Naive Bayes Classifier From Scratch With PyTorch

Alcohol consumption prediction with a naive bayes classifier built from scratch using Pytorch.
machine learning
pytorch
python
exploratory data analysis
from scratch
Author
Published

Sep 17, 2020

In this experiment, the Naive Bayes Classifier method will be implemented from scratch using PyTorch. We will train our model on the Student Alcohol Consumption dataset to try to predict if a student frequently drink alcohol or not.

Before starting, feel free to read the previous article of this series.

The data contains the following attributes:

import os
import math
import torch
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from pprint import pprint
from sklearn.base import BaseEstimator
from sklearn.preprocessing import LabelEncoder
from sklearn.model_selection import cross_val_score

Data Preparation

First, let’s read the data from .csv files and merge them together:

students_mat = pd.read_csv(os.path.join('data', 'student-mat.csv'))
students_por = pd.read_csv(os.path.join('data', 'student-por.csv'))

# Concatenating students data from math and portuguese class
students = pd.concat([students_mat, students_por], axis=0)

# Averaging three grades into one single grade
students['grade'] = (students['G1'] + students['G1'] + students['G3']) / 3

# Combining weekly and weekend alcohol consumption into a single attribute
students['alc'] = students['Walc'] + students['Dalc']

# Drop the combined columns
students = students.drop(columns=['G1', 'G2', 'G3', 'school'])

students.head(5)
sex age address famsize Pstatus Medu Fedu Mjob Fjob reason ... romantic famrel freetime goout Dalc Walc health absences grade alc
0 F 18 U GT3 A 4 4 at_home teacher course ... no 4 3 4 1 1 3 6 5.333333 2
1 F 17 U GT3 T 1 1 at_home other course ... no 5 3 3 1 1 3 4 5.333333 2
2 F 15 U LE3 T 1 1 at_home other other ... no 4 3 2 2 3 3 10 8.000000 5
3 F 15 U GT3 T 4 2 health services home ... yes 3 2 2 1 1 5 2 15.000000 2
4 F 16 U GT3 T 3 3 other other home ... no 4 3 2 1 2 5 4 7.333333 3

5 rows × 31 columns

Transform string to categorical values:

categorical_dict = {}
for col in students.columns:
    # For each column of type object, use sklearn label encoder and add the mapping to a dictionary
    if students[col].dtype == 'object':
        le = LabelEncoder() 
        students[col] = le.fit_transform(students[col])
        categorical_dict[col] = dict(zip(le.classes_, le.transform(le.classes_)))
pprint(categorical_dict)
{'Fjob': {'at_home': 0, 'health': 1, 'other': 2, 'services': 3, 'teacher': 4},
 'Mjob': {'at_home': 0, 'health': 1, 'other': 2, 'services': 3, 'teacher': 4},
 'Pstatus': {'A': 0, 'T': 1},
 'activities': {'no': 0, 'yes': 1},
 'address': {'R': 0, 'U': 1},
 'famsize': {'GT3': 0, 'LE3': 1},
 'famsup': {'no': 0, 'yes': 1},
 'guardian': {'father': 0, 'mother': 1, 'other': 2},
 'higher': {'no': 0, 'yes': 1},
 'internet': {'no': 0, 'yes': 1},
 'nursery': {'no': 0, 'yes': 1},
 'paid': {'no': 0, 'yes': 1},
 'reason': {'course': 0, 'home': 1, 'other': 2, 'reputation': 3},
 'romantic': {'no': 0, 'yes': 1},
 'schoolsup': {'no': 0, 'yes': 1},
 'sex': {'F': 0, 'M': 1}}

Here is the dictonary of the categorical labels

Exploratory Data Analysis

Correlation Heatmap

plt.figure(figsize=(20, 15))
sns.heatmap(students.corr(), annot=True, square=True, fmt='0.2f')
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x1b1a6856d48>

Just from the correlation heatmap, we can have an overview of the impact of alcohol consumption on students. Based on the linear correlation between the target and the features, there is a tendency for students consuming alcohol frequently to have more chance to:

  • have lower grades
  • have more absences
  • hang out more often
  • not aim to achieve higher education
  • study less

Among all theses cases, the attributes that are the most correlated with the target are the grades, the study time and if the student is a men.

Impact of alcohol consumption on students life

def plot_pie(data, column, ax):
    """Plots a pie diagram
    
    Args:
        data: A pandas data frame for the data.
        columns: A list containing the columns we are interested in.
        ax: The plt ax from which to plot the pie.
    """
    counts = data[column].value_counts()
    percent = counts / counts.sum() * 100
    labels = counts.index
    ax.pie(x=percent, labels=labels, autopct='%1.0f%%')
_, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(15, 7))
plot_pie(students, column='Dalc', ax=ax1)
plot_pie(students, column='Walc', ax=ax2)
ax1.set_title('Weekday Alcohol Consumption')
ax2.set_title('Weekend Alcohol Consumption')
Text(0.5, 1.0, 'Weekend Alcohol Consumption')

The alcohol consumption during workdays is relatively low compared to the weekend consumption. Most students prefer to stay sober during workdays. Let’s see how those behaviors have an impact on students success and life.

_, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(20, 4))
sns.boxplot(y='Dalc', x='studytime', orient='h', data=students, ax=ax1)
sns.boxplot(y='Walc', x='studytime', orient='h', data=students, ax=ax2)
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x1b1a8863cc8>

Students who do not drink alcohol during weekdays usually study more than those who do. But the amount of study hours of students who do not drink during weekend is much more than the ones who do.

sober_absences = students.loc[students['Dalc'] <= 2, 'absences']
drunk_absences = students.loc[students['Dalc'] > 2, 'absences']
_, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(14, 4))

ax1.set_xlim(-10, 35)
ax2.set_xlim(-10, 35)
ax1.set_ylim(0, 0.30)
ax2.set_ylim(0, 0.30)
ax1.set_title('Absences distribution of sober workdays students')
ax2.set_title('Absences distribution of drunk workdays students')
sns.distplot(sober_absences, ax=ax1)
sns.distplot(drunk_absences, ax=ax2)
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x1b1a8de7b08>

Students who drink two times or more a week have a tendency to be more absent in class.

_, (ax1, ax2, ax3) = plt.subplots(1, 3, figsize=(20, 4))
sober_grades = students.loc[students['Dalc'] == 1, 'grade']
drunk_grades = students.loc[students['Dalc'] > 1, 'grade']
severe_drunk_grades = students.loc[students['Dalc'] == 5, 'grade']
ax1.set_ylim(0, 0.18)
ax2.set_ylim(0, 0.18)
ax3.set_ylim(0, 0.18)
ax1.set_xlim(0, 20)
ax2.set_xlim(0, 20)
ax3.set_xlim(0, 20)
ax1.set_title('Grades distribution of sober weekdays students')
ax2.set_title('Grades distribution of students consuming alcohol on weekdays')
ax3.set_title('Grades distribution of students with high weekdays consumption')
sns.distplot(sober_grades, ax=ax1)
sns.distplot(drunk_grades, ax=ax2)
sns.distplot(severe_drunk_grades, ax=ax3)
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x1b1a7d7e7c8>

Students who drink even a little during workdays have lower grades than those who do not. The impact on grades is much more important for students with severe consumption.

_, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(20, 4))
sober_grades = students.loc[students['Walc'] == 1, 'grade']
severe_drunk_grades = students.loc[students['Walc'] == 5, 'grade']
ax1.set_ylim(0, 0.18)
ax2.set_ylim(0, 0.18)
ax1.set_xlim(0, 20)
ax2.set_xlim(0, 20)
ax1.set_title('Grades distribution of students sober during the weekend')
ax2.set_title('Grades distribution of students with severe consumption during weekends')
sns.distplot(sober_grades, ax=ax1)
sns.distplot(severe_drunk_grades, ax=ax2)
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x1b1a8e2e188>

However, even heavy alcohol consumption during the weekend has little impact on student grades. Great news ! We can party during the weekend and it does not affect our productivity.

Pre-processing

In this sections, we will convert the alcohol consumption data to categorical labels The original label goes from 1 to 5 from no consumption to severe consumption. It makes more sense to try to predict the weekly consumption of students so we combined the two attributes by summing them.

The fourth values seems like a good threshold to create three categorical classes:

  • \([2, 3]\) little alcohol consumption
  • \([4, 5]\) moderate alcohol consumption
  • \([6, 10]\) severe alcohol consumption
sns.countplot(students['alc'])
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x1b1a7f9ae88>


# Converting weekly consumption to classes
students.loc[students['alc'] <= 3, 'alc'] = 0                            # little 
students.loc[(students['alc'] > 3) & (students['alc'] <= 5), 'alc'] = 1  # moderate
students.loc[students['alc'] > 5, 'alc'] = 2                             # severe

# We need to distinguish categorical from numeric values to fit different distributions
# when we will fit the model
numeric_cols = ['age',
                'traveltime',
                'studytime',
                'failures',
                'famrel',
                'freetime',
                'goout',
                'health',
                'absences',
                'grade',
                'alc']

students = students.drop(columns=['Walc', 'Dalc'])

is_categorical = []
for col in students.columns:
    if col in numeric_cols:
        is_categorical.append(0)
    else:
        is_categorical.append(1)
        
# Convert data to torch tensor
X = torch.from_numpy(students.iloc[:, :-1].values).float()
y = torch.from_numpy(students.iloc[:, -1].values).float()

Naive Bayes Classifier

Considering a vector of discrete values \(\boldsymbol{x} \in \{1, \dots, K\}^D\), where \(K\) is the number of values for each feature and \(D\) the number of features. The naive bayes classifier assumes that the data is conditionally independant given the class label i.e \(p(\boldsymbol{x}|y=c)\). This assumption allows us to write the class conditional density as a product: \[\begin{align} p(\boldsymbol{x} | y = c, \boldsymbol{\theta}) = \prod_{i=1}^{K}p(x_i | y = c, \boldsymbol{\theta}_{ic}) \end{align}\] The model is called “naive” since we do not expect the features to be independent, even conditional on the class label.

Assuming the bayes theorem: \[\begin{align} P(A|B) = \frac{P(A)P(B|A)}{P(B)} \end{align}\] To have an easier understanding of the relation between the training of a model and the bayes theorem, let’s reformulate this equation in terms of class and sample: \[\begin{align} &P(\text{class}|\text{sample}) = \\ &\frac{P(\text{class})P(\text{sample}|\text{class})}{P(\text{sample})} \end{align}\]

When predicting, we utilize the following approximation: \[\begin{align} &P(c_j|\boldsymbol{x}) \sim \\ &P(c_j)P(x_i|c_j)\dots P(x_D|c_j) \end{align}\]

In other words, for each potential class, we multiply the probability of the class (prior) with the probability of finding each features of \(x_i\) in each class \(c_j\) (posterior).

For categorical or binay features, we group the training samples according to each class The form of the class-conditional density depends on the type of each feature. We give some possibilities below:

  • For real values, we can use the Gaussian distribution: \[\begin{align} p(\boldsymbol{x} | y = c, \boldsymbol{\theta}) = \prod_{i=1}^{D} \mathcal{N}(x_i| \mu_{ic}, \sigma_{ic}^2) \end{align}\]
  • For binary values, we can use a Bernouilli distribution, where \(\mu_{ic}\) is the probability that feature \(i\) occurs in class \(c\): \[\begin{align} p(\boldsymbol{x} | y = c, \boldsymbol{\theta}) = \prod_{i=1}^{D} \text{Ber}(x_i | \mu_{ic}) \end{align}\]
  • For categorical features, we can use a Multinouilli distribution, where \(\boldsymbol{\mu}_{ic}\) is an histogram over the possible values for \(x_i\) in class \(c\): \[\begin{align} p(\boldsymbol{x} | y = c, \boldsymbol{\theta}) = \prod_{i=1}^{D}\text{Cat}(x_i | \boldsymbol{\mu}_{ic}) \end{align}\]

These are the training steps:

  • group data according to the class label \(c_i\)
  • compute the prior probability i.e \(p(c_i)\) the proportion of samples inside each class \(c_i\) of the whole training set
  • for each feature:
    • if the feature is categorical, compute \(p(\boldsymbol{x_j} | c_i)\) for \(j = 1, \dots, D\) and \(i = 1, \dots, C\):
      • for each possible values of this feature in the training samples of class \(c_i\), compute the probability that this feature appears in class \(c_i\)
    • if the feature is continuous, compute \(p(\boldsymbol{x_j} | c_i)\) for \(j = 1, \dots, D\) and \(i = 1, \dots, C\):
      • compute the mean \(\mu\) and standard deviation \(\sigma\) of the training samples of class \(c_i\) and fit a normal distribution \(\mathcal{N}(\mu, \sigma^2)\)

To predict on a new samples:

  • for each class \(c_i\), compute \(p(c_i | x)\) as:
    • multiply the prior of each class \(p(c_i)\) by:
    • for each features \(k\):
      • if categorical, multiply by the probabilities calculated earlier \(p(\boldsymbol{x_k} | c_i)\) where \(x_k\) is the value of the input on feature \(k\).
      • if continuous, multiply by \(\mathcal{N}(x_k | \mu, \sigma^2)\) the likelihood of the gaussian distribution given the input \(x_k\)
  • return the highest probability \(p(c_i | x)\) of all classes
class NaiveBayesClassifier(BaseEstimator):
    """Class for the naive bayes classifier
    
    Inherits from sklearn BaseEstimator class to use cross validation.
    
    Attributes:
        offset: An integer to increment the conditional probabilities
            in order to smooth probabilities to avoid that a posterior
            probability be 0.
        is_categorical: A list containing 0 and 1 for indicating if a
            feature is categorical or numerical.
        nb_features: An integer for the numbers of feature of the data.
        nb_class: An integer for the number of classes in the labels.
        class_probs: A torch tensor for the proportion of each class.
        cond_probs: A torch tensor for the conditional probability of
            having a given value on a certain feature in the population 
            of each class.
    """
    
    def __init__(self, offset=1):
        """Init function for the naive bayes class"""
        self.offset = offset
    
    def fit(self, X, y, **kwargs):
        """Fits the model given data and labels as input
        
        Args:
            X: A torch tensor for the data.
            y: A torch tensor for the labels.
        """
        # It is mandatory to pass a list describing if each feature is categorical or numerical
        if 'is_categorical' not in kwargs:
            raise ValueError('must pass \'is_categorical\' to fit through **kwargs')
        self.is_categorical = kwargs['is_categorical']
        size = X.shape[0]
        
        self.nb_features = X.shape[1]
        y_uvals = y.unique()
        self.nb_class = len(y_uvals)
        # Probability of each class in the training set
        self.class_probs = y.int().bincount().float() / size
        
        features_maxvals = torch.zeros((self.nb_features,), dtype=torch.int32)
        for j in range(self.nb_features):
            features_maxvals[j] = X[:, j].max()
        
        # All the posterior probabilites
        cond_probs = [] 
        for i in range(self.nb_class):
            cond_probs.append([])
            # Group samples by class
            idx = torch.where(y == y_uvals[i])[0]
            elts = X[idx]
            
            size_class = elts.shape[0]
            for j in range(self.nb_features):
                cond_probs[i].append([])
                if self.is_categorical[j]:
                    # If categorical
                    # For each features
                    for k in range(features_maxvals[j] + 1):
                        # Count the number of occurence of each value in this feature given the group class
                        # Divided by the number of samples in the class
                        p_x_k = (torch.where(elts[:, j] == k)[0].shape[0] + self.offset) / size_class
                        # Append to posteriors probabilities
                        cond_probs[i][j].append(p_x_k)
                else:
                    # If numerical
                    features_class = elts[:, j]
                    # Compute mean and std
                    mean = features_class.mean()
                    std = (features_class - mean).pow(2).mean().sqrt()
                    # Store these value to use them for the gaussian likelihood
                    cond_probs[i][j] = [mean, std]
        self.cond_probs = cond_probs
        return 0
    
    def gaussian_likelihood(self, X, mean, std):
        """Computes the gaussian likelihood
        
        Args:
            X: A torch tensor for the data.
            mean: A float for the mean of the gaussian.
            std: A flot for the standard deviation of the gaussian.
        """
        return (1 / (2 * math.pi * std.pow(2))) * torch.exp(-0.5 * ((X - mean) / std).pow(2))
    
    def predict(self, X):
        """Predicts labels given an input
        
        Args:
            X: A torch tensor containing a batch of data.
        """
        if len(X.shape) == 1:
            X = X.unsqueeze(0)
        
        nb_samples = X.shape[0]
        pred_probs = torch.zeros((nb_samples, self.nb_class), dtype=torch.float32)
        for k in range(nb_samples):
            elt = X[k]
            for i in range(self.nb_class):
                # Set probability by the prior (class probability)
                pred_probs[k][i] = self.class_probs[i]
                prob_feature_per_class = self.cond_probs[i]
                for j in range(self.nb_features):
                    if self.is_categorical[j]:
                        # If categorical get the probability of drawing the value of the input on feature j
                        # inside class i
                        pred_probs[k][i] *= prob_feature_per_class[j][elt[j].int()]
                    else:
                        # If numerical, multiply by the gaussian likelihood with parameters
                        # mean and std of the class i on feature j
                        mean, std = prob_feature_per_class[j]
                        pred_probs[k][i] *= self.gaussian_likelihood(elt[j], mean, std)
        # Return the highest probability among all classes
        return pred_probs.argmax(dim=1)
nbc = NaiveBayesClassifier()

fit_params = {'is_categorical' : is_categorical}
cross_val_score(nbc, X, y, cv=5, scoring='accuracy', fit_params=fit_params).mean()
0.5689409274935591

Conclusion

Even if the naive bayes model makes a strong assumption that the features are conditionaly independant given the class label, it achieved almost 57% accuracy on three output classes. This model does not perform as well as the more sophisticated models but it is very fast and suited as a baseline model for most classification tasks.

On the other hand, naive bayes models can be descent predictors but they are considered as bad estimators i.e the output probabilities are not to be taken seriously. The naive bayes technique is performing better than logistic regression on small datasets, whereas it is the opposite for large datasets.

Now you can read the next article of this series on Clustering Methods !


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About the author

Axel Mendoza

Senior MLOps Engineer

I'm a Senior MLOps Engineer with 5+ years of experience in building end-to-end Machine Learning products. From my industry experience, I write long-form articles on MLOps to help you build real-world AI systems.