Tag Archives: kaggle

Trees, Ridges and Bulldozers made in 1000 AD

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New Kaggle contest! Estimating auction price for second hand construction equipment. Didn’t know bulldozer auctions were such a big thing. We had lots of historical data (400000 auctions, starting from 1989) and we had to estimate prices a few months “into the future” (2012).

Getting to know the data

Data cleaning is a very important step when analyzing most datasets, including this one. There were a lot of noisy values. For example, a lot of the equipment appeared to have been made in the year 1000. I’m no expert in bulldozers, but the guys who are (providing us the data) told us that’s noise. So, to help the competitors, they provided an index with info regarding each bulldozer in the dataset. After “correcting” the train/test data using the index, I got worse results for my model. In the end, I used the index only for filling in missing values. Other competitors used the original data along with the index data – that might have worked a little better.

Building the model

My first model was composed out of two Random Forest Regressors and two Gradient Boosting Regressors (python using sklearn), averaged using equal weights. The parameters were set by hand, after very little testing.

A first idea of improving came after noticing a lot of the features were relative to the bulldozer category. There were six categories: ‘Motorgrader’, ‘Track Type Tractor, Dozer’, ‘Hydraulic Excavator, Track’, ‘Wheel Loader’, ‘Skid Steer Loader’ and ‘Backhoe Loader’. So I segmented the data by category and trained instances of the first model (2 RFR + 2 GBR) on each subset. This generated a fair improvement.

I continued on this line by segmenting the data even more, based on subcategory. There were around 70 subcategories. Again, segmenting and training 70 models generated another improvement. By this time, the first model (trained on the whole data), wasn’t contributing at all compared to the other two, so I removed it from the equation. With this setup, I was on 10th place on the public leaderboard one week before the end of the competition. The hosts released the leaderboard dataset, so we could also train on it, and froze the leaderboard (no use for it when you can train on the leaderboard data).

Putting the model on steroids

Usually, when you want to find the best parameters for a model, you do grid search. For my “2 RFR + 2 GBR” model, I just tested a few parameters by hand. Time to put the Core i7 to work! But instead of grid seach, which tries all combinations and keeps the best, I tried all combinations and kept the best 20-30. Afterwards, I combined them using a linear model (in this case – Ridge Regression).

I also tried other models (besides RFR and GBR) to add to the cocktail. While nothing even approached the performance GBR was getting, some managed to improve the overall score. I kept NuSVR and Lasso, also trained on (sub)categories.

Outcome and final thoughts

Based on my model’s improvement over the final week (the one with the frozen leaderboard) and my estimation over my competitors’ improvements, I expected a final ranking of 5th – 7th. Unfortunately, I came 16th. I’ve made two errors in my process:

The first one was the improper use of the auction year when training. This generated a bias in the model. Usually, I was training on auctions that took place until 2010 and trained on auctions from 2011. Nothing wrong here. Then I also trained on actions until 2011 and tested on the first part of 2012 (public leaderboard data). Nothing wrong here. For the final model, I trained on the auctions until the first part of 2012 and tested on the second part of 2012. BOOM!

Prices fluctuate a lot during the year. They are usually higher during spring and lower during fall. When I was training on data from a whole year, there was no bias for that year, since it was a value the model hasn’t seen in training. But when I tested on fall data from 2012 on a model trained using spring data from that same year, the estimated prices were a little higher.

The second error was with averaging the 20-30 small models trained on (sub)categories. In a previous contest I used neural networks for this, but the final score fluctuated too much for my taste. I also tested genetic algorithms, but I thought the scores were not very good. Ridge regression gave significantly better results. There was one small problem though: it assigned positive as well as negative weights. Usually, ensembling weights are positive and sum to one. So price estimates are averages from a lot of predictions and they generalize well to unseen cases. With negative weights, estimates are no longer averages and generalizing gets a little unpredictable.

For posterity, the code is here. I recommend checking out the winning approaches on the competition’s forum.

Event Recommendation Contest on Kaggle

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The Event Recommendation Engine Challenge just finished on Kaggle.com. I managed to build a good model and finished 7th.

Given a dataset of users and events, we had to predict which event users will be interested in. We were given 38000 users, 3 million events and a bunch of data about them (like friends, attendance or interest in events).

First thing, preprocess the data and put it in a database. I had to go for a database since I couldn’t fit everything in RAM. I chose MongoDB because it’s just so easy to set up. It wasn’t the best database choice for this task. I should try and experiment with Neo4j in the future.

Regarding preprocessing, the most I’ve struggled with was location. Most users had an unformatted location string. Around half of the events had a well formatted location (city, state and country), as well as GPS coordinates. At first, I used the Yahoo Placemaker API to convert user locations into coordinates. This way, I could compute distances between users and events.

I then noticed that external data is not allowed. No problem. With 1.6 million events having both location strings and GPS coordinates, I was able to build a database of spatial information. I could then match user locations and get some coordinates without an external API.

Given a (user, event) pair, these were the features I’ve used in my model:

  • number of users attending, not attending, maybe attending and invited to the event;
  • number of friends attending, not attending, maybe attending and invited to the event;
  • location similarity between user and event;
  • number of users attending the event that have also attended events the user did;
  • similarity between the event and events the user attended, based on clusters – I used KMeans (loving scikit-learn) to cluster together similar events, based on words; I chose a few values for the number of clusters, in order to capture a little granularity;
  • same thing for events attended by friends;
  • same thing for events the user (or his friends) didn’t attend to;
  • time to event, apparently most important feature;
  • similarity between the event’s word distribution and the average distribution of words for events the user attended;
  • if the user was invited or not.

I didn’t manage to get anything out of user age and gender. I’m still wondering if (and how) that info can be used in some useful way.

In order to generate results, I went for the classifier approach (two classes, interested and not interested). I also tried ranking and regression, but classifying worked best. I chose a Random Forest (again.. scikit-learn), because it was able to work with missing values. I also added Logistic Regression (on the features that didn’t have missing values) and averaged the results.

The full code is on github. Mind you, except the scripts main.py and model.py, all other files contain code snippets I built on the fly while exploring the data in ipython.

My first Kaggle competition (and how I ranked 3rd)

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1. Intro
First, a few words about Kaggle. It’s a website/community for machine learning competitions. Companies and organizations share a problem (most of the time it’s an actual real world problem), provide a dataset and offer prizes for the best performing models. Some examples of current competitions: predict customer retention, discover dark matter by how it bends light in space photos (AWESOME), predict diseases in patients based on their history (and win $3 million!) and so on.

I was planning to join a competition on Kaggle since I found out about the website (in spring, I think), but I never found the time to. And then I got an email about a new competition – to detect insults in comments. I had a little knowledge on text mining, I also had some free time, so I downloaded the dataset and started coding.

Impermium, the company behind this competition, came with some prize money. First place got $7000, while second place got $2500. Third place got just the eternal glory, yay!

For implementation, I used python, the wonderful scikit-learn library (for the SVM implementation) and the neurolab library (for the neural network implementation).

2. General System Architecture
Here I’ll briefly describe the architecture of the model that performed the best. This architecture will be expanded afterwards.

First, all texts were preprocessed. Then they were fed into 3 different classifiers: word-level SVM, character-level SVM and a dictionary-based classifier. The output from each classifier, along with some other features, were fed into a neural network.

3. Tokenizing
This step was a lot more important than I first imagined. Here are some of the things that I tried and improved (or at least seemed to) the model score:
– removing links, html entities and html code
– formatting whitespaces (removing duplicates, removing newlines and tabs)
– removing non-ascii characters (I didn’t think people curse using special characters; I would reconsider this decision, given more time)
– adding special tokens in texts for character groups such as: #$%#$ (some people curse like this), ?!???, !!!!!!
– removing repeated letters: coooool -> cool, niiiice -> niice (yes, this is not the best implementation, but it usually works)
– replacing smileys by 2 tokens, one for positive smileys and one for negative smileys (“saddies”?)
– removing dots inside words (some people put dots inside curse words – they’re not getting away with this!)
– grouping together sequences of one-letter words – like “f u c k” (some people split a curse word in letters – they’re not getting away with it!)
– trying to group consecutive words (like “fu ck”) using a dictionary (some people split curse words in 2 – they’re not getting away with it!)

4. Classifiers
The first classifier was an SVM on word ngrams, with n from 1 to 4. Not a lot can be said here, I just imported it, fed it the ngrams generated from the tokenized text and let scikit-learn do its stuff.

The second classifier was another SVM, this time on character ngrams, with n from 4 to 10.

The third classifier was a custom build dictionary based classifier. It used a curse words dictionary (which I found online and then enriched with words I found in the misclassified examples). This classifier just looked if the text had words from the dictionary and also words like “you”, “your”, “yourself” (which you use when cursing somebody). It then computed a simple score based on the distances between the curse words and the “you”-words.

The final classifier was used to combine the previous ones. I used a neural network, but I’m sure other techniques can be applied here. The network had a hidden layer of 3 neurons and was trained using the function “train_rprop” (from the neurolab library). I took advantage of the network’s flexibility and added some more features as inputs:
– the ratio of curse words
– the text length
– the ratio of *, ! or ?
– the ratio of capital letter (should have used words in all caps instead)

5. Epilogue
I used k-folds cross-validation for model selection (scikit-learn comes with some nifty tools here also).

In total, I worked around one week for this. I tried a lot more models and approaches, but what I’ve showed here got the best score. I’d love to share the code, but it’s written so crappily (due to some hard core time constraints) that I’m too ashamed to release it. Still, if anybody wants it, please contact me – I’ll share it after explicitly agreeing to one condition: Don’t make fun of it. Screw that, code available here.

I think 3rd place is a very good result (considering it’s my first competition ever). Still, I noticed that there were a lot of mislabeled examples (perhaps more than the 1% stated on the contest page). This might have had an influence on the final ranking (the difference between the winner’s score and the fifth score was less than 1%).

Yet again, I always say “Fortune favors the brave” (I don’t believe in luck). Jumping to some actionable information, light bending dark matter detection sounds pretty cool!