# Multiclass Classification

According to Wikipedia:

In machine learning, multiclass or multinomial classification is the problem of classifying instances into one of the more than two classes (classifying instances into one of the two classes is called binary classification).


For instance, you are given an Apple product and you are told to classify it into one of the following:

1. Apple Watch
2. Apple TV
3. iMac
5. iPhone
6. iPod
7. MacBook

So, this is a type of multiclass classification problem.

In this post, let’s learn how to approach a multiclass classification problem. We will be using a dataset that has 5 categories to which we should classify the given data.

#### TL;DR

Check out the code for this problem.

Let’s import all the necessary libraries.

# imports

# numpy, lambda, matplotlib
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline

# scikit-learn
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.model_selection import GridSearchCV
from sklearn.neighbors import KNeighborsClassifier
from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score, confusion_matrix, classification_report
from sklearn.cross_validation import ShuffleSplit
from sklearn.learning_curve import learning_curve

# I will be explaining the purpose of each library as we approach the problem.


# train and test data
# here we will be using pandas library to read the input data in the form of CSV


# let's see what's inside the training data
# pandas is a good library to play with data, also you can clean the data.


id feature0 feature1 ... feature247 feature248 feature249 label
0 0 25.208249 -16.745748 ... -4.938090 130.068955 -8.231081 1
1 1 -86.931450 0.428227 ... -6.389429 -26.164277 -4.909740 2
2 2 42.160934 7.857013 ... 8.034066 120.510705 7.754377 0

3 rows × 252 columns

# let's check the shape of the dataset

train.shape

(7200, 252)


Looks like the training dataset contains 7200 rows and 252 columns.

Also, there are 250 features, an id column and a label column.

# let's check the information about the training and test dataset

train.info()
print("-")*40
test.info()

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 7200 entries, 0 to 7199
Columns: 252 entries, id to label
dtypes: float64(250), int64(2)
memory usage: 13.8 MB
----------------------------------------
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 4800 entries, 0 to 4799
Columns: 251 entries, id to feature249
dtypes: float64(250), int64(1)
memory usage: 9.2 MB


Now, let’s clean the training dataset for any null values

# checking for null values

train.isnull().sum().sum()

0L


Looks like there are no null values in the dataset

Now, let’s do feature selection, where we use the features which we think are important for classification later on on new data.

# feature selection

# seperate labels from training set
labels = train['label']

# drop or remove id and label columns from training set
train.drop(['id', 'label'], axis=1, inplace=True)


Let’s see how the training set looks after some trimming.

# training set after removing id and label column


feature0 feature1 feature2 ... feature246 feature247 feature248 feature249
0 25.208249 -16.745748 50.869944 ... 3.682115 -4.938090 130.068955 -8.231081
1 -86.931450 0.428227 2.874836 ... 6.484784 -6.389429 -26.164277 -4.909740
2 42.160934 7.857013 151.612757 ... -1.971843 8.034066 120.510705 7.754377

3 rows × 250 columns

Let’s do the same for test data, remove id column

# what test dataset looks like


id feature0 feature1 feature2 ... feature247 feature248 feature249
0 7200 -76.795547 -12.319618 -109.961631 ... 2.619267 -14.869630 -4.718944
1 7201 15.860563 -5.344301 74.481876 ... -16.322332 -54.813692 14.470087
2 7202 21.243900 -7.539082 -13.128054 ... -3.615364 160.603909 -11.330304

3 rows × 251 columns

# dropping id column and storing it for later use

test_ids = test['id']
test.drop(['id'], axis=1, inplace=True)


Now, we have segregated the data according to our need.

Let’s do some visualizations on the labels.

# count of values under each category

label_count = labels.value_counts().sort_index(ascending=True)
print label_count

0    1419
1    1426
2    1485
3    1410
4    1460
Name: label, dtype: int64

# visualizing the training labels

label_count.plot(kind='bar', color='skyblue')
plt.xlabel("categories")
plt.ylabel("Count of data")
plt.title("Count of data in each category")
plt.grid()


From the visualization, it’s clear that data is spread evenly across all the 5 categories.

Next, let’s split the training set into training set and validation set.

For splitting the dataset, we will be making use of train_test_split from sklearn.

Training Set = 80% Validation Set = 20%

The reason we use random_state is that the splitting of the data must not be random, as it might ruin the consistency.

# splitting of the dataset

X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(train, labels, test_size=0.2, random_state=21)

# check out the shape of each of the above train and test datasets
print("Shape of X_train: {}".format(X_train.shape))
print("Shape of y_train: {}".format(y_train.shape))
print("-"*50)
print("Shape of X_test: {}".format(X_test.shape))
print("Shape of y_test: {}".format(y_test.shape))

Shape of X_train: (5760, 250)
Shape of y_train: (5760L,)
--------------------------------------------------
Shape of X_test: (1440, 250)
Shape of y_test: (1440L,)


Looks like we have got 80% and 20% split

Next, let’s visualize the range of values in training set

# visualizing the range of values in training set

for i in range(X_train.shape[1]):
X_train["feature{}".format(i)].hist(alpha=0.3)
plt.xlabel("Range of datapoints")
plt.title("Feature0 to Feature249")
plt.show()


Looks like the datapoints range from -300 to 300. We shall bring this range to a single digit.

In-order to standardize the data, let’s use the StandardScaler from sklearn.

StandardScaler brings down the range of values a single digit, where the new values are 0. StandardScaler applies a normal distribution, with mean = 0 and standard deviation = 1.

# standardize the data
std_scaler = StandardScaler().fit(X_train)

# transform train and test set using standardization
X_train_std = std_scaler.transform(X_train)
X_test_std = std_scaler.transform(X_test)


Let’s visualize the range of datapoints in training set

# range of values in training dataset after standardization

plt.hist(X_train_std, 50, alpha=0.75)
plt.xlabel('Range of the data points')
plt.grid(True)
plt.show()


Standardization worked!

The datapoints are now distributed between -4 and 4.

Next, let’s convert the y_train and y_test pandas series to numpy arrays.

# converting from pandas series to numpy array

y_train = np.asarray(y_train, dtype='float64')
y_test = np.asarray(y_test, dtype='float64')


So, all the major cleaning process is done, next we need to choose a classification algorithm to train it.

But, before that we need to know what are the appropriate hyper parameters that our learning algorithm KNeighborsClassifier works efficiently.

In-order to choose the appropriate hyper parameters, let’s use GridSearchCV from model_selection.

# an instane of KNNeighborsClassifier
estimator = KNeighborsClassifier()

# cross-validation using ShuffleSplit
# we do this so the GridSearchCV will train and test the dataset to find the appropriate hyperparameters
cv = ShuffleSplit(int(len(X_train_std)), n_iter=10, random_state=0, test_size=0.2)

# instance of GridSearchCV
classifier = GridSearchCV(estimator=estimator, cv=cv, param_grid=dict(n_neighbors=[5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]))

# let's fit the classifier with the training set
classifier.fit(X_train_std, y_train)

GridSearchCV(cv=ShuffleSplit(5760, n_iter=10, test_size=0.2, random_state=0),
error_score='raise',
estimator=KNeighborsClassifier(algorithm='auto', leaf_size=30, metric='minkowski',
metric_params=None, n_jobs=1, n_neighbors=5, p=2,
weights='uniform'),
fit_params={}, iid=True, n_jobs=1,
param_grid={'n_neighbors': [5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15]},
pre_dispatch='2*n_jobs', refit=True, return_train_score=True,
scoring=None, verbose=0)


That took a while to figure out the appropriate n_neighbors value

Let’s check the value of n_neighbors

print classifier.best_params_

{'n_neighbors': 15}


Looks like assigning n_neighbors to 15 is a good choice.

Let’s train the KNeighborsClassifier with the best params value

# instance of KNeighborsClassifier

estimator = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors=15)

# fit the training data

estimator.fit(X_train_std, y_train)

KNeighborsClassifier(algorithm='auto', leaf_size=30, metric='minkowski',
metric_params=None, n_jobs=1, n_neighbors=15, p=2,
weights='uniform')

# testing on validation set

y_pred = estimator.predict(X_test_std)


Now, let’s print accuracy_score, confusion_matrix and classification_report from sklearn.metrics

# printing out some metrics

print("Accuracy: {}".format(accuracy_score(y_test, y_pred)))
print("-"*50)
print("Confusion Matrix: \n{}".format(confusion_matrix(y_test, y_pred)))
print("-"*50)
print("Classification Report: \n{}".format(classification_report(y_test, y_pred)))

Accuracy: 0.970833333333
--------------------------------------------------
Confusion Matrix:
[[274   2   0   1   0]
[  2 250   3   1   3]
[  1   3 280   3   0]
[  4   6   3 294   3]
[  3   3   1   0 300]]
--------------------------------------------------
Classification Report:
precision    recall  f1-score   support

0.0       0.96      0.99      0.98       277
1.0       0.95      0.97      0.96       259
2.0       0.98      0.98      0.98       287
3.0       0.98      0.95      0.97       310
4.0       0.98      0.98      0.98       307

avg / total       0.97      0.97      0.97      1440


All the above scores are fine, let’s have a look at the learning curve.

def leaning_curve_plot(estimator, X, y, cv):
plt.figure()
plt.title("Learning Curve")
plt.xlabel("Traning Example")
plt.ylabel("Score")
plt.grid()

# compute mean and standard deviation
train_sizes, train_scores, test_scores = learning_curve( estimator, X, y, cv=cv, n_jobs=-1, train_sizes=np.linspace(.1, 1.0, 5))
train_scores_mean = np.mean(train_scores, axis=1)
train_scores_std = np.std(train_scores, axis=1)
test_scores_mean = np.mean(test_scores, axis=1)
test_scores_std = np.std(test_scores, axis=1)

# fill_between
plt.fill_between(train_sizes, train_scores_mean - train_scores_std, train_scores_mean + train_scores_std, alpha=0.1, color='r')
plt.fill_between(train_sizes, test_scores_mean - test_scores_std, test_scores_mean + test_scores_std, alpha=0.1, color='g')

# plotting
plt.plot(train_sizes, train_scores_mean, 'o-', color='r', label="Trainig score")
plt.plot(train_sizes, test_scores_mean, 'o-', color='g', label="Cross Validation score")

plt.legend(loc="best")

return plt

plt = leaning_curve_plot(estimator, X_train_std, y_train, cv)
plt.show()


Looks like the estimator’s score goes high when the dataset size increases.

# Time to classify the test set
X_test = std_scaler.transform(test)

y_pred = estimator.predict(X_test)

# saving the output to a csv
output = pd.DataFrame({'id': test_ids, 'label': y_pred})

# printing output

id label
0 7200 4.0
1 7201 2.0
2 7202 2.0
3 7203 4.0

Now, let’s look at the decision boundary for the given dataset

# reducing the dimensionality from 15 to 2
X_train_embedded = TSNE(n_components=2).fit_transform(X_train_std)
print X_train_embedded.shape
model = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors=15).fit(X_train_std, y_train)
y_predicted = model.predict(X_train_std)

# creating meshgrid
resolution = 150 # 150x150 background pixels
X2d_xmin, X2d_xmax = np.min(X_train_embedded[:,0]), np.max(X_train_embedded[:,0])
X2d_ymin, X2d_ymax = np.min(X_train_embedded[:,1]), np.max(X_train_embedded[:,1])
xx, yy = np.meshgrid(np.linspace(X2d_xmin, X2d_xmax, resolution), np.linspace(X2d_ymin, X2d_ymax, resolution))

# approximate Voronoi tesselation on resolution x resolution grid using 1-NN
background_model = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors=15).fit(X_train_embedded, y_predicted)
voronoiBackground = background_model.predict(np.c_[xx.ravel(), yy.ravel()])
voronoiBackground = voronoiBackground.reshape((resolution, resolution))

#plot
plt.contourf(xx, yy, voronoiBackground)
plt.scatter(X_train_embedded[:,0], X_train_embedded[:,1], c=y_train)
plt.show()

(5760L, 2L)


Here, we see a clear classification of the datapoints into one of the five categories.

Hope you have understood the process of solving a multiclass classification problem.