Evaluate by ID/group
In cvms: Cross-Validation for Model Selection

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Introduction

When we have groups of observations (e.g. a participant ID), we are sometimes more interested in the overall prediction for the group than those at the observation-level.

Say we have a dataset with 10 observations per participant and a model that predicts whether a participant has an autism diagnosis or not. While the model will predict each of the 10 observations, it's really the overall prediction for the participant that we are interested in.

evaluate() has two approaches to performing the evaluation on the ID level: averaging and voting.

Averaging

In averaging, we simply average the predicted probabilities for the participant. This is the default approach as it maintains information about how certain our model is about its class prediction. That is, if all observations have a 60% predicted probability of an autism diagnosis, that should be considered differently than 90%.

Voting

In voting, we simply count the predictions of each outcome class and assign the class with the most predictions to the participant.

If 7 out of 10 of the observations are predicted as having no autism diagnosis, that becomes the prediction for the participant.

ID evaluation with evaluate()

We will use the simple participant.scores dataset as it has 3 rows per participant and a diagnosis column that we can evaluate predictions against. Let's add predicted probabilities and diagnoses and have a look:

library(cvms)
library(knitr)  # kable()
library(dplyr)
set.seed(74)

# Prepare dataset
data <- participant.scores %>% as_tibble()
# Add probabilities and predicted classes
data[["probability"]] <- runif(nrow(data))
data[["predicted diagnosis"]] <- ifelse(data[["probability"]] > 0.5, 1, 0)

data %>% head(10) %>% kable()

We tell evaluate() to aggregate the predictions by the participant column with the mean (averaging) method.

Note: It is assumed that the target class is constant within the IDs. I.e., that the participant has the same diagnosis in all observations.

ev <- evaluate(
  data = data,
  target_col = "diagnosis",
  prediction_cols = "probability",
  id_col = "participant",
  id_method = "mean",
  type = "binomial"
)

ev

The Predictions column contains the averaged predictions:

ev$Predictions[[1]] %>% kable()

Let's plot the confusion matrix as well:

# Note: If ev had multiple rows, we would have to 
# pass ev$`Confusion Matrix`[[1]] to 
# plot the first row's confusion matrix
plot_confusion_matrix(ev)

We can have a better look at the metrics:

ev_metrics <- select_metrics(ev)
ev_metrics %>% select(1:9) %>% kable(digits = 5)
ev_metrics %>% select(10:14) %>% kable(digits = 5)

Using voting

We can use the majority (voting) method for the ID aggregation instead:

ev_2 <- evaluate(
  data = data,
  target_col = "diagnosis",
  prediction_cols = "probability",
  id_col = "participant",
  id_method = "majority",
  type = "binomial"
)

ev_2

Now the Predictions column looks as follows:

ev_2$Predictions[[1]] %>% kable()

In this case, the Predicted Class column is identical to that in the averaging approach. We just don't have the probabilities to tell us, how sure the model is about that prediction.

Per model

If we have predictions from multiple models, we can group the data frame and get the results per model.

Let's duplicate the dataset and change the predictions. We then combine the datasets and add a model column for indicating which of the data frames the observation came from:

# Duplicate data frame
data_2 <- data
# Change the probabilities and predicted classes
data_2[["probability"]] <- runif(nrow(data))
data_2[["predicted diagnosis"]] <- ifelse(data_2[["probability"]] > 0.5, 1, 0)

# Combine the two data frames
data_multi <- dplyr::bind_rows(data, data_2, .id = "model")

data_multi

We can now group the data frame by the model column and run the evaluation again:

ev_3 <- data_multi %>%
  dplyr::group_by(model) %>%
  evaluate(
    target_col = "diagnosis",
    prediction_cols = "probability",
    id_col = "participant",
    id_method = "mean",
    type = "binomial"
  )

ev_3

The Predictions for the second model looks as follows:

ev_3$Predictions[[2]] %>% kable()

In `'gaussian'` evaluation

This kind of ID aggregation is also available for the 'gaussian' evaluation (e.g. for linear regression models), although only with the averaging approach. Again, it is assumed that the target value is constant for all observations by a participant (like the age column in our dataset).

We add a predicted age column to our initial dataset:

data[["predicted age"]] <- sample(20:45, size = 30, replace = TRUE)

We evaluate the predicted age, aggregated by participant:

ev_4 <- evaluate(
  data = data,
  target_col = "age",
  prediction_cols = "predicted age",
  id_col = "participant",
  id_method = "mean",
  type = "gaussian"
)

ev_4

The Predictions column looks as follows:

ev_4$Predictions[[1]] %>% kable()

On average, we predict participant 1 to have the age 35.66.

Results for each ID

If our targets are not constant within the IDs, we might be interested in the ID-level evaluation. E.g. how well it predicted the score for each of the participants.

We add a predicted score column to our dataset:

data[["predicted score"]] <- round(runif(30, 10, 81))

Now, we group the data frame by the participant column and evaluate the predicted scores:

data %>% 
  dplyr::group_by(participant) %>% 
  evaluate(
    target_col = "score",
    prediction_cols = "predicted score",
    type = "gaussian"
  )

Participant 4 has the lowest prediction error while participant 7 has the highest.

This approach is similar to what the most_challenging() function does:

# Extract the ~20% observations with highest prediction error
most_challenging(
  data = data,
  type = "gaussian",
  obs_id_col = "participant",
  target_col = "score",
  prediction_cols = "predicted score",
  threshold = 0.20
)