btml: Bayeisan Treed Machine Learning

In btml: Bayesian Treed Machine Learning for Personalized Prediction

Bayeisan Treed Machine Learning

Description

Generalization of the Bayesian classification and regression tree model that partitions subjects into terminal nodes and tailors predictive model to each terminal node.

Usage

  btml(y,x,z,ynew,xnew,znew,MLlist,sparse,nwarm,niter,minsample,base,power)

Arguments

y	Response vector. If y is a factor codied as 0 or 1, classification is assumed. Otherwise, regression is assumed.
x	Data.frame or matrix that estimates a decision-tree structure.
z	Data.frame or matrix that predicts y in terminal nodes, i.e. terminal-node-specific ML models.
ynew	Response vector for the test set corresponding to y (default ynew=NULL).
xnew	Data.frame or matrix for the test set corresponding to x (default xnew=NULL).
znew	Data.frame or matrix for the test set corresponding to z (default znew=NULL).
MLlist	Candidate predictive models models that can be assigned to each terminal node (default MLlist=c("lasso","rf","svm")). Any other ML models can be included. See the details below.
sparse	Whether to perform variable and ML model selections based on a sparse Dirichlet prior rather than simply uniform (default sparse=TRUE).
nwarm	Number of warm-up (default nwarm=25000).
niter	Number of iteration (defaut niter=25000).
minsample	The number of minimum sample size per each node, i.e., length(y)>min_sample if y is continuous; and min(length(y==1),length(y==0))>min_sample if y is binary. (default min_sample=20).
base	Base parameter for tree prior (default base=0.95).
power	Power parameter for tree prior (default power=0.8).

Details

The btml function uses a stochastic search to identify a decision tree rule that partitions subjects into distinct terminal nodes and assigns the most effective predictive model to each terminal node.

Ideally, two sets of predictors are used: x and z (e.g., clinical variables and biomarkers), where x is used to construct the tree structure, and z is used for terminal-node-specific predictive models. If this separation is not possible, the same predictor x can be used for both tasks, for example:

btml(y=y, x=x, z=x, y=ynew, x=xnew, z=xnew)

Regarding node numbering, each internal node s has left and right child nodes 2s and 2s+1, respectively. The root node is indexed as node 1; nodes 2 and 3 are left and right child nodes of node 1; nodes 4 and 5 are left and right nodes of node 2; and so on.

Terminal-node-specific models include lasso(), randomForest(), and svm(...,kernel="radial") from the R packages cv.glmnet, randomForest, and e1071, respectively. Additional models can be flexibly incorporated; see Example 3 below for an illustration.

Value

An object of class btml, which is a list with the following components:

terminal	Node numbers in terminal nodes.
internal	Node numbers in internal nodes.
splitVariable	Variable (i.e., x[,u] if splitVariable[k]=u) used to split the internal node k.
cutoff	cutoff[k] is the cutoff value to split the internal node k.
selML	ML model assigned to the terminal node t.
fitML	fitML[[t]] is the fitted ML model at the terminal node t \in terminal.
y.hat	Estimated y (or estimated probability) on the training set if y is continuous (or binary).
node.hat	Estimated node on the training set.
mse	Training MSE.
bs	Training Brier Score.
roc	Training ROC curve.
auc	Training AUC.
y.hat.new	Estimated y (or estimated probability) on the test set if y is continuous (or binary).
node.hat.new	Estimated node on the test set.
mse.new	Test MSE.
bs.new	Test Brier Score.
roc.new	Test ROC curve.
auc.new	Test AUC.

Author(s)

Yaliang Zhang [aut], Yunro Chung [aut, cre]

References

Yaliang Zhang and Yunro Chung, Bayesian treed machine learning model (in preperation)

Examples

set.seed(9)
###
#1. continuous y
###
n=200*2 #n=200 & 200 for training & test sets

x=matrix(rnorm(n*4),n,4)
z=matrix(rnorm(n*4),n,4)

xcut=median(x[,1])
subgr=1*(x[,1]<xcut)+2*(x[,1]>=xcut) #2 subgroups

lp=rep(NA,n)
for(i in 1:n){
  if(x[i,1]<0){
    lp[i]=1+3*z[i,1]
  }else{
    lp[i]=1+3*z[i,2]
  }
}
y=lp+rnorm(n,0,1)

idx.nex=sample(1:n,n*1/2,replace=FALSE)
ynew=y[idx.nex]
xnew=x[idx.nex,]
znew=z[idx.nex,]

y=y[-idx.nex]
x=x[-idx.nex,]
z=z[-idx.nex,]

fit1=btml(y,x,z,ynew=ynew,xnew=xnew,znew=znew,nwarm=1000,niter=1000)
fit1$mse.new
plot(fit1$y.hat.new~ynew,ylab="Predicted y",xlab="ynew")
abline(a=0,b=1,lwd=2,col="darkgray")

###
#2. binary y
###
x=matrix(rnorm(n*4),n,4)
z=matrix(rnorm(n*4),n,4)

lp=rep(NA,n)
for(i in 1:n){
  if(x[i,1]<0){
    lp[i]=1+3*z[i,1]
  }else{
    lp[i]=1+3*z[i,2]
  }
}
prob=1/(1+exp(-lp))
y=rbinom(n,1,prob)
y=as.factor(y)

idx.nex=sample(1:n,n*1/2,replace=FALSE)
ynew=y[idx.nex]
xnew=x[idx.nex,]
znew=z[idx.nex,]

y=y[-idx.nex]
x=x[-idx.nex,]
z=z[-idx.nex,]

fit2=btml(y,x,z,ynew=ynew,xnew=xnew,znew=znew,nwarm=1000,niter=1000)
fit2$auc.new
plot(fit2$roc.new)

###
#3. add new ML models
#   1) write two functions:
#      c_xx & c_xx_predict if y is continuous or
#      b_xx & b_xx.predict if y is binary
#   2) MLlist includes xx, not c.xx nor b.xx.
#   3) run btml using the updated MLlist.
#   The below is an example of adding ridge regression.
###
#3.1. ridge regression for continuous y.
c_ridge=function(y,x){
  x=data.matrix(x)
  fit=NULL
  suppressWarnings(try(fit<-glmnet::cv.glmnet(x,y,alpha=0),silent=TRUE))
  return(fit)
}
c_ridge_predict=function(fit,xnew){
  y.hat=rep(NA,nrow(xnew))
  if(!is.null(fit)){
    xnew=data.matrix(xnew)
    y.hat=as.numeric(predict(fit,newx=xnew,s="lambda.min",type="response"))
  }
  return(y.hat)
}

#3.2. ridge regression for binary y.
b_ridge=function(y,x){
  x=data.matrix(x)
  fit=NULL
  suppressWarnings(try(fit<-glmnet::cv.glmnet(x,y,alpha=1,family="binomial"),silent=TRUE))
  return(fit)
}
b_ridge_predict=function(fit,xnew){
  y.hat=rep(NA,nrow(xnew))
  if(!is.null(fit)){
    xnew=data.matrix(xnew)
    y.hat=as.numeric(predict(fit,newx=xnew,s="lambda.min",type="response"))
  }
  return(y.hat)
}

#3.3. update MLlist
MLlist=c("lasso","ridge")
fit3=btml(y,x,z,ynew=ynew,xnew=xnew,znew=znew,MLlist=MLlist,nwarm=1000,niter=1000)
fit3$auc.new
plot(fit3$roc.new)

btml documentation built on March 15, 2026, 5:07 p.m.