4. Data Representation and Visualization of Data
By Bernd Klein. Last modified: 07 Jul 2022.
Machine learning is about adapting models to data. For this reason we begin by showing how data can be represented in order to be understood by the computer.
At the beginning of this chapter we quoted Tom Mitchell's definition of machine learning: "Well posed Learning Problem: A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some task T and some performance measure P, if its performance on T, as measured by P, improves with experience E." Data is the "raw material" for machine learning. It learns from data. In Mitchell's definition, "data" is hidden behind the terms "experience E" and "performance measure P". As mentioned earlier, we need labeled data to learn and test our algorithm.
However, it is recommended that you familiarize yourself with your data before you begin training your classifier.
Numpy offers ideal data structures to represent your data and Matplotlib offers great possibilities for visualizing your data.
In the following, we want to show how to do this using the data in the sklearn module.
Iris Dataset, "Hello World" of Machine Learning
What was the first program you saw? I bet it might have been a program giving out "Hello World" in some programming language. Most likely I'm right. Almost every introductory book or tutorial on programming starts with such a program. It's a tradition that goes back to the 1968 book "The C Programming Language" by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie!
The likelihood that the first dataset you will see in an introductory tutorial on machine learning will be the "Iris dataset" is similarly high. The Iris dataset contains the measurements of 150 iris flowers from 3 different species:
- Iris-Setosa,
- Iris-Versicolor, and
- Iris-Virginica.
Iris Setosa
Iris Versicolor
Iris Virginica
The iris dataset is often used for its simplicity. This dataset is contained in scikit-learn, but before we have a deeper look into the Iris dataset we will look at the other datasets available in scikit-learn.
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Loading the Iris Data with Scikit-learn
For example, scikit-learn has a very straightforward set of data on these iris species. The data consist of the following:
-
Features in the Iris dataset:
- sepal length in cm
- sepal width in cm
- petal length in cm
- petal width in cm
-
Target classes to predict:
- Iris Setosa
- Iris Versicolour
- Iris Virginica
scikit-learn embeds a copy of the iris CSV file along with a helper function to load it into numpy arrays:
from sklearn.datasets import load_iris
iris = load_iris()
The resulting dataset is a Bunch object:
type(iris)
OUTPUT:
sklearn.utils.Bunch
You can see what's available for this data type by using
the method keys():
iris.keys()
OUTPUT:
dict_keys(['data', 'target', 'frame', 'target_names', 'DESCR', 'feature_names', 'filename'])
A Bunch object is similar to a dicitionary, but it additionally allows accessing the keys in an attribute style:
print(iris["target_names"])
print(iris.target_names)
OUTPUT:
['setosa' 'versicolor' 'virginica'] ['setosa' 'versicolor' 'virginica']
The features of each sample flower are stored in the data attribute of the dataset:
n_samples, n_features = iris.data.shape
print('Number of samples:', n_samples)
print('Number of features:', n_features)
# the sepal length, sepal width, petal length and petal width of the first sample (first flower)
print(iris.data[0])
OUTPUT:
Number of samples: 150 Number of features: 4 [5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2]
The feautures of each flower are stored in the data attribute of the data set. Let's take a look at some of the samples:
# Flowers with the indices 12, 26, 89, and 114
iris.data[[12, 26, 89, 114]]
OUTPUT:
array([[4.8, 3. , 1.4, 0.1],
[5. , 3.4, 1.6, 0.4],
[5.5, 2.5, 4. , 1.3],
[5.8, 2.8, 5.1, 2.4]])
The information about the class of each sample, i.e. the labels, is stored in the "target" attribute of the data set:
print(iris.data.shape)
print(iris.target.shape)
OUTPUT:
(150, 4) (150,)
print(iris.target)
OUTPUT:
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2]
import numpy as np
np.bincount(iris.target)
OUTPUT:
array([50, 50, 50])
Using NumPy's bincount function (above) we can see that the classes in this dataset are evenly distributed - there are 50 flowers of each species, with
- class 0: Iris Setosa
- class 1: Iris Versicolor
- class 2: Iris Virginica
These class names are stored in the last attribute, namely target_names:
print(iris.target_names)
OUTPUT:
['setosa' 'versicolor' 'virginica']
The information about the class of each sample of our Iris dataset is stored in the target attribute of the dataset:
print(iris.target)
OUTPUT:
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2]
Beside of the shape of the data, we can also check the shape of the labels, i.e. the target.shape:
Each flower sample is one row in the data array, and the columns (features) represent the flower measurements in centimeters. For instance, we can represent this Iris dataset, consisting of 150 samples and 4 features, a 2-dimensional array or matrix $\mathbb{R}^{150 \times 4}$ in the following format:
The superscript denotes the ith row, and the subscript denotes the jth feature, respectively.
Generally, we have $n$ rows and $k$ columns:
print(iris.data.shape)
print(iris.target.shape)
OUTPUT:
(150, 4) (150,)
bincount of NumPy counts the number of occurrences of each value in an array of non-negative integers. We can use this to check the distribution of the classes in the dataset:
import numpy as np
np.bincount(iris.target)
OUTPUT:
array([50, 50, 50])
We can see that the classes are distributed uniformly - there are 50 flowers from each species, i.e.
- class 0: Iris-Setosa
- class 1: Iris-Versicolor
- class 2: Iris-Virginica
These class names are stored in the last attribute, namely target_names:
print(iris.target_names)
OUTPUT:
['setosa' 'versicolor' 'virginica']
Visualising the Features of the Iris Data Set
The feauture data is four dimensional, but we can visualize one or two of the dimensions at a time using a simple histogram or scatter-plot.
from sklearn.datasets import load_iris
iris = load_iris()
print(iris.data[iris.target==1][:5])
print(iris.data[iris.target==1, 0][:5])
OUTPUT:
[[7. 3.2 4.7 1.4] [6.4 3.2 4.5 1.5] [6.9 3.1 4.9 1.5] [5.5 2.3 4. 1.3] [6.5 2.8 4.6 1.5]] [7. 6.4 6.9 5.5 6.5]
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Histograms of the features
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
x_index = 3
colors = ['blue', 'red', 'green']
for label, color in zip(range(len(iris.target_names)), colors):
ax.hist(iris.data[iris.target==label, x_index],
label=iris.target_names[label],
color=color)
ax.set_xlabel(iris.feature_names[x_index])
ax.legend(loc='upper right')
plt.show()
Exercise
Look at the histograms of the other features, i.e. petal length, sepal widt and sepal length.
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Scatterplot with two Features
The appearance diagram shows two features in one diagram:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
x_index = 3
y_index = 0
colors = ['blue', 'red', 'green']
for label, color in zip(range(len(iris.target_names)), colors):
ax.scatter(iris.data[iris.target==label, x_index],
iris.data[iris.target==label, y_index],
label=iris.target_names[label],
c=color)
ax.set_xlabel(iris.feature_names[x_index])
ax.set_ylabel(iris.feature_names[y_index])
ax.legend(loc='upper left')
plt.show()
Exercise
Change x_index and y_index in the above script
Change x_index and y_index in the above script and find a combination of two parameters which maximally separate the three classes.
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Generalization
We will now look at all feature combinations in one combined diagram:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
n = len(iris.feature_names)
fig, ax = plt.subplots(n, n, figsize=(16, 16))
colors = ['blue', 'red', 'green']
for x in range(n):
for y in range(n):
xname = iris.feature_names[x]
yname = iris.feature_names[y]
for color_ind in range(len(iris.target_names)):
ax[x, y].scatter(iris.data[iris.target==color_ind, x],
iris.data[iris.target==color_ind, y],
label=iris.target_names[color_ind],
c=colors[color_ind])
ax[x, y].set_xlabel(xname)
ax[x, y].set_ylabel(yname)
ax[x, y].legend(loc='upper left')
plt.show()
Scatterplot 'Matrices
Instead of doing it manually we can also use the scatterplot matrix provided by the pandas module.
Scatterplot matrices show scatter plots between all features in the data set, as well as histograms to show the distribution of each feature.
import pandas as pd
iris_df = pd.DataFrame(iris.data, columns=iris.feature_names)
pd.plotting.scatter_matrix(iris_df,
c=iris.target,
figsize=(8, 8)
);
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3-Dimensional Visualization
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn.datasets import load_iris
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
iris = load_iris()
X = []
for iclass in range(3):
X.append([[], [], []])
for i in range(len(iris.data)):
if iris.target[i] == iclass:
X[iclass][0].append(iris.data[i][0])
X[iclass][1].append(iris.data[i][1])
X[iclass][2].append(sum(iris.data[i][2:]))
colours = ("r", "g", "y")
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')
for iclass in range(3):
ax.scatter(X[iclass][0], X[iclass][1], X[iclass][2], c=colours[iclass])
plt.show()
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