# sl3: Machine Learning Pipelines for R

· by Jeremy Coyle, Nima Hejazi, Ivana Malenica, Oleg Sofrygin · Read in about 8 min · (1493 words) ·

Common in the language of modern data science are words such as “munging,” “massaging,” “mining” – terms denoting the interactive process by which the analyst extracts some form of deliverable inference from the data set at hand. These terms express, among other things, the often convoluted process by which a set of pre-processing and estimation procedures are applied to an input data set in order to transform it into a “tidy” data set from which informative visualizations and summaries may be easily extracted. A formalism that captures this involved process is that of machine learning pipelines. A pipeline – popularized by the method of the same name in Python’s scikit-learn library – may be thought of as an ordered set of instructions corresponding to procedures to be applied to the input data set, with the ultimate goal of producing a tidy output data set.

Recently, the new sl3 R package introduced the pipeline idiom into the R programming language. A concrete understanding of the utility of pipelines is best developed by example – so, that’s precisely what we’ll aim to do here. In the following, we’ll apply the concept of a machine learning pipeline to the canonical iris data set, combining a series of machine learning algorithms for classification with principal components analysis, a simple pre-processing step for dimensionality reduction.

library(datasets)
library(tidyverse)
library(data.table)
library(caret)
library(sl3)
set.seed(352)

In the above, we simply load a few of the R packages that we’ll rely on throughout this demonstration and set a seed in order to control any randomness in the estimation procedure that follows. Next, let’s load the iris data set:

data(iris)
iris <- iris %>%
as_tibble(.)
iris
## # A tibble: 150 x 5
##    Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
##           <dbl>       <dbl>        <dbl>       <dbl> <fct>
##  1         5.10        3.50         1.40       0.200 setosa
##  2         4.90        3.00         1.40       0.200 setosa
##  3         4.70        3.20         1.30       0.200 setosa
##  4         4.60        3.10         1.50       0.200 setosa
##  5         5.00        3.60         1.40       0.200 setosa
##  6         5.40        3.90         1.70       0.400 setosa
##  7         4.60        3.40         1.40       0.300 setosa
##  8         5.00        3.40         1.50       0.200 setosa
##  9         4.40        2.90         1.40       0.200 setosa
## 10         4.90        3.10         1.50       0.100 setosa
## # ... with 140 more rows

As we see above, the iris data set consists of a simple structure: numerical measurements of the length and width of sepals and petals, alongside the species of the observed flower (restricted to three: Iris setosa, Isis versicolor, Iris virginica).

To create very simple training and testing splits, we’ll rely on the popular caret R package:

trn_indx <- createDataPartition(iris$Species, p = .8, list = FALSE, times = 1) %>% as.numeric() tst_indx <- which(!(seq_len(nrow(iris)) %in% trn_indx)) Now that we have our training and testing splits, we can organize the data into tasks – the central bookkeeping object in the sl3 framework. Essentially, tasks represent a, well, data analytic task that is to be solved by invoking the various machine learning algorithms made available through sl3. # a task with the data from the training split iris_task_train <- sl3_Task$new(
data = iris[trn_indx, ],
covariates = colnames(iris)[-5],
outcome = colnames(iris)[5],
outcome_type = "categorical"
)

# a task with the data from the testing split
iris_task_test <- sl3_Task$new( data = iris[tst_indx, ], covariates = colnames(iris)[-5], outcome = colnames(iris)[5], outcome_type = "categorical" ) # let's take a look at the training data task iris_task_train ## A sl3 Task with 120 obs and these nodes: ##$covariates
## [1] "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Width"  "Petal.Length" "Petal.Width"
##
## $outcome ## [1] "Species" ## ##$id
## NULL
##
## $weights ## NULL ## ##$offset
## NULL

Having set up the data properly, let’s proceed to design pipelines that we can rely on for processing and analyzing the data. A pipeline simply represents a set of machine learning procedures to be invoked sequentially, with the results derived from earlier algorithms in the pipeline being used to train those later in the pipeline. Thus, a pipeline is a closed end-to-end system for resolving the problem posed by an sl3 task.

We’ll rely on PCA for dimension reduction, gathering only the two most important principal component dimensions to use in training our classification models. Since this is a quick experiment with a well-studied data set, we’ll use just two classification procedures: (1) Logistic regression with regularization (e.g., the LASSO) and (2) Random Forests.

pca_learner <- Lrnr_pca$new(n_comp = 2) glmnet_learner <- Lrnr_glmnet$new()
rf_learner <- Lrnr_randomForest$new() Above, we merely instantiate the learners by invoking the $new() method of each of the appropriate objects. We now have a machine learning object that invokes PCA to generate and extract just the first two (from the argument n_comp above) principal components derived from the design matrix.

Other than our PCA learner, we’ve also instantiated a regularized logistic regression model (glmnet_learner above) based on the implementation available through the popular glmnet R package, as well as a random forest model based on the canonical implementation available in the randomForest R package.

Now that our individual learners are set up, we can intuitively string them into pipelines by invoking the appropriate $new() method like so pca_to_glmnet <- Pipeline$new(pca_learner, glmnet_learner)
pca_to_rf <- Pipeline$new(pca_learner, rf_learner) The first pipeline above merely invokes our PCA learner, extracting the first two principal components of the design matrix from the input task and passing these as inputs to the regularized logistic regression model. Similarly, the second pipeline invokes PCA and passes the results to our random forest model. To streamline the training of our pipelines, we’ll bundle them into a single stack, then train the model stack all at once. Similar in spirit to a pipeline, a stack is a bundle of sl3 learner objects that are to be trained together. The principle difference is that learners in a pipeline are trained sequentially, as described above, while those in a stack are trained in simultaneously. Thus, the models in a stack are trained independently of one another. Now, forward – let’s generate a stack and train the two pipelines on our training split of the iris data set: model_stack <- Stack$new(pca_to_glmnet, pca_to_rf)
fit_model_stack <- model_stack$train(iris_task_train) Having trained our stacked pipelines, we can now predict on the testing data set simply by feeding the object iris_task_test that we created above to our model stack using the $predict() method. After doing that, we’ll simply do a bit of bookkeeping to extract the predicted class probabilities (of each observation) from the two pipelines in our stack.

out_model_stack <- fit_model_stack$predict(iris_task_test) pipe_preds <- lapply(out_model_stack, unpack_predictions) After extracting the predicted species probabilities for each observation (the most likely iris species), we now clean up the results a bit, just to make them easier to report # get class predictions pipe1_classes <- predict_classes(pipe_preds[[1]]) pipe2_classes <- predict_classes(pipe_preds[[2]]) A standard way to summarize results in machine learning problems is the confusion matrix. Now, let’s take a look at the results, using the handy confusionMatrix function from caret to compare our predicted classes to the true species in the holdout/testing data set. (cfmat_pipe1 <- confusionMatrix(pipe1_classes, iris_task_test$Y))
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
##
##             Reference
## Prediction   setosa versicolor virginica
##   setosa         10          0         0
##   versicolor      0          9         2
##   virginica       0          1         8
##
## Overall Statistics
##
##                Accuracy : 0.9
##                  95% CI : (0.7347, 0.9789)
##     No Information Rate : 0.3333
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : 1.665e-10
##
##                   Kappa : 0.85
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : NA
##
## Statistics by Class:
##
##                      Class: setosa Class: versicolor Class: virginica
## Sensitivity                 1.0000            0.9000           0.8000
## Specificity                 1.0000            0.9000           0.9500
## Pos Pred Value              1.0000            0.8182           0.8889
## Neg Pred Value              1.0000            0.9474           0.9048
## Prevalence                  0.3333            0.3333           0.3333
## Detection Rate              0.3333            0.3000           0.2667
## Detection Prevalence        0.3333            0.3667           0.3000
## Balanced Accuracy           1.0000            0.9000           0.8750

Let’s find out whether our pipeline of PCA and Random Forest fared any better than the one with PCA and GLMs above:

(cfmat_pipe2 <- confusionMatrix(pipe2_classes, iris_task_test\$Y))
## Confusion Matrix and Statistics
##
##             Reference
## Prediction   setosa versicolor virginica
##   setosa         10          0         0
##   versicolor      0          9         2
##   virginica       0          1         8
##
## Overall Statistics
##
##                Accuracy : 0.9
##                  95% CI : (0.7347, 0.9789)
##     No Information Rate : 0.3333
##     P-Value [Acc > NIR] : 1.665e-10
##
##                   Kappa : 0.85
##  Mcnemar's Test P-Value : NA
##
## Statistics by Class:
##
##                      Class: setosa Class: versicolor Class: virginica
## Sensitivity                 1.0000            0.9000           0.8000
## Specificity                 1.0000            0.9000           0.9500
## Pos Pred Value              1.0000            0.8182           0.8889
## Neg Pred Value              1.0000            0.9474           0.9048
## Prevalence                  0.3333            0.3333           0.3333
## Detection Rate              0.3333            0.3000           0.2667
## Detection Prevalence        0.3333            0.3667           0.3000
## Balanced Accuracy           1.0000            0.9000           0.8750

The predictions looks good!

## Summary

• We’ve taken a look at how to efficiently perform machine learning tasks with the sl3 R package.
• We’ve examined standard machine learning idioms, including tasks, pipelines, and stacks.
• We’ve examined a simple case of training and predicting with pipelines on the canonical Iris data set.