Grant McDermott developed this new R package I wish I had thought of: parttree
parttree includes a set of simple functions for visualizing decision tree partitions in R with ggplot2. The package is not yet on CRAN, but can be installed from GitHub using:
Using the familiar ggplot2 syntax, we can simply add decision tree boundaries to a plot of our data.
In this example from his Github page, Grant trains a decision tree on the famous Titanic data using the parsnip package. And then visualizes the resulting partition / decision boundaries using the simple function geom_parttree()
library(parsnip)
library(titanic) ## Just for a different data set
set.seed(123) ## For consistent jitter
titanic_train$Survived = as.factor(titanic_train$Survived)
## Build our tree using parsnip (but with rpart as the model engine)
ti_tree =
decision_tree() %>%
set_engine("rpart") %>%
set_mode("classification") %>%
fit(Survived ~ Pclass + Age, data = titanic_train)
## Plot the data and model partitions
titanic_train %>%
ggplot(aes(x=Pclass, y=Age)) +
geom_jitter(aes(col=Survived), alpha=0.7) +
geom_parttree(data = ti_tree, aes(fill=Survived), alpha = 0.1) +
theme_minimal()
Super awesome!
This visualization precisely shows where the trained decision tree thinks it should predict that the passengers of the Titanic would have survived (blue regions) or not (red), based on their age and passenger class (Pclass).
This will be super helpful if you need to explain to yourself, your team, or your stakeholders how you model works. Currently, only rpart decision trees are supported, but I am very much hoping that Grant continues building this functionality!
Ryan Holbrook made awesome animated GIFs in R of several classifiers learning a decision rule boundary between two classes. Basically, what you see is a machine learning model in action, learning how to distinguish data of two classes, say cats and dogs, using some X and Y variables.
These visuals can be great to understand these algorithms, the models, and their learning process a bit better.
Here’s the original tweet, with the logistic regression animation. If you follow it, you will find a whole thread of classifier GIFs. These I extracted, pasted, and explained below.
A thread of classifiers learning a decision rule. Dashed line is optimal boundary. Animations with #gganimate by @thomasp85 and @drob. #rstats
Logistic regression {stats::glm} with each class having normally distributed features. (1/n) pic.twitter.com/kKmqdO2zGy
Below is the GIF which I extracted using EZgif.com.
What you see is observations from two classes, say cats and dogs, each represented using colored dots. The dots are placed along X and Y axes, which represent variables about the observations. Their tail lengths and their hairyness, for instance.
Now there’s an optimal way to seperate these classes, which is the dashed line. That line best seperates the cats from the dogs based on these two variables X and Y. As this is an optimal boundary given this data, it is stable, it does not change.
However, there’s also a solid black line, which does change. This line represents the learned boundary by the machine learning model, in this case using logistic regression. As the model is shown more data, it learns, and the boundary is updated. This learned boundary represents the best line with which the model has learned to seperate cats from dogs.
Anything above the boundary is predicted to be class 1, a dog. Everything below predicted to be class 2, a cat. As logistic regression results in a linear model, the seperation boundary is very much linear/straight.
Logistic regression gif by Ryan Holbrook
These animations are great to get a sense of how the models come to their boundaries in the back-end.
For instance, other machine learning models are able to use non-linear boundaries to dinstinguish classes, such as this quadratic discriminant analysis (qda). This “learned” boundary is much closer to the optimal boundary:
Quadratic discriminant analysis gif by Ryan Holbrook
Multivariate adaptive regression splines gif by Ryan Holbrook
Next, we have the k-nearest neighbors algorithm, which predicts for each point (animal) the class (cat/dog) based on the “k” points closest to it. As you see, this results in a highly fluctuating, localized boundary.
K-nearest neighbors gif by Ryan Holbrook
Now, Ryan decided to push the challenge, and simulate new data for two classes with a more difficult decision boundary. The new data and optimal boundaries look like this:
On these data, Ryan put a whole range of non-linear models to work.
Like this support-vector machine, which tries to create optimal boundaries built of support vectors around all the cats and all the dohs (this is definitely not a technical, error-free explanation of what’s happening here).
Let’s jump into some tree-based algorithms and the resulting models. A decision tree classifies data based on multiple, sequential, binary splits. Here, Ryan trained a simple decision tree:
Decision tree gif by Ryan Holbrook
As well as it’s big brother, a random forest, which uses hundreds of trees in the back end and thus results in a more flexible boundary:
Random forest gif by Ryan Holbrook
Extreme gradient boosting is also a tree-based algorithm, which leverages many machine learning techniques to optimize the bias-variance tradeoff. Here’s an earlier blog on how to get started with Xgboost in Python or R:
Last week I cohosted a professional learning course on data visualization at JADS. My fellow host was prof. Jack van Wijk, and together we organized an amazing workshop and poster event. Jack gave two lectures on data visualization theory and resources, and mentioned among others treevis.net, a resource I was unfamiliar with up until then.
treevis.net is a lot like the dataviz project in the sense that it is an extensive overview of different types of data visualizations. treevis is unique, however, in the sense that it is focused on specifically visualizations of hierarchical data: multi-level or nested data structures.
Hans-Jörg Schulz — professor of Computer Science at Aarhus University in Denmark — maintains the treevis repo. At the moment of writing, he has compiled over 300 different types of hierachical data visualizations and displays them on this website.
As an added bonus, the repo is interactive as there are several ways to filter and look for the visualization type that best fits your data and needs.
Most resources come with added links to the original authors and the original papers they were first published in, so this is truly a great resources for those interested in doing a deep dive into data visualization. Do have a look yourself!
Marcus Volz is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, studying geometric networks, optimisation and computational geometry. He’s interested in visualisation, and always looking for opportunities to represent complex information in novel ways to accelerate learning and uncover the unexpected.
One of Marcus’ hobbies is the visualization of mathematical patterns and statistical algorithms via R. He has a whole portfolio full of them, including a Github page with all the associated R code. For my recent promotion, my girlfriend asked Marcus to generate a K-nearest neighbors visual and she had it printed on a large canvas.
The picture contains about 10.000 points, randomly uniformly distributed across x and y, connected by lines with their closest k other points. Marcus shared the code to generate such k-nearest neighbor algorithm plots here on Github. So if you know your way around R, you could make your own version:
#' k-nearest neighbour graph
#'
#' Computes a k-nearest neighbour graph for a given set of points. Refer to the \href{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearest_neighbor_graph}{Wikipedia article} for details.
#' @param points A data frame with x, y coordinates for the points
#' @param k Number of neighbours
#' @keywords nearest neightbour graph
#' @export
#' @examples
#' k_nearest_neighbour_graph()
k_nearest_neighbour_graph <- function(points, k=8) {
get_k_nearest <- function(points, ptnum, k) {
xi <- points$x[ptnum]
yi <- points$y[ptnum] points %>%
dplyr::mutate(dist = sqrt((x - xi)^2 + (y - yi)^2)) %>%
dplyr::arrange(dist) %>%
dplyr::filter(row_number() %in% seq(2, k+1)) %>%
dplyr::mutate(xend = xi, yend = yi)
}
1:nrow(points) %>%
purrr::map_df(~get_k_nearest(points, ., k))
}
Those less versed in R can use Marcus package mathart. With this package, Marcus shares many more visual depictions of cool algorithms! You can install the package and several dependencies with the following lines of code:
This page of Marcus’ mathart Github repository contains the code exact code for these and many other visualizations of algorithms and statistical phenomena. Do check it out if you’re interested!
Also, check out the “Fun” section of my R tips and tricks list for more cool visuals you can generate in R!
Do you have a bunch of data but you can’t seem to figure out how to display it? Or looking for that one specific visualization of which you can’t remember the name?
www.datavizproject.com provides a most comprehensive overview of all the different ways to visualize your data. You can sort all options by Family, Input, Function, and Shape to find that one dataviz that best conveys your message.
Update: look at some of these other repositories here or here.
paulvanderlaken.com 