[R] Proportional response and boosting

Imelda.Somodi imelda.somodi at gmail.com
Tue Jan 20 15:24:20 CET 2009


Dear Gerard,

Thank you very much for the quick answer. I am a bit uncertain, what you
meant by total frequency of type A. I have data on the extent of type A at a
location (let's call it freqA), this can be taken for fequency, yes and I
have information on the total extent of all the nautral vegetation types (A
to Z), lets call the latter freqAZ. Both freqA and freqAZ are vectors, with
individual values for each observation point.

So to make clear what I did so far I modelled just as you wrote:

pi=freqA/freqAZ

veg.glm = glm ( pi ~ x, weights = freqAZ, family=binomial),

Did you mean that too? Or what do you propose to use as weights and for
standardisation instead feqAZ (as you write "total freq of type A")? FreqA
over all the observations? That yould make a scalar to be a weight. I'm sure
you meant something else.

Thank you,

Imelda



Gerard M. Keogh wrote:
> 
> Quick response on the binomial:
> 
> If possible I would suggest you should model
> 
> pi = (number/freq of type A) / (total_freq of type A)
> 
> veg.glm = glm ( pi ~ x, weights = total_freq, family=binomial)
> 
> The glm method is supposed to work only on the natural numbers (inc 0!)
> but
> also works for decimal data - it gives a warning in these cases which can
> be ignored.
> 
> Hope this helps!
> Gerard
> 
> 
> 
> 
>                                                                            
>              "Imelda.Somodi"                                               
>              <imelda.somodi at gm                                             
>              ail.com>                                                   To 
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>                                                                    Subject 
>                                        [R]  Proportional response and      
>              20/01/2009 09:11          boosting                            
>                                                                            
>                                                                            
>                                                                            
>                                                                            
>                                                                            
>                                                                            
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dear experts of boosting!
> 
> I am planning to build vegetation models via boosting with either gbm or
> mboost. My problem is that my response variable is the proportion of a
> vegetation type in natural vegetation at a location.
> 
> ResponseA = (area of vegetation type A/area of all natural vegetation
> types)
> 
> That means that the response has a continuous distribution between 0 and 1
> with many 0s and 1s as well. As I understood from reading these forums, it
> is pretty close to a beta distribution with the exception that the
> marginal
> values (0,1) are also included. Because of the latter feature I cannot
> even
> build a beta regression, not that I could do a boosted variant of that.
> Nevertheless, I can think of my response as a binomial one with values
> between 0 and 1 and take 1 square meter (as if it was a pixel) of natural
> vegetation as an observation. This way I can do binomial glms for my data,
> so that I specify the no. of square meters of natural vegetation as
> weights
> (I round them to get integers to be applicable in glm). I hope I am
> allowed
> to post a side-question here. I always get a warning with these glms
> though.
> I give here a simple one-variable example:
> 
> Call: tmp <- glm(ossz_ujstand2$k2_stand ~ BIO_1 + I((BIO_1)^2),
> family=binomial, na.action=na.omit,weights= ossz_ujstand2$weights),
> 
> Where BIO_1 is a variable describing climate, and weights are the area of
> natural vegetation rounded to integers for each observation (a vector).
> 
> Warning: "non-integer #successes in a binomial glm!"
> 
> I read somewhere on this site that this can be normal, but would be
> reassured if it was stated that it is indeed so in my case as well.
> 
> My problem with boosting is that I don’t know how to handle my response
> variable distribution. I am not quite sure how to treat the loss function
> either. It seems to me that it somehow corresponds to the link function as
> it needs to be defined by family() like link functions in glm. The
> potential
> choices for family also correspond. At the same time some papers about
> boosting imply to me that the loss function takes more the role of the
> curve
> estimation technique and that data with any distribution can be boosted
> with
> any type of loss functions.
> As a start I tried to do the same with boosting as I did with glms. Here
> is
> an example.
> 
> With mboost:
> index<-!is.na(ossz_ujstand2$k2_stand)            # I need this to remove
> NAs
> proba.bb2<-blackboost(k2_stand~BIO_1+BIO_12,data=ossz_ujstand2[index,],weights=ossz_ujstand2$weights[index],family=Binomial())
> 
> 
> Error in family at check_y(y) :
>   response is not a factor but âfamily = Binomial()â
> 
> 
> With gbm using the modified code of Elith et al. 2008 Journal of Animal
> Ecology:
> 
> index<-!is.na(ossz_ujstand2$k2_stand)
> k2.tc5.lr01<- gbm.step(data=ossz_ujstand2[index,],
>     gbm.x = 50:147,
>     gbm.y = 27,
>     family = "bernoulli",
>     tree.complexity = 5,
>     learning.rate = 0.1,
>     bag.fraction = 0.75,
>     weights=ossz_ujstand2$weights)
> 
> Error in gbm.fit(x, y, offset = offset, distribution = distribution, w =
> w,
> 
> :
>   Bernoulli requires the response to be in {0,1}
> 
> 
> So obviously the solution with weights does not work. Is there a
> straightforward way to model my response with the prefabricated families
> or
> I have to write a new loss function? I understand that it is possible in
> mboost, but I would greatly appreciate support on how to do this.
> Obviously,
> I am even uncertain about what type of link I should use for my data.
> 
> Thank you very much!
> 
> Imelda Somodi
> Assistant research fellow
> Institute of Ecology and Botany
> Hungarian Academy of Science
> 
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