LabelEncoder-like functionality

[Hisham-Hussein]

Hi Max, and thanks for the great package.

I watched your interesting presentation titled (I don't want to be a dummy), and actually based on my experience, I tend to find that label_encoding of categorical variables is generally better than one_hot (dummy variables) encoding, in terms of training speed as well as robustness to overfitting.

So my question is: is there a function that transforms a categorical variable to numeric representation (like the LabelEncoder class in scikit-learn), plus handling novel levels in the test data?

That would be very nice to have!

Thank you in advance

[topepo]

Something like this:

> LabelEncoder <- function(x) {
+   as.numeric(x) - 1
+ }
> 
> test <- iris$Species[c(1:2, 51:52, 100:101)]
> test
[1] setosa     setosa     versicolor versicolor versicolor virginica 
Levels: setosa versicolor virginica
> LabelEncoder(test)
[1] 0 0 1 1 1 2

We generally eschew this way of representing qualitative data. It wouldn't be much trouble to ad this though.

I think that the tensorflow and/or keras packages might have built-in functions for doing this.

[Hisham-Hussein]

Thanks for your reply Max..

yes this works in a basic way. But I was hoping for a more sophisticated implementation:

• LabelEncoder is a kind of estimator class that fits the training data and remembers the levels it saw
• Then it transforms the training data
• Then it transforms the testing data, provided that the test data is not known in advance, so it should has a built-in functionality to deal with novel levels in the test data (which is encountered frequently in the real world)
• For example, once it sees novel levels in the test data ---> replace it with an arbitrary number the user chooses when fitting the transformer (and if he didn't specify that number, use NAs for the novel levels)

Something like what I'm describing is implemented here in CatEncoders package, and the author said it was inspired by the scikit-learn LabelEncoder class.

However I was hoping to see it in recipes because I really liked it and I wish we would never be forced to use any package for pre-processing aside from recipes and vtreat.

Also:
I'm curious to know why this way of representing qualitative data is not preferred?
Given that in your talk (I don't want to be a dummy) I saw that it led to either the same or better results than one-hot encoding, and in terms of training speed it was almost always better.

Also I've tried both representations (LabelEncoder and one-hot) many times in my work and in kaggle competitions and always found the one-hot encoding slower as well as more prone to overfitting, especially when using tree-based algorithms, especially xgboost

Could you please elaborate on this point? I'd like to learn from your experience as well

Thanks again Max,

Kind Regards,
Hisham

[topepo]

Then it transforms the testing data, provided that the test data is not known in advance, so it should has a built-in functionality to deal with novel levels in the test data (which is encountered frequently in the real world)

So does it increase the number of integers for the new level or drop that level into an existing slot? We are adding a feature hashing step (although I find that approach enormously unsatisfying from a statistical perspective).

I'm curious to know why this way of representing qualitative data is not preferred?

(the following rant is largely about unordered qualitative data)

I want to separate how we store qualitative data from how we represent it for our purposes. I think conflating the two (as integer values would) is bad.

Since R has a wonderful method for storing and summarizing qualitative data (factors), we don't have to take a low-level approach of encoding them as some type of number(s). For example, using table(factor_var) is much better than table(integer_var) because

• The factor has memory of the levels. An integer vector would need to have a definition for what the maximum number of integers would be so that it can put zeros in the table for levels that are possible but not observed.

• For both aesthetic and content reasons, showing the actual levels is far better for communicating values.

and so on.

Also, there is the not-so-far-fetched issue of people doing computations on the numbers that treat an integer value of 2 is twice the value of the integer value of the first level. For neophytes, this can happen easily and they might not be aware of it.

I could ramble on (and have in the past) but basically I feel that you should keep the best representation of the data until you absolutely need to encode it numerically. I have a hard time figuring out a case where some indicator variable encoding is inferior to an integer representation. An integer representation is probably a construct of how the implementation is written and that would be the "tail wagging the dog."

In recipes, step_ordinalscore does something similar to what you are interested in but it is only for ordered factors (where it makes sense to do this) and wouldn't know what to do with new values.

I'll take a look at CatEncoders too.

[lorenzwalthert]

On a related note: bfgray3/cattonum#20. The reason why I am interested in the functionality is because I fit a neural net with keras with embeddings and the input vector has to be numerical (for some reason). So I can't use the class factor to represent my data.

[kevinykuo]

Keras embedding layer requires that categorical variables be encoded as 0-based integer arrays. It doesn't seem like cf2e5e6 can do that since 0 is reserved for unseen labels?

[topepo]

I thought that was the convention for layer_embed; zero values corresponded to potentially new values.

[kevinykuo]

Here's the documentation for layers.Embedding: https://keras.io/layers/embeddings/. It doesn't seem like it has support for handling unseen data built in. mask_zero can be used if you have recurrent layers down the line, but it's not turned on by default anyway.

[topepo]

I was following this guide which uses

The first layer is the embedding layer with the size of 7 weekdays plus 1 (for the unknowns).

and then

embeddings$name <- c("none", levels(wday(df$date, label = T)) )

to make the first level of the factor apart from the actual factor levels.

Maybe @skeydan would have more info...

[skeydan]

I just commented on the other issue (#192 (comment))

I seem to come across the following way most often (just making use of a current example here and adding comments in-line )

###################    tokenize  ####################

# we will use the 5000 most frequent words only
# all others will be <unk>, here and in a later test set
# last I saw, but this could change over releases I guess, <unk> corresponded to 1
# so 0 is empty and later I will be using it to add <pad>
top_k <- 5000
tokenizer <- text_tokenizer(
  num_words = top_k,
  oov_token = "<unk>",
  filters = '!"#$%&()*+.,-/:;=?@[\\]^_`{|}~ ')
tokenizer$fit_on_texts(sample_captions)

# pad_sequences will use 0 to pad all captions to the same length
tokenizer$word_index["<pad>"] <- 0

########### convert text to integers #############

train_captions_tokenized <-
  tokenizer %>% texts_to_sequences(train_captions)


#######  create a lookup dataframe that allows us to go in both directions #######

word_index_df <- data.frame(
  word = tokenizer$word_index %>% names(),
  index = tokenizer$word_index %>% unlist(use.names = FALSE),
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)
word_index_df <- word_index_df %>% arrange(index)

#######  and some way to use that lookup table #######
decode_caption <- function(text) {
  paste(map(text, function(number)
    word_index_df %>%
      filter(index == number) %>%
      select(word) %>%
      pull()),
    collapse = " ")
}

###########  pad all sequences to the same length  ###########
train_captions_padded <-  pad_sequences(
  train_captions_tokenized,
  maxlen = max_length,
  padding = "post",
  truncating = "post"
)

So apart from the creating the lookup table, the recurring steps for me seem to be

• train ("fit") the tokenizer
• use it to convert text to integers (not to 1-hot, normally, as far as I see)
• then pad to a common length

As an illustration of the latter part, here's an official TF tutorial that does it like this (only it does not have to do the tokenizing):

https://tensorflow.rstudio.com/keras/articles/tutorial_basic_text_classification.html

Does this answer the question somehow or wasn't this what it's about? :-)

[kevinykuo]

The use case I'm mostly concerned about is using the embedding layer with a categorical variable in a structured data setting. What we're discussing is whether a categorical variable should be processed to be a 0- or 1- based vector. E.g. should iris$Species be encoded as 0, 0, ..., 1, 1, ..., 2, 2 or 1, 1, ..., 2, 2, ..., 3, 3.

[topepo]

I can modify it to be zero-based (as an option) but would throw errors if a new value is encountered. 😩

[skeydan]

My best guess ... I think it does not matter so much.... the way I understand the docs it means that per default, 0 can be a value like any other (if you leave mask_zero at its default of false)...

However if you just don’t use it, it would be like a mysterious value that never appears, but not change the results much...

So my guess would be starting from 1 could work just fine... but one could also do a quick test with simulated data to find out....

[kevinykuo]

Throwing an exception may be desirable in some cases, e.g. when you know you shouldn't have unseen labels. We can have a parameter that controls the behavior. FWIW Spark has a parameter handleInvalid that defaults to "error" when it sees unseen labels or missings.

It feels weird to me to have to set your input dim to number of classes + 1, when you know that you won't have new levels.

[topepo]

It feels weird to me to have to set your input dim to number of classes + 1, when you know that you won't have new levels.

But we don't know that and accommodating novel levels has been a consistent request.