My question is about the typical feed-forward single-hidden-layer backprop neural network, as implemented in package nnet, and trained with 'train()' in package caret. This is related to this question [Multi-layer neural network wont predict negative values ] but in the context of the nnet and caret packages in R.
I demonstrate the problem with a simple regression example where Y = sin(X) + small error:
(a) raw Y ~ raw X: predicted outputs are uniformly zero where raw Y < 0.
(b) scaled Y (to 0-1) ~ raw X: solution looks great; see code below.
library(nnet)
X <- t(t(runif(200, -pi, pi)))
Y <- t(t(sin(X))) # Y ~ sin(X)
Y <- Y + rnorm(200, 0, .05) # Add a little noise
Y_01 <- (Y - min(Y))/diff(range(Y)) # Y linearly transformed to have range 0-1.
plot(X,Y)
plot(X, Y_01)
dat <- data.frame(cbind(X, Y, Y_01)); names(dat) <- c("X", "Y", "Y_01")
head(dat)
plot(dat)
nnfit1 <- nnet(formula = Y ~ X, data = dat, maxit = 2000, size = 8, decay = 1e-4)
nnpred1 <- predict(nnfit1, dat)
plot(X, nnpred1)
nnfit2 <- nnet(formula = Y_01 ~ X, data = dat, maxit = 2000, size = 8, decay = 1e-4)
nnpred2 <- predict(nnfit2, dat)
plot(X, nnpred2)
When using train() in caret, there is a preProcess option but it only scales the inputs. train(..., method = "nnet", ...) appears to be using the raw Y values; see code below.
library(caret)
ctrl <- trainControl(method = "cv", number = 10)
nnet_grid <- expand.grid(.decay = 10^seq(-4, -1, 1), .size = c(8))
nnfit3 <- train(Y ~ X, dat, method = "nnet", maxit = 2000,
trControl = ctrl, tuneGrid = nnet_grid, preProcess = "range")
nnfit3
nnpred3 <- predict(nnfit3, dat)
plot(X, nnpred3)
Of course, I could linearly transform the Y variable(s) to have a positive range, but then my predictions will be on the wrong scale. Though this is only a minor headache, I'm wondering if there is a better (built-in?) solution for training nnet or avNNet models with caret when the output has negative values.
Thanks for any suggestions or insight you can provide!
