辅导INF 552留学生、讲解Homework 1 INF 552

Homework 1 INF 552, Instructor: Mohammad Reza Rajati

1. Vertebral Column Data Set

This Biomedical data set was built by Dr. Henrique da Mota during a medical residence

period in Lyon, France. Each patient in the data set is represented in the data set

by six biomechanical attributes derived from the shape and orientation of the pelvis

and lumbar spine (in this order): pelvic incidence, pelvic tilt, lumbar lordosis angle,

sacral slope, pelvic radius and grade of spondylolisthesis. The following convention is

used for the class labels: DH (Disk Hernia), Spondylolisthesis (SL), Normal (NO) and

Abnormal (AB). In this exercise, we only focus on a binary classification task NO=0

and AB=1.

(a) Download the Vertebral Column Data Set from: https://archive.ics.uci.

edu/ml/datasets/Vertebral+Column.

(b) Pre-Processing and Exploratory data analysis:

i. Make scatterplots of the independent variables in the dataset. Use color to

show Classes 0 and 1.

ii. Make boxplots for each of the independent variables. Use color to show

Classes 0 and 1 (see ISLR p. 129).

iii. Select the first 70 rows of Class 0 and the first 140 rows of Class 1 as the

training set and the rest of the data as the test set.

(c) Classification using KNN on Vertebral Column Data Set

i. Write code for k-nearest neighbors with Euclidean metric (or use a software

package).

ii. Test all the data in the test database with k nearest neighbors. Take decisions

by majority polling. Plot train and test errors in terms of k for

k ∈ {208, 205, . . . , 7, 4, 1, } (in reverse order). You are welcome to use smaller

increments of k. Which k

is the most suitable k among those values? Calculate

the confusion matrix, true positive rate, true negative rate, precision,

and F-score when k = k.

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iii. Since the computation time depends on the size of the training set, one may

only use a subset of the training set. Plot the best test error rate,

2 which

is obtained by some value of k, against the size of training set, when the

size of training set is N ∈ {10, 20, 30, . . . , 210}.

3 Note: for each N, select

your training set by choosing the first bN/3c rows of Class 0 and the first

N bN/3c rows of Class 1 in the training set you creatd in 1(b)iii. Also, for

each N, select the optimal k from a set starting from k = 1, increasing by 5.

For example, if N = 200, the optimal k is selected from {1, 6, 11, . . . , 196}.

This plot is called a Learning Curve.

Let us further explore some variants of KNN.

1We will learn in the lectures what these mean, for now research how they are computed and compute

them.

2Obviously, use the test data you created in 1(b)iii

3For extra practice, you are welcome to choose smaller increments of N.

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Homework 1 INF 552, Instructor: Mohammad Reza Rajati

(d) Replace the Euclidean metric with the following metrics4 and test them. Summarize

the test errors (i.e., when k = k) in a table. Use all of your training data

and select the best k when {1, 6, 11, . . . , 196}.

i. Minkowski Distance:

A. which becomes Manhattan Distance with p = 1.

B. with log10(p) ∈ {0.1, 0.2, 0.3, . . . , 1}. In this case, use the k

you found

for the Manhattan distance in 1(d)iA. What is the best log10(p)?

C. which becomes Chebyshev Distance with p → ∞

ii. Mahalanobis Distance.5

(e) The majority polling decision can be replaced by weighted decision, in which the

weight of each point in voting is proportional to its distance from the query/test

data point. In this case, closer neighbors of a query point will have a greater

influence than neighbors which are further away. Use weighted voting with Euclidean,

Manhattan, and Chebyshev distances and report the best test errors when

k ∈ {1, 6, 11, 16, . . . , 196}.

(f) What is the lowest training error rate you achieved in this exercise?

4You can use sklearn.neighbors.DistanceMetric. Research what each distance means.

5Mahalanobis Distance requires inverting the covariance matrix of the data. When the covariance matrix

is singular or ill-conditioned, the data live in a linear subspace of the feature space. In this case, the features

have to be transformed into a reduced feature set in the linear subspace, which is equivalent to using a

pseudoinverse instead of an inverse.