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I have a classification dataset of ~100,000 rows and ~200 features. Within the dataset my predictor variable (Y) is an integer value between 0-55, therefore I am trying to predict 1 of 56 possible classes. I split my training/testing set into 80/20% and performed an extensive 10-fold cross validation exercise to tune the parameters and fit the final model. I end up a very high accuracy (and F1) score in the training set (~90%) but a very slow accuracy (and F1) score in the testing set (~10%).

EDIT 1: The training and testing set are split randomly. About 150 of the features are binary features (0 or 1) and the others are continuous values which I center and scale to be between 0 and 1.

I have tried numerous learning algorithms (SVM, NN, logistic regression, PCA + SVM) and believe that the 10-fold CV should have eliminated overfitting as best as possible. However, nothing that I try seems to yield any meaningfully different results.

Can anyone suggest new ways to increase accuracy of the testing set?

Caveats:

1) This is real world data so getting more of it is very expensive and time consuming.

2) We need these 56 classes so cannot simply eliminate any.

Thanks and any suggestions are appreciated.

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  • $\begingroup$ Just to be sure: you split the sets randomly into training and test? Then you realize the cross-validation only with data from the training set, right? And what is the range you're using for your parameters? Maybe you could find better parameters outside the range you have defined. $\endgroup$
    – Jundiaius
    May 27, 2014 at 14:54
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for the reply! Yes, the sets are split randomly. About 150 of the features are binary features (0 or 1) and the others are continuous values which I center and scale to be between 0 and 1. I am not sure I understand your last comment, can you please elaborate. $\endgroup$
    – mike1886
    May 27, 2014 at 15:01
  • $\begingroup$ When I say the parameters I mean the learning parameters, for example the regularization strength for the logistic regression. For what values you test them with your cross-validation? But I think that's not the problem anyway, otherwise your F-score for the training set should be small too. $\endgroup$
    – Jundiaius
    May 27, 2014 at 15:10
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    $\begingroup$ Thanks for clarifying. I did a very large grid search for these parameters so I do not think that is the problem. I am pretty confident that the learning parameters are calculated correctly. $\endgroup$
    – mike1886
    May 27, 2014 at 15:13

1 Answer 1

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There may be many reasons for this. Below is a non-exhaustive list of bullet points; i.e. me thinking out loud.

  • Is your predictor variable (with the class labels) ordinal or nominal? If it is the former, how do you calculate accuracy? e.g. do you incorporate the fact that $Y_{predict} = 50$ is better than $Y_{predict}=10$, when $Y_{real} = 55$?

  • What are the label distributions for the 56 classes in the test and training sets? I understand that viewing and analysing a 56*56 confusion matrix is painful but the answer to your question is most likely in the analyses of the confusion matrices for the trainig and test sets. By collapsing the confusion matrices, you can get proportions of specific agreements, etc. per class label and then combine this information with the class distributions of your training and test sets. To sum up, accuracy on its own gives you a very limited view of the whole picture.

  • Attached to the first item, if you have selected the test data without shuffling the row indices, you may be suffering from temporal trends; e.g. if your test data is the most recent 20%, the class distributions for the data collected during this period may be different.

  • Also, is your data incomplete? If so, how do the ratios of incompleteness for the test and training sets compare? The more incomplete your subset, the less predictive information you have.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks Zhubarb for your thoughts! To answer your questions: 1) The predictor variable is nominal so ordering is not important. In fact, it was actually chosen in a arbitrary manner. 2) This is an interesting point that I will look more into. 3+4) The data has no temporal effect and is not incomplete . We have sufficient statistics in each class so I believe the learning algo is able to learn what each class represents. $\endgroup$
    – mike1886
    May 27, 2014 at 17:10

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