Ibex

Ami Tavory, Shahar Azulay, Tali Raveh-Sadka

This library aims for two (somewhat independent) goals:

• providing pandas adapters for estimators conforming to the scikit-learn protocol, in particular those of scikit-learn itself
• providing easier, and more succinct ways of combining estimators, features, and pipelines

(You might also want to check out the excellent pandas-sklearn which has the same aims, but takes a very different approach.)

The full documentation at defines these matters in detail, but the library has an extremely-small interface.

TL;DR

The following short example shows the main points of the library. It is an adaptation of the scikit-learn example Concatenating multiple feature extraction methods. In this example, we build a classifier for the iris dataset using a combination of PCA, univariate feature selection, and a support vecor machine classifier.

We first load the Iris dataset into a pandas DataFrame.

>>> import numpy as np
>>> from sklearn import datasets
>>> import pandas as pd
>>>
>>> iris = datasets.load_iris()
>>> features, targets, iris = iris['feature_names'], iris['target_names'], pd.DataFrame(
...     np.c_[iris['data'], iris['target']],
...     columns=iris['feature_names']+['class'])
>>> iris['class'] = iris['class'].map(pd.Series(targets))
>>>
>>> iris.head()
   sepal length (cm)  sepal width (cm)  petal length (cm)  petal width (cm)  \
0                5.1               3.5                1.4               0.2
1                4.9               3.0                1.4               0.2
2                4.7               3.2                1.3               0.2
3                4.6               3.1                1.5               0.2
4                5.0               3.6                1.4               0.2
<BLANKLINE>
    class
0  setosa
1  setosa
2  setosa
3  setosa
4  setosa

Now, we import the relevant steps. Note that, in this example, we import them from ibex.sklearn rather than sklearn.

>>> from ibex.sklearn.svm import SVC as PdSVC
>>> from ibex.sklearn.feature_selection import SelectKBest as PdSelectKBest
>>> from ibex.sklearn.decomposition import PCA as PdPCA

(Of course, it's possible to import steps from sklearn as well, and use them alongside and together with the steps of ibex.sklearn.)

Finally, we construct a pipeline that, given a DataFrame of features:

• horizontally concatenates a 2-component PCA DataFrame, and the best-feature DataFrame, to a resulting DataFrame

• then, passes the result to a support-vector machine classifier outputting a pandas series:

  >>> clf = PdPCA(n_components=2) + PdSelectKBest(k=1) | PdSVC(kernel="linear")

clf is now a pandas-ware classifier, but otherwise can be used pretty much like all sklearn estimator. For example,

>>> param_grid = dict(
...     featureunion__pca__n_components=[1, 2, 3],
...     featureunion__selectkbest__k=[1, 2],
...     svc__C=[0.1, 1, 10])
>>> try:
...     from ibex.sklearn.model_selection import GridSearchCV as PdGridSearchCV
... except: # Accomodate older versions of sklearn
...     from ibex.sklearn.grid_search import GridSearchCV as PdGridSearchCV
>>> PdGridSearchCV(clf, param_grid=param_grid).fit(iris[features], iris['class']) # doctest: +SKIP
...

So what does this add to the original version?

1. The estimators perform verification and processing on the inputs and outputs. They verify column names following calls to fit, and index results according to those of the inputs. This helps catch bugs.

2. The results are much more interpretable:

   >>> svc = PdSVC(kernel="linear", probability=True)

   Find the coefficients of the boundaries between the different classes:

   >>> svc.fit(iris[features], iris['class']).coef_
               sepal length (cm)  sepal width (cm)  petal length (cm)  \
   setosa              -0.046259          0.521183          -1.003045
   versicolor          -0.007223          0.178941          -0.538365
   virginica            0.595498          0.973900          -2.031000
   <BLANKLINE>
               petal width (cm)
   setosa             -0.464130
   versicolor         -0.292393
   virginica          -2.006303

   Predict belonging to classes:

   >>> svc.fit(iris[features], iris['class']).predict_proba(iris[features])
       setosa  versicolor  virginica
   0    0.97...    0.01...   0.00...
   ...

   Find the coefficients of the boundaries between the different classes in a pipeline:

   >>> clf = PdPCA(n_components=2) + PdSelectKBest(k=1) | svc
   >>> clf = clf.fit(iris[features], iris['class'])
   >>> svc.coef_
                   pca                 selectkbest
               comp_0    comp_1 petal length (cm)
   setosa     -0.757016  ...0.376680         -0.575197
   versicolor -0.351218  ...0.141699         -0.317562
   virginica  -1.529320  ...1.472771         -1.509391

3. It allows writinfitg Pandas-munging estimators (see also Multiple-Row Features In The Movielens Dataset).

4. Using DataFrame metadata, it allows writing more complex meta-learning algorithms, such as stacking and nested labeled and stratified cross validation.

5. The pipeline syntax is succinct and clear (see Motivation For Shorter Combinations).