# PREDICTING BREAST CANCER USING RANDOM FOREST

###### MODEL ESTIMATION
5

PYTHON, JUPYTER NOTEBOOK, SKLEARN, PANDAS, MATPLOTLIB

MEDIUM

last hacked on Jun 27, 2018

# Wisconsin Breast Cancer Machine Learning For this project, I implemented a **Random Forest Model** on a data set containing descriptive attributes of digitized images of a process known as, *fine needle aspirate* (**FNA**) of breast mass. We have a total of 29 features that were computed for each cell nucleus with an ID Number and the Diagnosis (Later converted to binary representations: *Malignant* = **1**, *Benign* = **0**). <img src="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glaucia_Sizilio/publication/232811011/figure/fig3/AS:214220353347586@1428085520095/Captured-images-of-layers-of-glass-with-smears-of-breast-massobtained-by-FNA-the-parts.png"> + Ex. Image of a malignant solitary fibrous tumor using **FNA**. + Source by [Glaucia Rma Sizilio](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glaucia_Sizilio), [Cicilia Rm Leite](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cicilia_Leite), [Ana Mg Guerreiro](https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2069488816_Ana_Mg_Guerreiro), and [Adriao D Doria Neto](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adriao_Duarte_Neto)
# Table of Contents + [Introduction](#intro) + [Load Packages](#load_pack) + [Load Data](#load_data) + [Training and Test Sets](#train_test) + [Fitting Random Forest](#fit_model) + [Hyperparameters Optimization](#hype_opt) + [Out of Bag Error](#oob) + [Traditional Training and Test Split](#trad_train_test) + [Training Algorithm](#train_alg) + [Variable Importance](#var_imp) + [Cross Validation](#cross_val) + [Test Set Metrics](#test_set_met) + [ROC Curve Metrics](#roc_curve) + [Classification Report](#class_rep) + [Conclusions](#concl) # <a name='intro'></a>Introduction A Random Forest (also known as Random Decision Forest) is a popular supervised classification method used for predictive modeling both for classification and regression problems (for this tutorial, we will be going over Random Forest in the classification context). Essentially a Random Forest is an entire forest of random uncorrelated decision trees, classified as an ensemble method. Ensemble methods is the use of multiple learning models to gain better predictive results. For Random Forest, the model creates multiple Decision Trees. We will be using a famous data set from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, called the [Breast Cancer (Diagnostic)](https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Breast+Cancer+Wisconsin+%28Diagnostic%29) data set which deals with binary classification. Familiarity with Classification and Regression Tree (or CART) modeling is expected for this tutorial, a great resource for CART modeling can be found in Chapter 8 of this [book](http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/). I will give a brief overview of different CART methodologies culminating to the relevance and preference towards Random Forest, beginning with Decision Trees. ## Decision Trees Decision trees are simple but intuitive models that utilize a top down approach where the root node then creates binary splits until a certain criteria is met. More information on its implementation can be found [here](http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/tree.html). The binary *splitting* of nodes will give an outcome of the predicted value based on the interior nodes leading to the terminal (final) nodes. In the classification context, it will output a predicted target class for each terminal node produced. Although intuitive, Decision trees do have limitations that prevent it from being a useful model in machine learning applications. ### Limitations to Decision trees Decision trees tend to have high variance when utilizing different training and test sets of the same data, since they tend to over-fit on the training data leading to poorly performance on unseen data. This limits the usage of Decision trees in predictive modeling, but through ensemble methods we can create models that produce powerful results utilzing the underlying Decision Trees as a basis for the methodology behind ensembles. ## Bootstrap Aggregating Trees Through a process known as **B**ootstrap **Agg**regat**ing** (or Bagging), we create an ensemble (forest) of trees where multiple training sets are generated with replacement (meaning data instances or in our case patients can be repeated). Once the training sets are created a CART model is trained on each subsample. This approach helps reduce variance by averaging the ensemble's results, creating a majority votes model. Another important feature of Bagging trees is that the model uses the entire feature space when considering node splits. Bagging trees allow the trees to grow without pruning (reducing the tree depth sizes. See [this article](https://www.displayr.com/machine-learning-pruning-decision-trees/) for more details) resulting in high variance but lower bias, which can help in improving predictive power. However, a downside to this process is utliziation of the entire feature space since there is a risk of having correlation between trees increasing bias in our model. ### Limitation to Bagging Trees As stated earlier since each new subsample can include repeated observations we can over-fit our model on the training set. The main limitation of Bagging Trees is the use of the entire feature space when creating splits in the trees. If some variables within our feature space are indicative of certain predictions we run the risk of having a forest of correlated trees, thereby increasing bias and reducing variance. A simple tweak of Bagging Trees methodology proves advantageous to our models predictive power. ## Random Forest Random Forest aims to reduce the previously mentioned correlation by choosing only a subsample of the feature space at each split. Essentially aiming to make the trees de-correlated, along with pruning of trees by setting a stopping criteria for node splits (more on this later). The processes outlined in this project are typical of a machine learning project, so I've given an outline of what will be done throughout the tutorial. After this tutorial you will be familiar with how to implement (in python): + Basic exploratory analysis + Training and test set creation + Model fitting using sklearn + Hyperparamter optimization + Out of Bag Error Rate + Calculating Variable Importance + Test Set calculations + Cross Validation + ROC Curve Estimation # Buisness Uses Random Forest can be used for a plethora of data circumstances including but not limited to: + Image Classification + Detecting Fraudulent cases in banking systems + Recommendation Engines + Feature Selection # <a name="load_pack"></a>Load Packages We load our modules into our python environment. I am employing a Jupyter Notebook while running inside a virtualenv environment (the requirements.txt file associated with this repo contains the module information for reproducibility). We will be primarily using the [SciPy](https://www.scipy.org/stackspec.html) stack focusing on pandas, matplotlib, seaborn and sklearn for this tutorial. python # Import modules %matplotlib inline import time import random import numpy as np import pandas as pd import seaborn as sns import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from sklearn.metrics import roc_curve, auc from sklearn.metrics import confusion_matrix from sklearn.metrics import classification_report from sklearn.model_selection import KFold, cross_val_score from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split, GridSearchCV from sklearn.metrics import confusion_matrix from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier from sklearn.utils.validation import check_is_fitted from sklearn.exceptions import NotFittedError from urllib.request import urlopen plt.style.use('ggplot') pd.set_option('display.max_columns', 500)  # <a name='load_data'></a>Load Data For this section, I'll load the data into a Pandas dataframe using urlopen from the urllib.request module. Instead of downloading a csv, I started implementing this method (inspired by this [Python Tutorials](https://github.com/JasonFreeberg/PythonTutorials)) where I grab the data straight from the [UCI Machine Learning Database](https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets.html) using an http request. python # Loading data and cleaning dataset UCI_data_URL = 'https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases\ /breast-cancer-wisconsin/wdbc.data'  I do recommend on keeping a static file for your dataset as well. Next, I created a list with the appropriate names and set them as the data frame's column names, then I load them unto a pandas data frame python names = ['id_number', 'diagnosis', 'radius_mean', 'texture_mean', 'perimeter_mean', 'area_mean', 'smoothness_mean', 'compactness_mean', 'concavity_mean','concave_points_mean', 'symmetry_mean', 'fractal_dimension_mean', 'radius_se', 'texture_se', 'perimeter_se', 'area_se', 'smoothness_se', 'compactness_se', 'concavity_se', 'concave_points_se', 'symmetry_se', 'fractal_dimension_se', 'radius_worst', 'texture_worst', 'perimeter_worst', 'area_worst', 'smoothness_worst', 'compactness_worst', 'concavity_worst', 'concave_points_worst', 'symmetry_worst', 'fractal_dimension_worst'] dx = ['Benign', 'Malignant']  python breast_cancer = pd.read_csv(urlopen(UCI_data_URL), names=names)  ## Cleaning We do some minor cleanage like setting the id_number to be the data frame index, along with converting the diagnosis to the standard binary 1, 0 representation using the map() function. python # Setting 'id_number' as our index breast_cancer.set_index(['id_number'], inplace = True) # Converted to binary to help later on with models and plots breast_cancer['diagnosis'] = breast_cancer['diagnosis'].map({'M':1, 'B':0})  ## Missing Values Given context of the data set, I know that there is no missing data, but I ran a for-loop that checks to see if there was any missing values through each column. Printing the column name and total missing values for that column, iteratively. python breast_cancer.apply(lambda x: x.isnull().values.ravel().sum())  diagnosis 0 radius_mean 0 texture_mean 0 perimeter_mean 0 area_mean 0 smoothness_mean 0 compactness_mean 0 concavity_mean 0 concave_points_mean 0 symmetry_mean 0 fractal_dimension_mean 0 radius_se 0 texture_se 0 perimeter_se 0 area_se 0 smoothness_se 0 compactness_se 0 concavity_se 0 concave_points_se 0 symmetry_se 0 fractal_dimension_se 0 radius_worst 0 texture_worst 0 perimeter_worst 0 area_worst 0 smoothness_worst 0 compactness_worst 0 concavity_worst 0 concave_points_worst 0 symmetry_worst 0 fractal_dimension_worst 0 dtype: int64 This will be used for the random forest model, where the id_number won't be relevant. python # For later use in CART models names_index = names[2:]  Let's preview the data set utilizing the head() function which will give the first 5 values of our data frame. python breast_cancer.head()  <iframe width="798" height="280" frameborder="0" src='https://cdn.rawgit.com/raviolli77/7275dd3c9455f052171b22d3da5185b2/raw/fdc8c659fae9288f1ba1da01103265eb9403fc0b/head.html'></iframe> Next, we'll give the dimensions of the data set; where the first value is the number of patients and the second value is the number of features. We print the data types of our data set this is important because this will often be an indicator of missing data, as well as giving us context to anymore data cleanage. python print("Here's the dimensions of our data frame:\n", breast_cancer.shape) print("Here's the data types of our columns:\n", breast_cancer.dtypes)  Here's the dimensions of our data frame: (569, 31) Here's the data types of our columns: diagnosis int64 radius_mean float64 texture_mean float64 perimeter_mean float64 area_mean float64 smoothness_mean float64 compactness_mean float64 concavity_mean float64 concave_points_mean float64 symmetry_mean float64 fractal_dimension_mean float64 radius_se float64 texture_se float64 perimeter_se float64 area_se float64 smoothness_se float64 compactness_se float64 concavity_se float64 concave_points_se float64 symmetry_se float64 fractal_dimension_se float64 radius_worst float64 texture_worst float64 perimeter_worst float64 area_worst float64 smoothness_worst float64 compactness_worst float64 concavity_worst float64 concave_points_worst float64 symmetry_worst float64 fractal_dimension_worst float64 dtype: object ## Class Imbalance The distribution for diagnosis is important because it brings up the discussion of *Class Imbalance* within Machine learning and data mining applications. *Class Imbalance* refers to when a target class within a data set is outnumbered by the other target class (or classes). This can lead to misleading accuracy metrics, known as [accuracy paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_paradox), therefore we have to make sure our target classes aren't imblanaced. We do so by creating a function that will output the distribution of the target classes. **NOTE**: If your data set suffers from class imbalance I suggest reading documentation on upsampling and downsampling. python def print_dx_perc(data_frame, col): """Function used to print class distribution for our data set""" try: # Stores value counts col_vals = data_frame[col].value_counts() # Resets index to make index a column in data frame col_vals = col_vals.reset_index() # If the number of unique instances in column exceeds 20 print warning if len(col_vals['index']) > 20: print('Warning: values in column are more than 20 \nPlease try a column with lower value counts!') # Else it calculates/prints percentage for each unique value in column else: # Create a function to output the percentage f = lambda x, y: 100 * (x / sum(y)) for i in range(0, len(col_vals['index'])): print('{0} accounts for {1:.2f}% of the {2} column'\ .format(col_vals['index'][i], f(col_vals[col].iloc[i], col_vals[col]), col)) # try-except block goes here if it can't find the column in data frame except KeyError as e: print('{0}: Not found'.format(e)) print('Please choose the right column name!')  python print_dx_perc(breast_cancer, 'diagnosis')  0 accounts for 62.74% of the diagnosis column 1 accounts for 37.26% of the diagnosis column Fortunately, this data set does not suffer from *class imbalance*. Next we will use a useful function that gives us standard descriptive statistics for each feature including mean, standard deviation, minimum value, maximum value, and range intervals. python breast_cancer.describe()  <iframe width="798" height="350" frameborder="0" src='https://cdn.rawgit.com/raviolli77/f0b743ab560331bf9382d9a6ad0b8ff7/raw/54d0f327ed07b42294da40303380530edd7b9f3d/describe_breast_cancer.html'></iframe> We can see through the maximum row that our data varies in distribution, this will be important when considering classification models. *Standardization* is an important requirement for many classification models that should be considered when implementing pre-processing. Some models (like neural networks) can perform poorly if pre-processing isn't considered, so the describe() function can be a good indicator for *standardization*. Fortunately Random Forest does not require any pre-processing (for use of categorical data see [sklearn's Encoding Categorical Data](http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/preprocessing.html#encoding-categorical-features) section). # <a name='train_test'></a>Creating Training and Test SetsTraining and Test Sets We split the data set into our *training* and *test sets* which will be (pseudo) randomly selected having a 80-20% splt. We will use the training set to train our model along with some optimization, and use our test set as the unseen data that will be a useful final metric to let us know how well our model does. When using this method for machine learning always be weary of utilizing your test set when creating models. The issue of data leakage is a serious issue that is common in practice and can result in over-fitting. More on data leakage can be found in this [Kaggle article](https://www.kaggle.com/wiki/Leakage) python feature_space = breast_cancer.iloc[:, breast_cancer.columns != 'diagnosis'] feature_class = breast_cancer.iloc[:, breast_cancer.columns == 'diagnosis'] training_set, test_set, class_set, test_class_set = train_test_split(feature_space, feature_class, test_size = 0.20, random_state = 42)  **NOTE**: What I mean when I say *pseudo-random* is that we would want everyone who replicates this project to get the same results. So we use a random seed generator and set it equal to a number of our choosing, this will then make the results the same for anyone who uses this generator, awesome for reproducibility. python # Cleaning test sets to avoid future warning messages class_set = class_set.values.ravel() test_class_set = test_class_set.values.ravel()  # <a name='fit_model'></a>Fitting Random Forest Now we will create the model no parameter tuning aside from the random seed generator. What I mean when I say parameter tuning is different machine learning models utilize various parameters which have to be tuned by the person implementing the algorithm. Here I'll give a brief overview of the parameters I will be tuning in this tutorial: + max_depth: the maximum splits for all trees in the forest. + bootstrap: indicating whether or not we want to use bootstrap samples when building trees + max_features: the maximum number of features that will be used in the node splitting (the main difference previously mentioned between Bagging trees and Random Forest). Typically we want a value that is less than p, where p is all features in our dataset. + criterion: this is the metric used to asses the stopping criteria for the Decision trees, more on this later Once we've instantiated our model we will go ahead and tune our parameters. python # Set the random state for reproducibility fit_rf = RandomForestClassifier(random_state=42)  # <a name='hype_opt'></a>Hyperparameters Optimization Utilizing the GridSearchCV functionality, I create a dictionary with parameters I am looking to optimize to create the best model for our data. Setting the n_jobs to 3 tells the grid search to run 3 jobs in parallel reducing the time the function will take to compute the best parameters. I included the timer to help see how long different jobs took, ultimately deciding on using 3 parallel jobs. This will help set parameters which I will then use to tune one final paramter; the number of trees in my forest. python np.random.seed(42) start = time.time() param_dist = {'max_depth': [2, 3, 4], 'bootstrap': [True, False], 'max_features': ['auto', 'sqrt', 'log2', None], 'criterion': ['gini', 'entropy']} cv_rf = GridSearchCV(fit_rf, cv = 10, param_grid=param_dist, n_jobs = 3) cv_rf.fit(training_set, class_set) print('Best Parameters using grid search: \n', cv_rf.best_params_) end = time.time() print('Time taken in grid search: {0: .2f}'.format(end - start))  Best Parameters using grid search: {'bootstrap': True, 'criterion': 'gini', 'max_depth': 3, 'max_features': 'log2'} Time taken in grid search: 8.56 Once we are given the best parameter combination, we set the parameters to our model. Notice how we didn't utilize the bootstrap: True parameter, this will make sense in the following section. python # Set best parameters given by grid search fit_rf.set_params(criterion = 'gini', max_features = 'log2', max_depth = 3)  RandomForestClassifier(bootstrap=True, class_weight=None, criterion='gini', max_depth=3, max_features='log2', max_leaf_nodes=None, min_impurity_split=1e-07, min_samples_leaf=1, min_samples_split=2, min_weight_fraction_leaf=0.0, n_estimators=10, n_jobs=1, oob_score=False, random_state=42, verbose=0, warm_start=False) # <a name='oob'></a>Out of Bag Error Rate Another useful feature of Random Forest is the concept of Out of Bag Error Rate or OOB error rate. When creating the forest, typically only 2/3 of the data is used to train each tree, this gives us 1/3 of unseen data that we can then utilize in a way that is advantageos to our accuracy metrics withou being computationally expensive like cross validation. When calculating OOB, two parameters have to be changed as outlined below. Also utilizing a for-loop across a multitude of forest sizes, we can calculate the OOB Error rate and use this to asses how many trees are appropriate for our model! **NOTE**: When calculating the oob score, setting bootstrap=True will produce errors, but is necessary for oob_score calculation as stated on this [example](http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/ensemble/plot_ensemble_oob.html) For the original analysis I compared *Kth Nearest Neighbor*, *Random Forest*, and *Neural Networks*, so most of the analysis was done to compare across different models. python fit_rf.set_params(warm_start=True, oob_score=True) min_estimators = 15 max_estimators = 1000 error_rate = {} for i in range(min_estimators, max_estimators + 1): fit_rf.set_params(n_estimators=i) fit_rf.fit(training_set, class_set) oob_error = 1 - fit_rf.oob_score_ error_rate[i] = oob_error  python # Convert dictionary to a pandas series for easy plotting oob_series = pd.Series(error_rate)  python fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 10)) ax.set_axis_bgcolor('#fafafa') oob_series.plot(kind='line', color = 'red') plt.axhline(0.055, color='#875FDB', linestyle='--') plt.axhline(0.05, color='#875FDB', linestyle='--') plt.xlabel('n_estimators') plt.ylabel('OOB Error Rate') plt.title('OOB Error Rate Across various Forest sizes \n(From 15 to 1000 trees)')  <matplotlib.text.Text at 0x1058c3048> ![png](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raviolli77/machineLearning_breastCancer_Python/master/notebooks/random_forest_files/output_36_1.png) The OOB error rate starts to oscilate at around 400 trees, so I will go ahead and use my judgement to use 400 trees in my forest. Using the pandas series object I can easily find the OOB error rate for the estimator as follows: python print('OOB Error rate for 400 trees is: {0:.5f}'.format(oob_series[400]))  OOB Error rate for 400 trees is: 0.04835 Utilizing the OOB error rate that was created with the model gives us an unbiased error rate. This can be helpful when cross validating and/or hyperparameter optimization prove to be too computationally expensive, since oob can be calculated with the model estimation. For the sake of this tutorial I will go over the other traditional methods for machine learning including the training and test error route, along with cross validation metrics. # <a name='trad_train_test'></a>Traditional Training and Test Set Split In order for this methodology to work we will set the number of trees calculated using the OOB error rate, and removing the warm_start and oob_score parameters. Along with including the bootstrap parameter. python fit_rf.set_params(n_estimators=400, bootstrap = True, warm_start=False, oob_score=False)  RandomForestClassifier(bootstrap=True, class_weight=None, criterion='gini', max_depth=3, max_features='log2', max_leaf_nodes=None, min_impurity_split=1e-07, min_samples_leaf=1, min_samples_split=2, min_weight_fraction_leaf=0.0, n_estimators=400, n_jobs=1, oob_score=False, random_state=42, verbose=0, warm_start=False) # <a name='train_alg'></a>Training Algorithm Next we train the algorithm utilizing the training and target class set we had made earlier. python fit_rf.fit(training_set, class_set)  RandomForestClassifier(bootstrap=True, class_weight=None, criterion='gini', max_depth=3, max_features='log2', max_leaf_nodes=None, min_impurity_split=1e-07, min_samples_leaf=1, min_samples_split=2, min_weight_fraction_leaf=0.0, n_estimators=400, n_jobs=1, oob_score=False, random_state=42, verbose=0, warm_start=False) # <a name='var_imp'></a>Variable Importance Once we have trained the model, we are able to assess this concept of variable importance. A downside to creating ensemble methods with Decision Trees is we lose the interpretability that a single tree gives. A single tree can outline for us important node splits along with variables that were important at each split. Forunately ensemble methods utilzing CART models use a metric to evaluate homogeneity of splits. Thus when creating ensembles these metrics can be utilized to give insight to important variables used in the training of the model. Two metrics that are used are gini impurity and entropy. The two metrics vary and from reading documentation online, many people favor gini impurity due to the computational cost of entropy since it requires calculating the logarithmic function. For more discussion I recommend reading this [article](https://github.com/rasbt/python-machine-learning-book/blob/master/faq/decision-tree-binary.md). Here we define each metric: $$Gini\ Impurity = 1 - \sum_i p_i$$ $$Entropy = \sum_i -p_i * \log_2 p_i$$ where $p_i$ is defined as the proportion of subsamples that belong to a certain target class. Since we are utilizing the *Gini Impurity*, the impurity measure reaches 0 when all target class labels are the same. We are able to access the feature importance of the model and using a helper function to output the importance of our variables in descending order. python def variable_importance(fit): """ Purpose ---------- Checks if model is fitted CART model then produces variable importance and respective indices in dictionary. Parameters ---------- * fit: Fitted model containing the attribute feature_importances_ Returns ---------- Dictionary containing arrays with importance score and index of columns ordered in descending order of importance. """ try: if not hasattr(fit, 'fit'): return print("'{0}' is not an instantiated model from scikit-learn".format(fit)) # Captures whether the model has been trained if not vars(fit)["estimators_"]: return print("Model does not appear to be trained.") except KeyError: print("Model entered does not contain 'estimators_' attribute.") importances = fit.feature_importances_ indices = np.argsort(importances)[::-1] return {'importance': importances, 'index': indices}  python var_imp_rf = variable_importance(fit_rf) importances_rf = var_imp_rf['importance'] indices_rf = var_imp_rf['index']  python def print_var_importance(importance, indices, name_index): """ Purpose ---------- Prints dependent variable names ordered from largest to smallest based on information gain for CART model. Parameters ---------- * importance: Array returned from feature_importances_ for CART models organized by dataframe index * indices: Organized index of dataframe from largest to smallest based on feature_importances_ * name_index: Name of columns included in model Returns ---------- Prints feature importance in descending order """ print("Feature ranking:") for f in range(0, indices.shape[0]): i = f print("{0}. The feature '{1}' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of {2:.5f}" .format(f + 1, names_index[indices[i]], importance[indices[f]]))  python print_var_importance(importances_rf, indices_rf, names_index)  Feature ranking: 1. The feature 'area_worst' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.12986 2. The feature 'perimeter_worst' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.12095 3. The feature 'concave_points_worst' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.11555 4. The feature 'concave_points_mean' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.10014 5. The feature 'radius_worst' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.07805 6. The feature 'concavity_mean' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.06214 7. The feature 'area_mean' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.05656 8. The feature 'radius_mean' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.05457 9. The feature 'perimeter_mean' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.05174 10. The feature 'area_se' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.04326 11. The feature 'concavity_worst' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.03866 12. The feature 'compactness_worst' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.02033 13. The feature 'compactness_mean' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.01616 14. The feature 'texture_worst' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.01554 15. The feature 'radius_se' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.01452 16. The feature 'perimeter_se' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.01308 17. The feature 'texture_mean' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.01220 18. The feature 'symmetry_worst' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.01175 19. The feature 'smoothness_worst' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00938 20. The feature 'concavity_se' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00910 21. The feature 'concave_points_se' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00445 22. The feature 'smoothness_mean' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00398 23. The feature 'fractal_dimension_se' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00395 24. The feature 'fractal_dimension_worst' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00267 25. The feature 'fractal_dimension_mean' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00221 26. The feature 'smoothness_se' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00217 27. The feature 'symmetry_mean' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00205 28. The feature 'texture_se' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00204 29. The feature 'symmetry_se' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00194 30. The feature 'compactness_se' has a Mean Decrease in Impurity of 0.00099 We can see here that our top 5 variables were area_worst, perimeter_worst, concave_points_worst, concave_points_mean, radius_worst. This can give us great insight for further analysis like [feature engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_engineering), although we won't go into this during this tutorial. This step can help give insight to the practitioner and audience as to what variables played an important part to the predictions generated by the model. In our test case, this can help people in the medical field focus on the top variables and their relationship with breast cancer. python def variable_importance_plot(importance, indices, name_index): """ Purpose ---------- Prints bar chart detailing variable importance for CART model NOTE: feature_space list was created because the bar chart was transposed and index would be in incorrect order. Parameters ---------- * importance: Array returned from feature_importances_ for CART models organized by dataframe index * indices: Organized index of dataframe from largest to smallest based on feature_importances_ * name_index: Name of columns included in model Returns: ---------- Returns variable importance plot in descending order """ index = np.arange(len(names_index)) importance_desc = sorted(importance) feature_space = [] for i in range(indices.shape[0] - 1, -1, -1): feature_space.append(names_index[indices[i]]) fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 10)) ax.set_axis_bgcolor('#fafafa') plt.title('Feature importances for Random Forest Model\ \nBreast Cancer (Diagnostic)') plt.barh(index, importance_desc, align="center", color = '#875FDB') plt.yticks(index, feature_space) plt.ylim(-1, 30) plt.xlim(0, max(importance_desc) + 0.01) plt.xlabel('Mean Decrease in Impurity') plt.ylabel('Feature') plt.show() plt.close()  python variable_importance_plot(importances_rf, indices_rf, names_index)  ![png](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raviolli77/machineLearning_breastCancer_Python/master/notebooks/random_forest_files/output_50_0.png) The visual helps drive the point of variable importance, since you can clearly see the difference in importance of variables for the ensemble method. Certain cutoff points can be made to reduce the inclusion of features and can help in the accuracy of the model, since we'll be removing what is considered noise within our feature space. # <a name='cross_val'></a>Cross Validation *Cross validation* is a powerful tool that is used for estimating the predicitive power of your model, which performs better than the conventional training and test set. What we are doing with *Cross Validation* is we are essentially creating multiple training and test sets, then averaging the scores to give us a less biased metric. In our case we are creating 10 sets within our data set that calculates the estimations we have done already, but then averages the prediction error to give us a more accurate representation of our model's prediction power, since the model's performance can vary significantly when utilizing different training and test sets. **Suggested Reading**: For a more concise explanation of *Cross Validation* I recommend reading [An Introduction to Statistical Learnings with Applications in R](http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/), specifically chapter 5.1! ## K-Fold Cross Validation Here we are employing *K-Fold Cross Validation*, more specifically 10 folds. So therefore we are creating 10 subsets of our data where we will be employing the training and test set methodology then averaging the accuracy for all folds to give us our estimatation. Within a Random Forest context if your data set is significantly large one can choose to not do cross validation and use the OOB error rate as an unbiased metric for computational costs, but for this tutorial I included it to show different accuracy metrics available. python def cross_val_metrics(fit, training_set, class_set, estimator, print_results = True): """ Purpose ---------- Function helps automate cross validation processes while including option to print metrics or store in variable Parameters ---------- fit: Fitted model training_set: Data_frame containing 80% of original dataframe class_set: data_frame containing the respective target vaues for the training_set print_results: Boolean, if true prints the metrics, else saves metrics as variables Returns ---------- scores.mean(): Float representing cross validation score scores.std() / 2: Float representing the standard error (derived from cross validation score's standard deviation) """ my_estimators = { 'rf': 'estimators_', 'nn': 'out_activation_', 'knn': '_fit_method' } try: # Captures whether first parameter is a model if not hasattr(fit, 'fit'): return print("'{0}' is not an instantiated model from scikit-learn".format(fit)) # Captures whether the model has been trained if not vars(fit)[my_estimators[estimator]]: return print("Model does not appear to be trained.") except KeyError as e: print("'{0}' does not correspond with the appropriate key inside the estimators dictionary. \ \nPlease refer to function to check my_estimators dictionary.".format(estimator)) raise n = KFold(n_splits=10) scores = cross_val_score(fit, training_set, class_set, cv = n) if print_results: for i in range(0, len(scores)): print("Cross validation run {0}: {1: 0.3f}".format(i, scores[i])) print("Accuracy: {0: 0.3f} (+/- {1: 0.3f})"\ .format(scores.mean(), scores.std() / 2)) else: return scores.mean(), scores.std() / 2  python cross_val_metrics(fit_rf, training_set, class_set, 'rf', print_results = True)  Cross validation run 0: 1.000 Cross validation run 1: 0.957 Cross validation run 2: 0.935 Cross validation run 3: 0.935 Cross validation run 4: 0.957 Cross validation run 5: 0.978 Cross validation run 6: 0.933 Cross validation run 7: 0.889 Cross validation run 8: 1.000 Cross validation run 9: 0.889 Accuracy: 0.947 (+/- 0.019) # <a name='test_set_met'></a>Test Set Metrics Now we will be utilizing the test set that was created earlier to receive another metric for evaluation of our model. Recall the importance of data leakage and that we didn't touch the test set until now, after we had done hyperparamter optimization. We create a confusion matrix showcasing the following metrics: | n = Sample Size | Predicted Benign | Predicted Malignant | |-----------------|------------------|---------------------| | Actual Benign | *True Negative* | *False Positive* | | Actual Malignant | *False Negative* | *True Positive* | python predictions_rf = fit_rf.predict(test_set)  ## Confusion Matrix Here we create a confusion matrix visual with seaborn and transposing the matrix when creating the heatmap. python def create_conf_mat(test_class_set, predictions): """Function returns confusion matrix comparing two arrays""" if (len(test_class_set.shape) != len(predictions.shape) == 1): return print('Arrays entered are not 1-D.\nPlease enter the correctly sized sets.') elif (test_class_set.shape != predictions.shape): return print('Number of values inside the Arrays are not equal to each other.\nPlease make sure the array has the same number of instances.') else: # Set Metrics test_crosstb_comp = pd.crosstab(index = test_class_set, columns = predictions) test_crosstb = test_crosstb_comp.as_matrix() return test_crosstb  python conf_mat = create_conf_mat(test_class_set, predictions_rf) sns.heatmap(conf_mat, annot=True, fmt='d', cbar=False) plt.xlabel('Predicted Values') plt.ylabel('Actual Values') plt.title('Actual vs. Predicted Confusion Matrix') plt.show()  ![png](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raviolli77/machineLearning_breastCancer_Python/master/notebooks/random_forest_files/output_58_0.png) python accuracy_rf = fit_rf.score(test_set, test_class_set) print("Here is our mean accuracy on the test set:\n {0:.3f}"\ .format(accuracy_rf))  Here is our mean accuracy on the test set: 0.965 python # Here we calculate the test error rate! test_error_rate_rf = 1 - accuracy_rf print("The test error rate for our model is:\n {0: .4f}"\ .format(test_error_rate_rf))  The test error rate for our model is: 0.0351 As you can see we got a very similar error rate for our test set that we did for our OOB, which is a good sign for our model. # <a name='roc_curve'></a>ROC Curve Metrics Receiver Operating Characteristc Curve, calculates the False Positive Rates and True Positive Rates across different thresholds . We will now graph these calculations, and being located the top left corner of the plot indicates a really ideal model, i.e. a False Positive Rate of 0 and True Positive Rate of 1, whereas an ROC curve that is at a 45 degree is indicative of a model that is essentially randomly guessing. We also calculated the Area under the Curve or AUC, the AUC is used as a metric to differentiate the predicion power for those with the disease and those without it. Typically a value closer to one means that our model was able to differentiate correctly from a random sample of the two target classes of two patients with and without the disease. python # We grab the second array from the output which corresponds to # to the predicted probabilites of positive classes # Ordered wrt fit.classes_ in our case [0, 1] where 1 is our positive class predictions_prob = fit_rf.predict_proba(test_set)[:, 1] fpr2, tpr2, _ = roc_curve(test_class_set, predictions_prob, pos_label = 1)  python auc_rf = auc(fpr2, tpr2)  python def plot_roc_curve(fpr, tpr, auc, estimator, xlim=None, ylim=None): """ Purpose ---------- Function creates ROC Curve for respective model given selected parameters. Optional x and y limits to zoom into graph Parameters ---------- * fpr: Array returned from sklearn.metrics.roc_curve for increasing false positive rates * tpr: Array returned from sklearn.metrics.roc_curve for increasing true positive rates * auc: Float returned from sklearn.metrics.auc (Area under Curve) * estimator: String represenation of appropriate model, can only contain the following: ['knn', 'rf', 'nn'] * xlim: Set upper and lower x-limits * ylim: Set upper and lower y-limits """ my_estimators = {'knn': ['Kth Nearest Neighbor', 'deeppink'], 'rf': ['Random Forest', 'red'], 'nn': ['Neural Network', 'purple']} try: plot_title = my_estimators[estimator][0] color_value = my_estimators[estimator][1] except KeyError as e: print("'{0}' does not correspond with the appropriate key inside the estimators dictionary. \ \nPlease refer to function to check my_estimators dictionary.".format(estimator)) raise fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 10)) ax.set_axis_bgcolor('#fafafa') plt.plot(fpr, tpr, color=color_value, linewidth=1) plt.title('ROC Curve For {0} (AUC = {1: 0.3f})'\ .format(plot_title, auc)) plt.plot([0, 1], [0, 1], 'k--', lw=2) # Add Diagonal line plt.plot([0, 0], [1, 0], 'k--', lw=2, color = 'black') plt.plot([1, 0], [1, 1], 'k--', lw=2, color = 'black') if xlim is not None: plt.xlim(*xlim) if ylim is not None: plt.ylim(*ylim) plt.xlabel('False Positive Rate') plt.ylabel('True Positive Rate') plt.show() plt.close()  python plot_roc_curve(fpr2, tpr2, auc_rf, 'rf', xlim=(-0.01, 1.05), ylim=(0.001, 1.05))  ![png](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raviolli77/machineLearning_breastCancer_Python/master/notebooks/random_forest_files/output_65_0.png) Our model did exceptional with an AUC over .90, now we do a zoomed in view to showcase the closeness our ROC Curve is relative to the ideal ROC Curve. python plot_roc_curve(fpr2, tpr2, auc_rf, 'rf', xlim=(-0.01, 0.2), ylim=(0.85, 1.01))  ![png](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raviolli77/machineLearning_breastCancer_Python/master/notebooks/random_forest_files/output_67_0.png) # <a name='class_rep'></a>Classification Report The classification report is available through sklearn.metrics, this report gives many important classification metrics including: + Precision: also the positive predictive value, is the number of correct predictions divided by the number of correct predictions plus false positives, so $tp / (tp + fp)$ + Recall: also known as the sensitivity, is the number of correct predictions divided by the total number of instances so $tp / (tp + fn)$ where $fn$ is the number of false negatives + f1-score: this is defined as the *weighted harmonic mean* of both the precision and recall, where the f1-score at 1 is the best value and worst value at 0, as defined by the [documentation](http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.precision_recall_fscore_support.html#sklearn.metrics.precision_recall_fscore_support) + support: number of instances that are the correct target values Across the board we can see that our model provided great insight into classifying patients based on the FNA scans. Important metrics to consider would be optimzing the *false positive* rate since within this context it would be bad for the model to tell someone that they are cancer free when in reality they have cancer. python def print_class_report(predictions, alg_name): """ Purpose ---------- Function helps automate the report generated by the sklearn package. Useful for multiple model comparison Parameters: ---------- predictions: The predictions made by the algorithm used alg_name: String containing the name of the algorithm used Returns: ---------- Returns classification report generated from sklearn. """ print('Classification Report for {0}:'.format(alg_name)) print(classification_report(predictions, test_class_set, target_names = dx))  python class_report = print_class_report(predictions_rf, 'Random Forest')  Classification Report for Random Forest: precision recall f1-score support Benign 0.99 0.96 0.97 73 Malignant 0.93 0.98 0.95 41 avg / total 0.97 0.96 0.97 114 ## Metrics for Random Forest Here I've accumulated the various metrics we used through this tutorial in a simple table! Showcasing the power and effectiveness of Random Forest Modeling. | Model | OOB Error Rate | Test Error Rate | Cross Validation Score | AUC | |-------|----------------|------------------------|-----------------|-----| | Random Forest | 0.04835 | 0.0351 | 0.947 (+/- 0.019) | 0.996 | # <a name='concl'></a>Conclusions For this tutorial we went through a number of metrics to assess the capabilites of our Random Forest, but this can be taken further when using background information of the data set. Feature engineering would be a powerful tool to extract and move forward into research regarding the important features. As well defining key metrics to utilize when optimizing model paramters. There have been advancements with image classification in the past decade that utilize the images intead of extracted features from images, but this data set is a great resource to become with machine learning processes. Especially for those who are just beginning to learn machine learning concepts. If you have any suggestions, recommendations, or corrections please reach out to me.