Classification

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Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Decision Tree Induction
◼ Bayes Classification Methods
◼ Rule-Based Classification
◼ Model Evaluation and Selection
◼ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
◼ Summary
3
 Basic concepts of classification

◼ Data classification is a two-step process:

◼ Learning step: where a classification model is constructed

◼ Classification step: where the model is used to predict

class labels for given data

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Learning vs Classification

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 Supervised vs. Unsupervised Learning

◼ Supervised learning (classification)

◼ Supervision: The training data (observations,
measurements, etc.) are accompanied by labels indicating
the class of the observations
◼ New data is classified based on the training set
◼ Unsupervised learning (clustering)
◼ The class labels of training data is unknown
◼ Given a set of measurements, observations, etc. with the
aim of establishing the existence of classes or clusters in
the data
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 Prediction Problems: Classification vs.
Numeric Prediction
◼ Classification
◼ predicts categorical class labels (discrete or nominal)

◼ classifies data (constructs a model) based on the training

set and the values (class labels) in a classifying attribute
and uses it in classifying new data
◼ Numeric Prediction
◼ models continuous-valued functions, i.e., predicts
unknown or missing values
◼ Typical applications
◼ Credit/loan approval:

◼ Medical diagnosis: if a tumor is cancerous or benign

◼ Fraud detection: if a transaction is fraudulent

◼ Web page categorization: which category it is

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 Classification—A Two-Step Process
◼ Model construction: describing a set of predetermined classes
◼ Each tuple/sample is assumed to belong to a predefined class, as

determined by the class label attribute

◼ The set of tuples used for model construction is training set

◼ The model is represented as classification rules, decision trees, or

mathematical formulae
◼ Model usage: for classifying future or unknown objects
◼ Estimate accuracy of the model

◼ The known label of test sample is compared with the classified

result from the model

◼ Accuracy rate is the percentage of test set samples that are

correctly classified by the model

◼ Test set is independent of training set (otherwise overfitting)

◼ If the accuracy is acceptable, use the model to classify new data

◼ Note: If the test set is used to select models, it is called validation (test) set
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 Process (1): Model Construction

Classification
Algorithms
Training
Data

NAME RANK YEARS TENURED Classifier

M ike A ssistan t P ro f 3 no (Model)
M ary A ssistan t P ro f 7 yes
B ill P ro fesso r 2 yes
Jim A sso ciate P ro f 7 yes
IF rank = ‘professor’
D ave A ssistan t P ro f 6 no
OR years > 6
Anne A sso ciate P ro f 3 no
THEN tenured = ‘yes’
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Process (2): Using the Model in Prediction

Classifier

Testing
Data Unseen Data

(Jeff, Professor, 4)
NAME RANK YEARS TENURED
Tom A ssistan t P ro f 2 no Tenured?
M erlisa A sso ciate P ro f 7 no
G eo rg e P ro fesso r 5 yes
Jo sep h A ssistan t P ro f 7 yes
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Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Decision Tree Induction
◼ Bayes Classification Methods
◼ Rule-Based Classification
◼ Model Evaluation and Selection
◼ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
◼ Summary
11
 Algorithm for Decision Tree Induction
◼ Decision tree induction is the learning of decision trees from class-
labeled training tuples.
◼ A decision tree is a flowchart-like tree structure, where each

internal node (non-leaf node) denotes a test on an attribute,

each branch represents an outcome of the test, and each leaf
node (or terminal node) holds a class label
◼ The topmost node in a tree is the root node.

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 Decision Tree Induction: An Example
age income student credit_rating buys_computer
<=30 high no fair no
❑ Training data set: Buys_computer <=30 high no excellent no
❑ The data set follows an example of 31…40 high no fair yes
>40 medium no fair yes
Quinlan’s ID3 (Playing Tennis) >40 low yes fair yes
>40 low yes excellent no
❑ Resulting tree:
31…40 low yes excellent yes
age? <=30 medium no fair no
<=30 low yes fair yes
>40 medium yes fair yes
<=30 medium yes excellent yes
<=30 overcast
31..40 >40 31…40 medium no excellent yes
31…40 high yes fair yes
>40 medium no excellent no

student? yes credit rating?

no yes excellent fair

no yes yes
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 Algorithm for Decision Tree Induction
◼ Decision tree induction is the learning of decision trees from class-
labeled training tuples.
◼ Basic algorithm (a greedy algorithm)
◼ Tree is constructed in a top-down recursive divide-and-conquer manner
◼ At start, all the training examples are at the root

◼ Attributes are categorical (if continuous-valued, they are discretized in

advance)
◼ Examples are partitioned recursively based on selected attributes

◼ Test attributes are selected on the basis of a heuristic or statistical measure

(e.g., information gain)

◼ Conditions for stopping partitioning
◼ All samples for a given node belong to the same class

◼ There are no remaining attributes for further partitioning – majority voting

is employed for classifying the leaf

◼ There are no samples left

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 Attribute Selection Measure:
Information Gain (ID3/C4.5)
◼ Select the attribute with the highest information gain
◼ Let pi be the probability that an arbitrary tuple in D belongs to
class Ci, estimated by |Ci, D|/|D|
◼ Expected information (entropy) needed to classify a tuple in D:
m
Info( D ) = − pi log 2 ( pi )
i =1
◼ Information needed (after using A to split D into v partitions) to
classify D: v | D |
Info A ( D) =   Info( D j )
j

j =1 | D |
◼ Information gained by branching on attribute A

Gain(A) = Info(D) − Info A(D)

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 Attribute Selection: Information Gain
 Class P: buys_computer = “yes” 5 4
Infoage ( D) = I (2,3) + I (4,0)
 Class N: buys_computer = “no” 14 14
5
age
<=30
age (dis.)
youth
income student credit_rating
high no fair
+ I (3,2) = 0.694
<=30 youth high no excellent
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31…40 middle_aged high no fair
5
>40 senior medium no fair
I (2,3) means “age <=30” has 5 out of
>40 senior low yes fair 14
>40 senior low yes excellent
31…40 middle_aged low yes excellent
14 samples, with 2 yes’es and 3
<=30 youth medium no fair
<=30 youth low yes fair no’s. Hence
>40 senior medium yes fair
<=30
31…40
youth
middle_aged
medium
medium
yes
no
excellent
excellent
Gain(age) = Info( D) − Infoage ( D) = 0.246
31…40 middle_aged high yes fair
>40 senior medium no excellent
Similarly,

Info( D) = I (9,5) = −
9 9 5 5
log 2 ( ) − log 2 ( ) =0.940 Gain(income) = 0.029
14 14 14 14
Gain( student) = 0.151
Gain(credit _ rating ) = 0.048
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 age (dis.) income student credit_rating buys_computer
youth high no fair no
youth high no excellent no
middle_aged high no fair yes
senior medium no fair yes
senior low yes fair yes
senior low yes excellent no
middle_aged low yes excellent yes
youth medium no fair no
youth low yes fair yes
senior medium yes fair yes
youth medium yes excellent yes
middle_aged medium no excellent yes
middle_aged high yes fair yes
senior medium no excellent no

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 Computing Information-Gain for
Continuous-Valued Attributes
◼ Let attribute A be a continuous-valued attribute
◼ Must determine the best split point for A
◼ Sort the value A in increasing order
◼ Typically, the midpoint between each pair of adjacent values
is considered as a possible split point
◼ (ai+ai+1)/2 is the midpoint between the values of ai and ai+1
◼ The point with the minimum expected information
requirement for A is selected as the split-point for A
◼ Split:
◼ D1 is the set of tuples in D satisfying A ≤ split-point, and D2 is
the set of tuples in D satisfying A > split-point
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Gain Ratio for Attribute Selection (C4.5)
◼ Information gain measure is biased towards attributes with a
large number of values
◼ C4.5 (a successor of ID3) uses gain ratio to overcome the
problem (normalization to information gain)
v | Dj | | Dj |
SplitInfoA ( D) = −  log 2 ( )
j =1 |D| |D|
◼ GainRatio(A) = Gain(A)/SplitInfo(A)
◼ Ex.

◼ gain_ratio(income) = 0.029/1.557 = 0.019

◼ The attribute with the maximum gain ratio is selected as the
splitting attribute
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Gini Index (CART, IBM IntelligentMiner)
◼ If a data set D contains examples from n classes, gini index,
gini(D) is defined as n 2
gini( D) = 1−  p j
j =1
where pj is the relative frequency of class j in D
◼ If a data set D is split on A into two subsets D1 and D2, the gini
index gini(D) is defined as
|D1| |D |
gini A ( D) = gini( D1) + 2 gini( D 2)
|D| |D|
◼ Reduction in Impurity:
gini( A) = gini(D) − giniA(D)
◼ The attribute provides the smallest ginisplit(D) (or the largest
reduction in impurity) is chosen to split the node (need to
enumerate all the possible splitting points for each attribute)
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 Computation of Gini Index
◼ Ex. D has 9 tuples in buys_computer = “yes”
2
and
2
5 in “no”
9 5
gini( D) = 1 −   −   = 0.459
 14   14 
◼ Suppose the attribute income partitions D into 10 in D1: {low,
medium} and 4 in D2 giniincome{low,medium} ( D) =  10 Gini( D1 ) +  4 Gini( D2 )
 14   14 

Gini{low,high} is 0.458; Gini{medium,high} is 0.450. Thus, split on the

{low,medium} (and {high}) since it has the lowest Gini index
◼ All attributes are assumed continuous-valued
◼ May need other tools, e.g., clustering, to get the possible split
values
◼ Can be modified for categorical attributes 25
 Comparing Attribute Selection Measures

◼ The three measures, in general, return good results but

◼ Information gain:
◼ biased towards multivalued attributes
◼ Gain ratio:
◼ tends to prefer unbalanced splits in which one partition is
much smaller than the others
◼ Gini index:
◼ biased to multivalued attributes
◼ has difficulty when # of classes is large
◼ tends to favor tests that result in equal-sized partitions
and purity in both partitions
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 Other Attribute Selection Measures
◼ CHAID: a popular decision tree algorithm, measure based on χ2 test for
independence
◼ C-SEP: performs better than info. gain and gini index in certain cases
◼ G-statistic: has a close approximation to χ2 distribution
◼ MDL (Minimal Description Length) principle (i.e., the simplest solution is
preferred):
◼ The best tree as the one that requires the fewest # of bits to both (1)
encode the tree, and (2) encode the exceptions to the tree
◼ Multivariate splits (partition based on multiple variable combinations)
◼ CART: finds multivariate splits based on a linear comb. of attrs.
◼ Which attribute selection measure is the best?
◼ Most give good results, none is significantly superior than others
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 Overfitting and Tree Pruning
◼ Overfitting: An induced tree may overfit the training data
◼ Too many branches, some may reflect anomalies due to

noise or outliers
◼ Poor accuracy for unseen samples

◼ Two approaches to avoid overfitting

◼ Prepruning: Halt tree construction early ̵ do not split a node

if this would result in the goodness measure falling below a

threshold
◼ Difficult to choose an appropriate threshold

◼ Postpruning: Remove branches from a “fully grown” tree—

get a sequence of progressively pruned trees

◼ Use a set of data different from the training data to

decide which is the “best pruned tree”

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Enhancements to Basic Decision Tree Induction

◼ Allow for continuous-valued attributes

◼ Dynamically define new discrete-valued attributes that
partition the continuous attribute value into a discrete set of
intervals
◼ Handle missing attribute values
◼ Assign the most common value of the attribute
◼ Assign probability to each of the possible values
◼ Attribute construction
◼ Create new attributes based on existing ones that are
sparsely represented
◼ This reduces fragmentation, repetition, and replication
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 Classification in Large Databases
◼ Classification—a classical problem extensively studied by
statisticians and machine learning researchers
◼ Scalability: Classifying data sets with millions of examples and
hundreds of attributes with reasonable speed
◼ Why is decision tree induction popular?
◼ relatively faster learning speed (than other classification
methods)
◼ convertible to simple and easy to understand classification
rules
◼ can use SQL queries for accessing databases

◼ comparable classification accuracy with other methods

◼ RainForest (VLDB’98 — Gehrke, Ramakrishnan & Ganti)

◼ Builds an AVC-list (attribute, value, class label)

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 Scalability Framework for RainForest

◼ Separates the scalability aspects from the criteria that

determine the quality of the tree
◼ Builds an AVC-list: AVC (Attribute, Value, Class_label)
◼ AVC-set (of an attribute X )
◼ Projection of training dataset onto the attribute X and
class label where counts of individual class label are
aggregated
◼ AVC-group (of a node n )
◼ Set of AVC-sets of all predictor attributes at the node n

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 Rainforest: Training Set and Its AVC Sets

Training Examples AVC-set on Age AVC-set on income

age income studentcredit_rating
buys_computerAge Buy_Computer income Buy_Computer

<=30 high no fair no yes no

<=30 high no excellent no yes no
high 2 2
31…40 high no fair yes <=30 2 3
31..40 4 0 medium 4 2
>40 medium no fair yes
>40 low yes fair yes >40 3 2 low 3 1
>40 low yes excellent no
31…40 low yes excellent yes
AVC-set on
<=30 medium no fair no AVC-set on Student
credit_rating
<=30 low yes fair yes
student Buy_Computer
>40 medium yes fair yes Credit
Buy_Computer

<=30 medium yes excellent yes yes no rating yes no

31…40 medium no excellent yes yes 6 1 fair 6 2
31…40 high yes fair yes no 3 4 excellent 3 3
>40 medium no excellent no
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 BOAT (Bootstrapped Optimistic
Algorithm for Tree Construction)
◼ Use a statistical technique called bootstrapping to create
several smaller samples (subsets), each fits in memory
◼ Each subset is used to create a tree, resulting in several
trees
◼ These trees are examined and used to construct a new
tree T’
◼ It turns out that T’ is very close to the tree that would
be generated using the whole data set together
◼ Adv: requires only two scans of DB, an incremental alg.

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 Presentation of Classification Results

November 2, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 34

Visualization of a Decision Tree in SGI/MineSet 3.0

November 2, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 35

Interactive Visual Mining by Perception-
Based Classification (PBC)

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 36

Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Decision Tree Induction
◼ Bayes Classification Methods
◼ Rule-Based Classification
◼ Model Evaluation and Selection
◼ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
◼ Summary
37
 Bayesian Classification: Why?
◼ A statistical classifier: performs probabilistic prediction, i.e.,
predicts class membership probabilities
◼ Foundation: Based on Bayes’ Theorem.
◼ Performance: A simple Bayesian classifier, naïve Bayesian
classifier, has comparable performance with decision tree and
selected neural network classifiers
◼ Incremental: Each training example can incrementally
increase/decrease the probability that a hypothesis is correct —
prior knowledge can be combined with observed data
◼ Standard: Even when Bayesian methods are computationally
intractable, they can provide a standard of optimal decision
making against which other methods can be measured
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 Bayes’ Theorem: Basics
M
◼ Total probability Theorem: P(B) =  P(B | A )P( A )
i i
i =1

◼ Bayes’ Theorem: P( H | X) = P(X | H ) P( H ) = P(X | H ) P( H ) / P(X)

P(X)
◼ Let X be a data sample (“evidence”): class label is unknown
◼ Let H be a hypothesis that X belongs to class C
◼ Classification is to determine P(H|X), (i.e., posteriori probability): the
probability that the hypothesis holds given the observed data sample X
◼ P(H) (prior probability): the initial probability
◼ E.g., X will buy computer, regardless of age, income, …

◼ P(X): probability that sample data is observed

◼ P(X|H) (likelihood): the probability of observing the sample X, given that
the hypothesis holds
◼ E.g., Given that X will buy computer, the prob. that X is 31..40,

medium income
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 Prediction Based on Bayes’ Theorem
◼ Given training data X, posteriori probability of a hypothesis H,
P(H|X), follows the Bayes’ theorem

P( H | X) = P(X | H ) P( H ) = P(X | H ) P( H ) / P(X)

P(X)
◼ Informally, this can be viewed as
posteriori = likelihood x prior/evidence
◼ Predicts X belongs to Ci iff the probability P(Ci|X) is the highest
among all the P(Ck|X) for all the k classes
◼ Practical difficulty: It requires initial knowledge of many
probabilities, involving significant computational cost

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Classification Is to Derive the Maximum Posteriori
◼ Let D be a training set of tuples and their associated class
labels, and each tuple is represented by an n-D attribute vector
X = (x1, x2, …, xn)
◼ Suppose there are m classes C1, C2, …, Cm.
◼ Classification is to derive the maximum posteriori, i.e., the
maximal P(Ci|X)
◼ This can be derived from Bayes’ theorem
P(X | C )P(C )
P(C | X) = i i
i P(X)
◼ Since P(X) is constant for all classes, only
P(C | X) = P(X | C )P(C )
i i i
needs to be maximized

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 Naïve Bayes Classifier
◼ A simplified assumption: attributes are conditionally
independent (i.e., no dependence relation between
attributes): n
P( X | C i) =  P( x | C i) = P( x | C i)  P( x | C i)  ... P( x | C i)
k 1 2 n
k =1
◼ This greatly reduces the computation cost: Only counts the
class distribution
◼ If Ak is categorical, P(xk|Ci) is the # of tuples in Ci having value xk
for Ak divided by |Ci, D| (# of tuples of Ci in D)
◼ If Ak is continous-valued, P(xk|Ci) is usually computed based on
Gaussian distribution with a mean μ and standard deviation σ
( x− )2
1 −
g ( x,  ,  ) = e 2 2
and P(xk|Ci) is 2 

P(X | C i) = g ( xk , Ci , Ci )
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 Naïve Bayes Classifier: Training Dataset
age income studentcredit_rating
buys_compu
<=30 high no fair no
Class: <=30 high no excellent no
C1:buys_computer = ‘yes’ 31…40 high no fair yes
C2:buys_computer = ‘no’ >40 medium no fair yes
>40 low yes fair yes
Data to be classified: >40 low yes excellent no
31…40 low yes excellent yes
X = (age <=30,
<=30 medium no fair no
Income = medium, <=30 low yes fair yes
Student = yes >40 medium yes fair yes
Credit_rating = Fair) <=30 medium yes excellent yes
31…40 medium no excellent yes
31…40 high yes fair yes
>40 medium no excellent no
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44
 Naïve Bayes Classifier: An Example
age income studentcredit_rating
buys_comput
<=30 high no fair no
<=30 high no excellent no
31…40
◼ P(Ci): P(buys_computer = “yes”) = 9/14 = 0.643 >40
>40
high
medium
low
no fair
no fair
yes fair
yes
yes
yes

P(buys_computer = “no”) = 5/14= 0.357 >40

31…40
<=30
low
low
medium
yes excellent
yes excellent
no fair
no
yes
no

◼ Compute P(X|Ci) for each class <=30

>40
low yes fair
medium yes fair
yes
yes
<=30 medium yes excellent yes

P(age = “<=30” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 2/9 = 0.222 31…40

31…40
medium
high
no excellent
yes fair
yes
yes
>40 medium no excellent no

P(age = “<= 30” | buys_computer = “no”) = 3/5 = 0.6

P(income = “medium” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 4/9 = 0.444
P(income = “medium” | buys_computer = “no”) = 2/5 = 0.4
P(student = “yes” | buys_computer = “yes) = 6/9 = 0.667
P(student = “yes” | buys_computer = “no”) = 1/5 = 0.2
P(credit_rating = “fair” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 6/9 = 0.667
P(credit_rating = “fair” | buys_computer = “no”) = 2/5 = 0.4
◼ X = (age <= 30 , income = medium, student = yes, credit_rating = fair)
P(X|Ci) : P(X|buys_computer = “yes”) = 0.222 x 0.444 x 0.667 x 0.667 = 0.044
P(X|buys_computer = “no”) = 0.6 x 0.4 x 0.2 x 0.4 = 0.019
P(X|Ci)*P(Ci) : P(X|buys_computer = “yes”) * P(buys_computer = “yes”) = 0.028
P(X|buys_computer = “no”) * P(buys_computer = “no”) = 0.007
Therefore, X belongs to class (“buys_computer = yes”) 45
 Naïve Bayes Classifier: Comments
◼ Advantages
◼ Easy to implement

◼ Good results obtained in most of the cases

◼ Disadvantages
◼ Assumption: class conditional independence, therefore loss
of accuracy
◼ Practically, dependencies exist among variables

◼ E.g., hospitals: patients: Profile: age, family history, etc.

Symptoms: fever, cough etc., Disease: lung cancer,

diabetes, etc.
◼ Dependencies among these cannot be modeled by Naïve

Bayes Classifier
◼ How to deal with these dependencies? Bayesian Belief Networks
(Chapter 9)
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Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Decision Tree Induction
◼ Bayes Classification Methods
◼ Rule-Based Classification
◼ Model Evaluation and Selection
◼ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
◼ Summary
47
 Using IF-THEN Rules for Classification
◼ Represent the knowledge in the form of IF-THEN rules
R: IF age = youth AND student = yes THEN buys_computer = yes
◼ Rule antecedent/precondition vs. rule consequent

◼ Assessment of a rule: coverage and accuracy

◼ ncovers = # of tuples covered by R

◼ ncorrect = # of tuples correctly classified by R

coverage(R) = ncovers /|D| /* D: training data set */

accuracy(R) = ncorrect / ncovers
◼ If more than one rule are triggered, need conflict resolution
◼ Size ordering: assign the highest priority to the triggering rules that has

the “toughest” requirement (i.e., with the most attribute tests)

◼ Class-based ordering: decreasing order of prevalence or misclassification

cost per class

◼ Rule-based ordering (decision list): rules are organized into one long

priority list, according to some measure of rule quality or by experts

48
 Rule Extraction from a Decision Tree
◼ Rules are easier to understand than large
trees age?

◼ One rule is created for each path from the <=30 31..40 >40
root to a leaf
student? credit rating?
yes
◼ Each attribute-value pair along a path forms a
no yes excellent fair
conjunction: the leaf holds the class
no yes yes
prediction
◼ Rules are mutually exclusive and exhaustive
◼ Example: Rule extraction from our buys_computer decision-tree
IF age = young AND student = no THEN buys_computer = no
IF age = young AND student = yes THEN buys_computer = yes
IF age = mid-age THEN buys_computer = yes
IF age = old AND credit_rating = excellent THEN buys_computer = no
IF age = old AND credit_rating = fair THEN buys_computer = yes
49
50
Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Decision Tree Induction
◼ Bayes Classification Methods
◼ Rule-Based Classification
◼ Model Evaluation and Selection
◼ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
◼ Summary
51
 Model Evaluation and Selection
◼ Evaluation metrics: How can we measure accuracy? Other
metrics to consider?
◼ Use validation test set of class-labeled tuples instead of
training set when assessing accuracy
◼ Methods for estimating a classifier’s accuracy:
◼ Holdout method, random subsampling
◼ Cross-validation
◼ Bootstrap
◼ Comparing classifiers:
◼ Confidence intervals
◼ Cost-benefit analysis and ROC Curves
52
 Classifier Evaluation Metrics: Confusion
Matrix
Confusion Matrix:
Actual class\Predicted class C1 ¬ C1
C1 True Positives (TP) False Negatives (FN)
¬ C1 False Positives (FP) True Negatives (TN)

Example of Confusion Matrix:

Actual class\Predicted buy_computer buy_computer Total
class = yes = no
buy_computer = yes 6954 46 7000
buy_computer = no 412 2588 3000
Total 7366 2634 10000

◼ Given m classes, an entry, CMi,j in a confusion matrix indicates

# of tuples in class i that were labeled by the classifier as class j
◼ May have extra rows/columns to provide totals
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 Classifier Evaluation Metrics: Accuracy,
Error Rate, Sensitivity and Specificity
A\P C ¬C ◼ Class Imbalance Problem:
C TP FN P
◼ One class may be rare, e.g.
¬C FP TN N
fraud, or HIV-positive
P’ N’ All
◼ Significant majority of the

◼ Classifier Accuracy, or negative class and minority of

recognition rate: percentage of the positive class
test set tuples that are correctly ◼ Sensitivity: True Positive
classified recognition rate
Accuracy = (TP + TN)/All ◼ Sensitivity = TP/P

◼ Error rate: 1 – accuracy, or ◼ Specificity: True Negative

Error rate = (FP + FN)/All recognition rate

◼ Specificity = TN/N

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 Classifier Evaluation Metrics:
Precision and Recall, and F-measures
◼ Precision: exactness – what % of tuples that the classifier
labeled as positive are actually positive

◼ Recall: completeness – what % of positive tuples did the

classifier label as positive?
◼ Perfect score is 1.0
◼ Inverse relationship between precision & recall
◼ F measure (F1 or F-score): harmonic mean of precision and
recall,

◼ Fß: weighted measure of precision and recall

◼ assigns ß times as much weight to recall as to precision

55
 Classifier Evaluation Metrics: Example

Actual Class\Predicted class cancer = yes cancer = no Total Recognition(%)

cancer = yes 90 210 300 30.00 (sensitivity
cancer = no 140 9560 9700 98.56 (specificity)
Total 230 9770 10000 96.40 (accuracy)

◼ Precision = 90/230 = 39.13% Recall = 90/300 = 30.00%

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 Evaluating Classifier Accuracy:
Holdout & Cross-Validation Methods
◼ Holdout method
◼ Given data is randomly partitioned into two independent sets

◼ Training set (e.g., 2/3) for model construction

◼ Test set (e.g., 1/3) for accuracy estimation

◼ Random sampling: a variation of holdout

◼ Repeat holdout k times, accuracy = avg. of the accuracies

obtained
◼ Cross-validation (k-fold, where k = 10 is most popular)
◼ Randomly partition the data into k mutually exclusive subsets,
each approximately equal size
◼ At i-th iteration, use Di as test set and others as training set

◼ Leave-one-out: k folds where k = # of tuples, for small sized

data
◼ *Stratified cross-validation*: folds are stratified so that class
dist. in each fold is approx. the same as that in the initial data
57
 Model Selection: ROC Curves
◼ ROC (Receiver Operating
Characteristics) curves: for visual
comparison of classification models
◼ Originated from signal detection theory
◼ Shows the trade-off between the true
positive rate and the false positive rate
◼ The area under the ROC curve is a ◼ Vertical axis
measure of the accuracy of the model represents the true
positive rate
◼ Rank the test tuples in decreasing ◼ Horizontal axis rep.
order: the one that is most likely to the false positive rate
belong to the positive class appears at ◼ The plot also shows a
the top of the list diagonal line
◼ The closer to the diagonal line (i.e., the ◼ A model with perfect
closer the area is to 0.5), the less accuracy will have an
accurate is the model area of 1.0
58
 Issues Affecting Model Selection
◼ Accuracy
◼ classifier accuracy: predicting class label
◼ Speed
◼ time to construct the model (training time)
◼ time to use the model (classification/prediction time)
◼ Robustness: handling noise and missing values
◼ Scalability: efficiency in disk-resident databases
◼ Interpretability
◼ understanding and insight provided by the model
◼ Other measures, e.g., goodness of rules, such as decision tree
size or compactness of classification rules
59
 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Decision Tree Induction
◼ Bayes Classification Methods
◼ Rule-Based Classification
◼ Model Evaluation and Selection
◼ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
◼ Summary
60
Ensemble Methods: Increasing the Accuracy

◼ Ensemble methods
◼ Use a combination of models to increase accuracy

◼ Combine a series of k learned models, M1, M2, …, Mk, with

the aim of creating an improved model M*

◼ Popular ensemble methods
◼ Bagging: averaging the prediction over a collection of

classifiers
◼ Boosting: weighted vote with a collection of classifiers

◼ Ensemble: combining a set of heterogeneous classifiers

61
 Bagging: Boostrap Aggregation
◼ Analogy: Diagnosis based on multiple doctors’ majority vote
◼ Training
◼ Given a set D of d tuples, at each iteration i, a training set Di of d tuples

is sampled with replacement from D (i.e., bootstrap)

◼ A classifier model Mi is learned for each training set Di

◼ Classification: classify an unknown sample X

◼ Each classifier Mi returns its class prediction

◼ The bagged classifier M* counts the votes and assigns the class with the

most votes to X
◼ Prediction: can be applied to the prediction of continuous values by taking
the average value of each prediction for a given test tuple
◼ Accuracy
◼ Often significantly better than a single classifier derived from D

◼ For noise data: not considerably worse, more robust

◼ Proved improved accuracy in prediction

62
 Boosting
◼ Analogy: Consult several doctors, based on a combination of
weighted diagnoses—weight assigned based on the previous
diagnosis accuracy
◼ How boosting works?
◼ Weights are assigned to each training tuple
◼ A series of k classifiers is iteratively learned
◼ After a classifier Mi is learned, the weights are updated to
allow the subsequent classifier, Mi+1, to pay more attention to
the training tuples that were misclassified by Mi
◼ The final M* combines the votes of each individual classifier,
where the weight of each classifier's vote is a function of its
accuracy
◼ Boosting algorithm can be extended for numeric prediction
◼ Comparing with bagging: Boosting tends to have greater accuracy,
but it also risks overfitting the model to misclassified data 63
 Random Forest (Breiman 2001)
◼ Random Forest:
◼ Each classifier in the ensemble is a decision tree classifier and is

generated using a random selection of attributes at each node to

determine the split
◼ During classification, each tree votes and the most popular class is

returned
◼ Two Methods to construct Random Forest:
◼ Forest-RI (random input selection): Randomly select, at each node, F

attributes as candidates for the split at the node. The CART methodology
is used to grow the trees to maximum size
◼ Forest-RC (random linear combinations): Creates new attributes (or

features) that are a linear combination of the existing attributes

(reduces the correlation between individual classifiers)
◼ Comparable in accuracy to Adaboost, but more robust to errors and outliers
◼ Insensitive to the number of attributes selected for consideration at each
split, and faster than bagging or boosting
64
 Classification of Class-Imbalanced Data Sets
◼ Class-imbalance problem: Rare positive example but numerous
negative ones, e.g., medical diagnosis, fraud, oil-spill, fault, etc.
◼ Traditional methods assume a balanced distribution of classes
and equal error costs: not suitable for class-imbalanced data
◼ Typical methods for imbalance data in 2-class classification:
◼ Oversampling: re-sampling of data from positive class

◼ Under-sampling: randomly eliminate tuples from negative

class
◼ Threshold-moving: moves the decision threshold, t, so that
the rare class tuples are easier to classify, and hence, less
chance of costly false negative errors
◼ Ensemble techniques: Ensemble multiple classifiers
introduced above
◼ Still difficult for class imbalance problem on multiclass tasks
65
 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Classification: Basic Concepts

◼ Decision Tree Induction
◼ Bayes Classification Methods
◼ Rule-Based Classification
◼ Model Evaluation and Selection
◼ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
◼ Summary
66
67
 Summary (I)
◼ Classification is a form of data analysis that extracts models
describing important data classes.
◼ Effective and scalable methods have been developed for decision
tree induction, Naive Bayesian classification, rule-based
classification, and many other classification methods.
◼ Evaluation metrics include: accuracy, sensitivity, specificity,
precision, recall, F measure, and Fß measure.
◼ Stratified k-fold cross-validation is recommended for accuracy
estimation. Bagging and boosting can be used to increase overall
accuracy by learning and combining a series of individual models.

68
 Summary (II)

◼ Significance tests and ROC curves are useful for model selection.
◼ There have been numerous comparisons of the different
classification methods; the matter remains a research topic
◼ No single method has been found to be superior over all others
for all data sets
◼ Issues such as accuracy, training time, robustness, scalability,
and interpretability must be considered and can involve trade-
offs, further complicating the quest for an overall superior
method

69
 References (1)
◼ C. Apte and S. Weiss. Data mining with decision trees and decision rules. Future
Generation Computer Systems, 13, 1997
◼ C. M. Bishop, Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition. Oxford University Press,
1995
◼ L. Breiman, J. Friedman, R. Olshen, and C. Stone. Classification and Regression Trees.
Wadsworth International Group, 1984
◼ C. J. C. Burges. A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition. Data
Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 2(2): 121-168, 1998
◼ P. K. Chan and S. J. Stolfo. Learning arbiter and combiner trees from partitioned data
for scaling machine learning. KDD'95
◼ H. Cheng, X. Yan, J. Han, and C.-W. Hsu, Discriminative Frequent Pattern Analysis for
Effective Classification, ICDE'07
◼ H. Cheng, X. Yan, J. Han, and P. S. Yu, Direct Discriminative Pattern Mining for
Effective Classification, ICDE'08
◼ W. Cohen. Fast effective rule induction. ICML'95
◼ G. Cong, K.-L. Tan, A. K. H. Tung, and X. Xu. Mining top-k covering rule groups for
gene expression data. SIGMOD'05
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 References (2)
◼ A. J. Dobson. An Introduction to Generalized Linear Models. Chapman & Hall, 1990.
◼ G. Dong and J. Li. Efficient mining of emerging patterns: Discovering trends and
differences. KDD'99.
◼ R. O. Duda, P. E. Hart, and D. G. Stork. Pattern Classification, 2ed. John Wiley, 2001
◼ U. M. Fayyad. Branching on attribute values in decision tree generation. AAAI’94.
◼ Y. Freund and R. E. Schapire. A decision-theoretic generalization of on-line learning and
an application to boosting. J. Computer and System Sciences, 1997.
◼ J. Gehrke, R. Ramakrishnan, and V. Ganti. Rainforest: A framework for fast decision tree
construction of large datasets. VLDB’98.
◼ J. Gehrke, V. Gant, R. Ramakrishnan, and W.-Y. Loh, BOAT -- Optimistic Decision Tree
Construction. SIGMOD'99.
◼ T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, and J. Friedman. The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data
Mining, Inference, and Prediction. Springer-Verlag, 2001.
◼ D. Heckerman, D. Geiger, and D. M. Chickering. Learning Bayesian networks: The
combination of knowledge and statistical data. Machine Learning, 1995.
◼ W. Li, J. Han, and J. Pei, CMAR: Accurate and Efficient Classification Based on Multiple
Class-Association Rules, ICDM'01.
71
 References (3)

◼ T.-S. Lim, W.-Y. Loh, and Y.-S. Shih. A comparison of prediction accuracy, complexity,
and training time of thirty-three old and new classification algorithms. Machine
Learning, 2000.
◼ J. Magidson. The Chaid approach to segmentation modeling: Chi-squared
automatic interaction detection. In R. P. Bagozzi, editor, Advanced Methods of
Marketing Research, Blackwell Business, 1994.
◼ M. Mehta, R. Agrawal, and J. Rissanen. SLIQ : A fast scalable classifier for data
mining. EDBT'96.
◼ T. M. Mitchell. Machine Learning. McGraw Hill, 1997.
◼ S. K. Murthy, Automatic Construction of Decision Trees from Data: A Multi-
Disciplinary Survey, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 2(4): 345-389, 1998
◼ J. R. Quinlan. Induction of decision trees. Machine Learning, 1:81-106, 1986.
◼ J. R. Quinlan and R. M. Cameron-Jones. FOIL: A midterm report. ECML’93.
◼ J. R. Quinlan. C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning. Morgan Kaufmann, 1993.
◼ J. R. Quinlan. Bagging, boosting, and c4.5. AAAI'96.

72
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◼ R. Rastogi and K. Shim. Public: A decision tree classifier that integrates building and
pruning. VLDB’98.
◼ J. Shafer, R. Agrawal, and M. Mehta. SPRINT : A scalable parallel classifier for data
mining. VLDB’96.
◼ J. W. Shavlik and T. G. Dietterich. Readings in Machine Learning. Morgan Kaufmann,
1990.
◼ P. Tan, M. Steinbach, and V. Kumar. Introduction to Data Mining. Addison Wesley,
2005.
◼ S. M. Weiss and C. A. Kulikowski. Computer Systems that Learn: Classification and
Prediction Methods from Statistics, Neural Nets, Machine Learning, and Expert
Systems. Morgan Kaufman, 1991.
◼ S. M. Weiss and N. Indurkhya. Predictive Data Mining. Morgan Kaufmann, 1997.
◼ I. H. Witten and E. Frank. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and
Techniques, 2ed. Morgan Kaufmann, 2005.
◼ X. Yin and J. Han. CPAR: Classification based on predictive association rules. SDM'03
◼ H. Yu, J. Yang, and J. Han. Classifying large data sets using SVM with hierarchical
clusters. KDD'03.
73
 CS412 Midterm Exam Statistics
◼ Opinion Question Answering:
◼ Like the style: 70.83%, dislike: 29.16%

◼ Exam is hard: 55.75%, easy: 0.6%, just right: 43.63%

◼ Time: plenty:3.03%, enough: 36.96%, not: 60%

◼ Score distribution: # of students (Total: 180)

◼ >=90: 24 ◼ 60-69: 37 ◼ <40: 2

◼ 80-89: 54 ◼ 50-59: 15

◼ 70-79: 46 ◼ 40-49: 2

◼ Final grading are based on overall score accumulation

and relative class distributions
75
 Issues: Evaluating Classification Methods
◼ Accuracy
◼ classifier accuracy: predicting class label

◼ predictor accuracy: guessing value of predicted attributes

◼ Speed
◼ time to construct the model (training time)

◼ time to use the model (classification/prediction time)

◼ Robustness: handling noise and missing values

◼ Scalability: efficiency in disk-resident databases
◼ Interpretability
◼ understanding and insight provided by the model

◼ Other measures, e.g., goodness of rules, such as decision tree

size or compactness of classification rules

76
 Predictor Error Measures

◼ Measure predictor accuracy: measure how far off the predicted value is from
the actual known value
◼ Loss function: measures the error betw. yi and the predicted value yi’
◼ Absolute error: | yi – yi’|
◼ Squared error: (yi – yi’)2
◼ Test error (generalization error):
d
the average loss over the test set
d

◼ Mean absolute error:  | y − yMean

i =1
'| i squared error:
i (y
i =1
i − yi ' ) 2

d d
d

◼ Relative absolute error:

d

 | y −Relative
y '|
i squared error:
i
 ( yi − yi ' ) 2
i =1
i =1
d d
| y
i =1
i −y|
(y
i =1
i − y)2
The mean squared-error exaggerates the presence of outliers
Popularly use (square) root mean-square error, similarly, root relative
squared error
77
Scalable Decision Tree Induction Methods

◼ SLIQ (EDBT’96 — Mehta et al.)

◼ Builds an index for each attribute and only class list and the

current attribute list reside in memory

◼ SPRINT (VLDB’96 — J. Shafer et al.)
◼ Constructs an attribute list data structure

◼ PUBLIC (VLDB’98 — Rastogi & Shim)

◼ Integrates tree splitting and tree pruning: stop growing the

tree earlier
◼ RainForest (VLDB’98 — Gehrke, Ramakrishnan & Ganti)
◼ Builds an AVC-list (attribute, value, class label)

◼ BOAT (PODS’99 — Gehrke, Ganti, Ramakrishnan & Loh)

◼ Uses bootstrapping to create several small samples

78
Data Cube-Based Decision-Tree Induction
◼ Integration of generalization with decision-tree induction
(Kamber et al.’97)
◼ Classification at primitive concept levels
◼ E.g., precise temperature, humidity, outlook, etc.
◼ Low-level concepts, scattered classes, bushy classification-
trees
◼ Semantic interpretation problems
◼ Cube-based multi-level classification
◼ Relevance analysis at multi-levels
◼ Information-gain analysis with dimension + level
79