missing values. And plot the dummy vector in addition to the data. For instance, see:

(The script to produce the graph can be downloaded from the following GitHub Gist.)

In cases, where missing values are imputed, the dummy vector can also be used to ‘color’ the points that were imputed.