GradientFeatureSelector

The algorithm in GradinetFeatureSelector comes from “Feature Gradients: Scalable Feature Selection via Discrete Relaxation”.

GradientFeatureSelector, a gradient-based search algorithm for feature selection.

  1. This approach extends a recent result on the estimation of learnability in the sublinear data regime by showing that the calculation can be performed iteratively (i.e., in mini-batches) and in linear time and space with respect to both the number of features D and the sample size N.
  2. This, along with a discrete-to-continuous relaxation of the search domain, allows for an efficient, gradient-based search algorithm among feature subsets for very large datasets.
  3. Crucially, this algorithm is capable of finding higher-order correlations between features and targets for both the N > D and N < D regimes, as opposed to approaches that do not consider such interactions and/or only consider one regime.

Usage

from nni.feature_engineering.gradient_selector import FeatureGradientSelector

# load data
...
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.33, random_state=42)

# initlize a selector
fgs = FeatureGradientSelector(n_features=10)
# fit data
fgs.fit(X_train, y_train)
# get improtant features
# will return the index with important feature here.
print(fgs.get_selected_features())

...

And you could reference the examples in /examples/feature_engineering/gradient_feature_selector/, too.

Parameters of class FeatureGradientSelector constructor

  • order (int, optional, default = 4) - What order of interactions to include. Higher orders may be more accurate but increase the run time. 12 is the maximum allowed order.
  • penatly (int, optional, default = 1) - Constant that multiplies the regularization term.
  • n_features (int, optional, default = None) - If None, will automatically choose number of features based on search. Otherwise, the number of top features to select.
  • max_features (int, optional, default = None) - If not None, will use the ‘elbow method’ to determine the number of features with max_features as the upper limit.
  • learning_rate (float, optional, default = 1e-1) - learning rate
  • init (zero, on, off, onhigh, offhigh, or sklearn, optional, default = zero) - How to initialize the vector of scores. ‘zero’ is the default.
  • n_epochs (int, optional, default = 1) - number of epochs to run
  • shuffle (bool, optional, default = True) - Shuffle “rows” prior to an epoch.
  • batch_size (int, optional, default = 1000) - Nnumber of “rows” to process at a time.
  • target_batch_size (int, optional, default = 1000) - Number of “rows” to accumulate gradients over. Useful when many rows will not fit into memory but are needed for accurate estimation.
  • classification (bool, optional, default = True) - If True, problem is classification, else regression.
  • ordinal (bool, optional, default = True) - If True, problem is ordinal classification. Requires classification to be True.
  • balanced (bool, optional, default = True) - If true, each class is weighted equally in optimization, otherwise weighted is done via support of each class. Requires classification to be True.
  • prerocess (str, optional, default = ‘zscore’) - ‘zscore’ which refers to centering and normalizing data to unit variance or ‘center’ which only centers the data to 0 mean.
  • soft_grouping (bool, optional, default = True) - If True, groups represent features that come from the same source. Used to encourage sparsity of groups and features within groups.
  • verbose (int, optional, default = 0) - Controls the verbosity when fitting. Set to 0 for no printing 1 or higher for printing every verbose number of gradient steps.
  • device (str, optional, default = ‘cpu’) - ‘cpu’ to run on CPU and ‘cuda’ to run on GPU. Runs much faster on GPU

Requirement of fit FuncArgs

  • X (array-like, require) - The training input samples which shape = [n_samples, n_features]
  • y (array-like, require) - The target values (class labels in classification, real numbers in regression) which shape = [n_samples].
  • groups (array-like, optional, default = None) - Groups of columns that must be selected as a unit. e.g. [0, 0, 1, 2] specifies the first two columns are part of a group. Which shape is [n_features].

Requirement of get_selected_features FuncArgs

For now, the get_selected_features function has no parameters.