nestfs-package: Cross-validated (nested) forward selection

nestfs-packageR Documentation

Cross-validated (nested) forward selection

Description

This package provides an implementation of forward selection based on linear and logistic regression which adopts cross-validation as a core component of the selection procedure.

Details

The engine of the package is fs(), whose aim is to select a set of variables out of those available in the dataset. The selection of variables can be done according to two main different criteria: by paired-test p-value or by largest decrease in validation log-likelihood. A combined criteria is also available.

The role of nested.fs() is to allow the evaluation of the selection method by providing an unbiased estimate of the performance of the selected variables on withdrawn data.

Forward selection is an inherently slow approach, as for each variable a model needs to be fitted. In our implementation, this issue is further aggravated by the fact that an inner cross-validation happens at each iteration, with the aim of guiding the selection towards variables that have better generalization properties.

The code is parallelized over the inner folds, thanks to the parallel package. User time therefore depends on the number of available cores, but there is no advantage in using more cores than inner folds. The number of cores assigned to computations must be registered before starting by setting the "mc.cores" option.

The main advantage of forward selection is that it provides an immediately interpretable model, and the panel of variables obtained is in some sense the least redundant one, particularly if the number of variables to choose from is not too large (in our experience, up to about 30-40 variables).

However, when the number of variables is much larger than that, forward selection, besides being unbearably slow, may be more subject to overfitting, which is in the nature of its greedy-like design. These undesirable effects can be somewhat remedied by applying some filtering (see the num.filter argument to fs(), thus reducing the number or variables entering the selection phase.

Author(s)

Marco Colombo mar.colombo13@gmail.com

See Also

Useful links:


mcol/nestfs documentation built on Jan. 4, 2023, 12:38 p.m.