--- title: "Using 'splitTools'" output: rmarkdown::html_vignette vignette: > %\VignetteIndexEntry{Using 'splitTools'} %\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown} %\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8} --- ```{r, include = FALSE} knitr::opts_chunk$set( collapse = TRUE, comment = "#>", warning = FALSE, message = FALSE ) ``` ## Overview {splitTools} is a fast, lightweight toolkit for data splitting. Its two main functions `partition()` and `create_folds()` support - data partitioning (e.g. into training, validation and test), - creating (in- or out-of-sample) folds for cross-validation (CV), - creating *repeated* folds for CV, - stratified splitting, - grouped splitting as well as - blocked splitting (if the sequential order of the data should be retained). The function `create_timefolds()` does time-series splitting in the sense that the out-of-sample data follows the in-sample data. We will now illustrate how to use {splitTools} in a typical modeling workflow. ## Usage ### Simple validation We will go through the following steps: 1. We split the `iris` data into 60% training, 20% validation, and 20% test data, stratified by the variable `Sepal.Length`. Since this variable is numeric, stratification uses quantile binning. 2. We will model the response `Sepal.Length` with a linear regression, once with and once without interaction between `Species` and `Sepal.Width`. 3. After selecting the better of the two models via validation RMSE, we evaluate the final model on the test data. ```{r} library(splitTools) # Split data into partitions set.seed(3451) inds <- partition(iris$Sepal.Length, p = c(train = 0.6, valid = 0.2, test = 0.2)) str(inds) train <- iris[inds$train, ] valid <- iris[inds$valid, ] test <- iris[inds$test, ] rmse <- function(y, pred) { sqrt(mean((y - pred)^2)) } # Use simple validation to decide on interaction yes/no... fit1 <- lm(Sepal.Length ~ ., data = train) fit2 <- lm(Sepal.Length ~ . + Species:Sepal.Width, data = train) rmse(valid$Sepal.Length, predict(fit1, valid)) rmse(valid$Sepal.Length, predict(fit2, valid)) # Yes! Choose and test final model rmse(test$Sepal.Length, predict(fit2, test)) ``` ### CV Since the `iris` data consists of only 150 rows, investing 20% of observations for validation seems like a waste of resources. Furthermore, the performance estimates might not be very robust. Let's replace simple validation by five-fold CV, again using stratification on the response variable. 1. Split `iris` into 80% training data and 20% test, stratified by the variable `Sepal.Length`. 2. Use stratified five-fold CV to choose between the two models. 3. We evaluate the final model on the test data. ```{r} # Split into training and test inds <- partition(iris$Sepal.Length, p = c(train = 0.8, test = 0.2), seed = 87) train <- iris[inds$train, ] test <- iris[inds$test, ] # Get stratified CV in-sample indices folds <- create_folds(train$Sepal.Length, k = 5, seed = 2734) # Vectors with results per model and fold cv_rmse1 <- cv_rmse2 <- numeric(5) for (i in seq_along(folds)) { insample <- train[folds[[i]], ] out <- train[-folds[[i]], ] fit1 <- lm(Sepal.Length ~ ., data = insample) fit2 <- lm(Sepal.Length ~ . + Species:Sepal.Width, data = insample) cv_rmse1[i] <- rmse(out$Sepal.Length, predict(fit1, out)) cv_rmse2[i] <- rmse(out$Sepal.Length, predict(fit2, out)) } # CV-RMSE of model 1 -> close winner mean(cv_rmse1) # CV-RMSE of model 2 mean(cv_rmse2) # Fit model 1 on full training data and evaluate on test data final_fit <- lm(Sepal.Length ~ ., data = train) rmse(test$Sepal.Length, predict(final_fit, test)) ``` ### Repeated CV If feasible, *repeated* CV is recommended in order to reduce uncertainty in decisions. Otherwise, the process remains the same. ```{r} # Train/test split as before # 15 folds instead of 5 folds <- create_folds(train$Sepal.Length, k = 5, seed = 2734, m_rep = 3) cv_rmse1 <- cv_rmse2 <- numeric(15) # Rest as before... for (i in seq_along(folds)) { insample <- train[folds[[i]], ] out <- train[-folds[[i]], ] fit1 <- lm(Sepal.Length ~ ., data = insample) fit2 <- lm(Sepal.Length ~ . + Species:Sepal.Width, data = insample) cv_rmse1[i] <- rmse(out$Sepal.Length, predict(fit1, out)) cv_rmse2[i] <- rmse(out$Sepal.Length, predict(fit2, out)) } mean(cv_rmse1) mean(cv_rmse2) # Refit and test as before ``` ### Stratification on multiple columns The function `multi_strata()` creates a stratification factor from multiple columns that can then be passed to `create_folds(, type = "stratified")` or `partition(, type = "stratified")`. The resulting partitions will be (quite) balanced regarding these columns. Two grouping strategies are offered: 1. k-means clustering based on scaled input. 2. All combinations of columns, where numeric input is being binned. Let's have a look at a simple example where we want to model "Sepal.Width" as a function of the other variables in the iris data set. We want to do a stratified train/valid/test split, aiming at being balanced regarding not only the response "Sepal.Width", but also regarding the important predictor "Species". In this case, we could use the following workflow: ```{r} set.seed(3451) ir <- iris[c("Sepal.Length", "Species")] y <- multi_strata(ir, k = 5) inds <- partition( y, p = c(train = 0.6, valid = 0.2, test = 0.2), split_into_list = FALSE ) # Check by(ir, inds, summary) ```