Correct way to use polynomial regression in Python

I'm having some trouble getting reasonable responses from a polynomial regression. When I used linear regression I got a reasonable error, but when I switched to Polynomial regressions the error jumped up by almost seven times. It could be because it's just a bad model, but I suspect that I'm doing something wrong. Here's the code that I'm using (I've left a little off the beginning which gets the data and does some processing):

feature_columns = list(train)
feature_columns.remove('SalePrice')
X = train[feature_columns]
y = train['SalePrice']

poly = PolynomialFeatures(degree=2)
polyX = poly.fit_transform(X)
polyTest = poly.fit_transform(test[feature_columns])

lm = LinearRegression()
lm.fit(polyX, y)

import numpy
predictions = numpy.absolute(lm.predict(polyTest).round(decimals = 2))

pandas.DataFrame({'Id': pandas.to_numeric(test.Id, downcast = 'integer'), 'SalePrice':predictions}).to_csv('2017-07-02-2.csv', index = False)


I'm not sure if it matters but there are more than 250 features that are being processed. Another issue, which might be related is that if I try to use a degree larger than 2 then it takes too long to run. What am I doing wrong here?

• I believe PolynomialFeatures also creates all second order interactions, so you're probably overfitting as a consequence. To get all second degree univariate features, you can use a FeatureUnion after applying PolynomialFeatures to each feature in turn. I usually wrap this all in my own class. – Matthew Drury Jul 6 '17 at 1:34
• Thanks for the response. I'm not understanding how you are using FeatureUnion. Can you elaborate with an application using the code, or link to somewhere that might explain it this relationship between FeatureUnion and PolynomialFeatures? – David Jul 6 '17 at 3:24
• I posted an answer below with my approach. – Matthew Drury Jul 6 '17 at 19:54

Here's how I go about it in pure sklearn. There are probably ways to improve this workflow.

First I made a tranformer that simply selects one column from a DataFrame or matrix:

class ColumnSelector(object):

def __init__(self, idxs):
self.idxs = np.asarray(idxs)

# Fit here doesn't need to do anything.  We already know the indices of the columns
# we want to keep.
def fit(self, *args, **kwargs):
return self

def transform(self, X, **transform_params):
# Need to teat pandas data frames and numpy arrays slightly differently.
if isinstance(X, pd.DataFrame):
return X.iloc[:, self.idxs]
return X[:, self.idxs]


Then I made a PolynomialExpansion class

class PolynomialExpansion(object):

def __init__(self, degree):
self.degree = degree

def fit(self, *args, **kwargs):
return self

def transform(self, X, **transform_params):
# Initialize our return value as a matrix of all zeros.
# We are going to overwrite all of these zeros in the code below.
X_poly = np.zeros((X.shape[0], self.degree))
# The first column in our transformed matrix is just the vector we started with.
X_poly[:, 0] = X.squeeze()
# We create the subsequent columns by multiplying the most recently created column
# by X.  This creates the sequence X -> X^2 -> X^3 -> etc...
for i in range(1, self.degree):
X_poly[:, i] = X_poly[:, i-1] * X.squeeze()
return X_poly


Then to use it, I combine it with Pipelines and FeatureUnions. This pipeline uses the arsenic data from Gelman and Hill

wells_pipeline = Pipeline([
('polynomial_expansions', FeatureUnion([