# Class 09: Model Regularization

## City Tempurature Data

Today we will start by looking at a small dataset of tempuratures from 327 cities across the world.

Our goal is to predict the average daily high tempurature for the month of May using the average daily tempuratures for the other elevent months of the year. This is not particularly hard but will be a great illustration of linear regression regularization.

The format of the data is the same as others we have looked at, but all of the data is in the training set.

### Ordinary regression

We can start by predicting the average daily high in May as a function of all of the other eleven months:

We can understand these coefficents best by plotting them over the course of the year:

As you might expect, April and Jun have the largest coefficents. You may not have thought that other months would have negative weights. What is going on here? These variables have fairly high correlations, so we can get a fairly predictive model by combining positive weights on some variables and negative weights on others.

### An analogy

In the article “The relationship between jaw, arm and leg size in three ethnic groups” (DOI: 10.1002/aja.1001360211), it is established that the length of the average human leg is roughly 20% larger than the length of their arms. We know that the length between someone’s left arm and their right arm are very highly correlated (virtually the same, depending on your precision). If we collected data and tried to predict the length of left legs as a function of right arms and left arms we would have several different choices that seem to given essentially the same fit.

We could put all of the model weight on the left arm:

All on the right arm:

Split it between both arms:

Or, do something quite a bit more complex:

If our measurements for left arms and right arms were exactly the same, there would be no way of distinguishing this infinite set of choices. This would then be a rank deficent model. If just one person has a different left and right arm measurment (perhaps an old injury or we are using very precise measuring tool), there will be a best model in the ordinary least squares sense. However, this may not match what the best model should be for future predictions.

### Regularization: Ridge regression

The tendency of linear regression to overfit the data in the presense of highly-correlated variables or sets of variables is a major issue in predictive modelling. So far our only option has been to control this by limiting the number of variables in a model, either directly or by limiting the number of interactions or basis expansion terms.

Regularization is a more direct approach to limiting the complexity of a model. Ridge regression solves this problem by modifying the ordinary least squares optimization task. It add a penalty term that penalizes the model for having coefficents that are too large. Specifically, we have:

Where

The tuning parameter lambda sets the level of penalization. If lambda is very large, the best model will have no coefficents. As lambda approaches zero, the ridge vector will limit towards the ordinary least squares solution. The term in from of the sum of squares makes such that lambda does not have to scale with the sample size (the sum of squares growns with larger samples). It is the same reason we use RMSE instead of MSE to compare our models.

The glmnet package provides a function for fitting the ridge regression model. It requires that we provide a matrix form of our data.

To run ridge regression, we will use the function cv.glmnet and set alpha equal to zero. I want us to understand what this model is doing before returning to some of the details later today.

The output vector is given in a different type of R object than from the lm function, but the printed output looks similar:

Let’s plot this again:

Now, the weights are all positive and spread out over the course of the year. There is still, however, a peak near April and June. What has happened is two fold: the penalty as made it “not worth” making offsetting negative weights and positive weights even if this slightly decreases the RMSE. The penalty is simply too great. Secondly, the ridge penalty in particular prefers many small weights compared to a few larger weights. That is why the values are spread throughout the year.

In our leg length example, ridge regression would strongly prefer this:

The squared size of these values is only 0.36, compared to the size of 1.44 for having the full weight on only one of the two variables.

### Regularization: Lasso regression

There are other ways of penalizing the size of the regression vector by replacing the sum of squares term with other penalties. Lasso regression replaces the sum of squares with the sum of absolute values:

Where

The behavior of the lasso regression has a very special property that can be extremely useful in predictive modeling. We can apply it using the cv.glmnet function by setting alpha to 1.

Plotting the coefficents again, we see the special behavior of the lasso regression in action:

The model has made every weight other than April and June set to exactly zero. As with ridge regression, the penalty is too great to make canceling negative weights and postive weights. Unlike ridge regression, the lasso penalty does not prefer many small weights to fewer large weights. Therefore, the model will pick only those variables which are most strongly correlated with the response; here, these are April and June.

The magic of lasso regression is that it sets many terms exactly to zero. This is accomplished because the absolute value does not have a derivative at zero. Therefore, the target function has many critical points where beta coefficents are equal to zero and a non-zero chance of setting any beta value to zero.

Which model would the lasso regression prefer in our left leg prediction example? It would put all of the weight on one arm, whichever one had a slightly higher correlation with the response.

## The elastic net with glmnet

The glmnet functions fits, and is named for, a collection of models that sit in-between ridge and lasso regression known as the elastic net. This is defined as:

You can see how we can get ridge by setting alpha to 0 and the lasso regression by setting alpha to 1 (the latter is the default). Settings with alpha somewhere in between 0 and 1 blend the behavior of the two estimators. Generally, the elastic net tends to still set some coefficents to zero but tries to spread the weight out evenly over higher correlated groups of variables.

### Model selection

Let’s look at the California house price dataset again.

We will run an elastic net regression on the data:

The function intelligently picks a set of 100 values of lambda to fit the elastic net to. We can see all of these by looking at the lambda paramter of the model

The coef and predict function, by default, choose the optimal value of lambda; we will see in the final section today exactly how this is done. We can manually pass either function the option s to specify which value of lambda we want the parameters for (that it is called s and not lambda has always been a pet-peeve of mine). We can pick any value between the largest and smallest lambda parameters, though it generally makes sense to pick values where the model was actually fit.

The primary reason for looking at other values of lambda is to see which variables are included when the penalty is very high. Here, at the 10th value of lambda (remember, they are in descending order), we see that only mean_household_income is included:

Setting it to the 14th value, shows three additional variables that seem particularly important:

Notice, however, that latitude and longitude are not popping up because we would need several interaction orders for them to become the most predictive variables. We’ll see next class some ways of mitigating these weakness of glmnet.

### Scaling and intercepts

As we wrote the lasso, ridge regression, and elastic net the scale of the predictor variables would have a large impact on the model. We did not focus on this because glmnet always scales the columns to have unit variance and zero mean. Generally, we do not have to worry about this and I have rarely found a reason to modify this default behavior.

The elastic net function also puts in a manual intercept for us. The intercept is treated differently because it does not have a penalty. Again, this is almost always the preferred behavior and you will likely have no reason to change it. If you accidentally do put in an intercept into the model, it will be silently ignored (why would the model put a weight on your intercept, which is penalized, rather than the internal one which is not?).

### Binomial and Multinomial elastic net

The “g” in glmnet stands for the same generalized as in glm and gam. We can fit binomial and multinomial models by adjusting the family function. Here is an example with the NBA dataset:

Unlike with glm and gam, we have to provide the family name in quotes and there is no link function to specify (logit is default and only choice):

The internal representation of the model is almost exactly the same. Here, we see the most important variables in the model (notice that we can give multiple values of lambda):

So, shot distance seems to be the most important, follwed by shot clock, and then touch time and closest defender height.

### Cross-validation

How does the elastic net determine which value of lambda is the best? It uses a process called cross-validation (that’s where the “cv” comes from) where the training set itself is used to do automated validation of the model.

Cross validation works as follows. Here I am using 10-fold validation, but you can modify to have k-fold validation:

• assign every training observation randomly to one of ten buckets
• fit a model using only data from buckets 2-10 with the first lambda value. Use this to predict the values from bucket 1.
• fit a model using only data from buckets 1, and 3-10. Use this to predict the values from bucket 2.
• repeat eight more time to get predictions for the other buckets
• you now have a prediction for each point in the training data. Compute the RMSE or other target metric on this set.
• repeat for all values of lambda (100, by default)

The “best” lambda is the one that is found to minimize the target metric from cross-validation. A final model is built using all of the data and that is the one that we get as an output.

Let’s visualize this by putting a very high order interaction into the California pricing data:

And fit the cross-validated elastic net model:

Plotting the model visualizes the cross-validation error for each value of lambda:

We can see the “best” lambda, as well as the other lambda defined by the dashed line above:

The second lambda gives a model that is within one standard error of the predictions from the “best” model but often has significantly fewer variables in it.