# Discrete or continuous modeling ?

Tuesday, we got our conference “Insurance, Actuarial Science, Data & Models” and Dylan Possamaï gave a very interesting concluding talk. In the introduction, he came back briefly on a nice discussion we usually have in economics on the kind of model we should consider. It was about optimal control. In many applications, we start with a one period economy, then a two period economy, and pretend that we can extend it to $n$ period economy. And then, the continuous case can also be considered. A few years ago, I was working on sports game as an optimal effort startegy (within in a game – fixed time). It was with a discrete model, I was running simulations to get an efficient frontier, where coaches might say “ok, now we have enough (positive) difference, and we get closer to the end of the game, so we can ‘lower the effort’ i.e. top players can relax a little bit” (it was on basket-ball games). I asked a good friend of mine, Romuald, to help me on some technical parts of proofs, but he did not like so much my discrete-time model, and wanted to move to continuous time. And for now six years, we keep saying that someday we should get back to that paper….

My initial thoughts were that the difference was really “cultural”: you are either a continuous-time sort of guy, or a discrete-time one (or maybe none of the two, but that’s another problem). He works with stochastic processes, I work with time series. Of course, we can find connections, but most of the time, the techniques are very different. And tuesday, Dylan mentioned a very nice illustration that it’s not necessarily a cultural difference, and sometimes, it is great to move to continuous time. So I wanted to illustrate that idea.

Consider for instance the following curve.

vu = seq(0,1,length=601) vv = sin(vu*pi) plot(vu,vv,type="l",lwd=2)

The goal is to find the value of the maximum, numerically. And here, there are two (very) different strategies

• the discrete one: we see a (finite) collection of points – for instance, the graph above is a collection of 601 points (connected with a straight line) – and in that case, we need a standard algorithm (in $O(n)$) to get the value of the maximum
• the continuous one: we see a function $x\mapsto \sin(\pi x)$, and in that case, we use optimization routines

In the second case, use for instance

optim(0,function(x) -sin(pi*x)) $par [1] 0.5$value [1] -1

For the first case, we can use the standard R function, and see how long it takes to use simulations to get an approximation of the maximum

library(microbenchmark) max_time = function(n) median(microbenchmark(max(sin(runif(n)*pi)))$time) vn = 10^(seq(1,6,length=21)) vt = Vectorize(max_time)(vn) plot(vn,vt/1e9,col="blue",pch=19,type="b",log="xy") but of course, some home-made code can also be used c_max = function(n=100){ x = sin(runif(n)*pi) y = x[1] for(i in 2:length(x)) { if(x[i] &gt; y) { y = x[i] }} return(y)} max_time=function(n) median(microbenchmark(c_max(n))$time) lines(vn,vt/1e9,type="b")

We can add that horizontal red line using

## Ridge Regression (from scratch)

Before running some codes, recall that we want to solve something like$$\widehat{\mathbf{\beta}}_{\lambda}=\text{argmin}\lbrace -\log\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{\beta}|\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y})+\lambda\|\mathbf{\beta}\|_{\ell_2}^2\rbrace$$ In the case where we consider the log-likelihood of some Gaussian variable, we get the sum of the square of the residuals, and we can obtain an explicit solution. But not in the context of a logistic regression.

The heuristics about Ridge regression is the following graph. In the background, we can visualize the (two-dimensional) log-likelihood of the logistic regression, and the blue circle is the constraint we have, if we rewite the optimization problem as a contrained optimization problem : $$\min_{\mathbf{\beta}:\|\mathbf{\beta}\|^2_{\ell_2}\leq s} \lbrace \sum_{i=1}^n -\log\mathcal{L}(y_i,\beta_0+\mathbf{x}^T\mathbf{\beta}) \rbrace$$can be written equivalently (it is a strictly convex problem)$$\min_{\mathbf{\beta},\lambda} \lbrace -\sum_{i=1}^n \log\mathcal{L}(y_i,\beta_0+\mathbf{x}^T\mathbf{\beta}) +\lambda \|\mathbf{\beta}\|_{\ell_2}^2 \rbrace$$Thus, the constrained maximum should lie in the blue disk

LogLik = function(bbeta){ b0=bbeta[1] beta=bbeta[-1] sum(-y*log(1 + exp(-(b0+X%*%beta))) - (1-y)*log(1 + exp(b0+X%*%beta)))} u = seq(-4,4,length=251) v = outer(u,u,function(x,y) LogLik(c(1,x,y))) image(u,u,v,col=rev(heat.colors(25))) contour(u,u,v,add=TRUE) u = seq(-1,1,length=251) lines(u,sqrt(1-u^2),type="l",lwd=2,col="blue") lines(u,-sqrt(1-u^2),type="l",lwd=2,col="blue")

Let us consider the objective function, with the following code

PennegLogLik = function(bbeta,lambda=0){ b0 = bbeta[1] beta = bbeta[-1] -sum(-y*log(1 + exp(-(b0+X%*%beta))) - (1-y)* log(1 + exp(b0+X%*%beta)))+lambda*sum(beta^2) }

Why not try a standard optimisation routine ? In the very first post on that series, we did mention that using optimization routines were not clever, since they were strongly relying on the starting point. But here, it is not the case

lambda = 1 beta_init = lm(PRONO~.,data=myocarde)$coefficients vpar = matrix(NA,1000,8) for(i in 1:1000){ vpar[i,] = optim(par = beta_init*rnorm(8,1,2), function(x) PennegLogLik(x,lambda), method = "BFGS", control = list(abstol=1e-9))$par} par(mfrow=c(1,2)) plot(density(vpar[,2]),ylab="",xlab=names(myocarde)[1]) plot(density(vpar[,3]),ylab="",xlab=names(myocarde)[2])

Clearly, even if we change the starting point, it looks like we converge towards the same value. That could be considered as the optimum.

The code to compute $\widehat{\mathbf{\beta}}_{\lambda}$ would then be

opt_ridge = function(lambda){ beta_init = lm(PRONO~.,data=myocarde)$coefficients logistic_opt = optim(par = beta_init*0, function(x) PennegLogLik(x,lambda), method = "BFGS", control=list(abstol=1e-9)) logistic_opt$par[-1]}

and we can visualize the evolution of $\widehat{\mathbf{\beta}}_{\lambda}$ as a function of ${\lambda}$

v_lambda = c(exp(seq(-2,5,length=61))) est_ridge = Vectorize(opt_ridge)(v_lambda) library("RColorBrewer") colrs = brewer.pal(7,"Set1") plot(v_lambda,est_ridge[1,],col=colrs[1]) for(i in 2:7) lines(v_lambda,est_ridge[i,],col=colrs[i])

At least it seems to make sense: we can observe the shrinkage as $\lambda$ increases (we’ll get back to that later on).

## Ridge, using Netwon Raphson algorithm

We’ve seen that we can also use Newton Raphson to solve this problem. Without the penalty term, the algorithm was$$\mathbf{\beta}_{new} = \mathbf{\beta}_{old} - \left(\frac{\partial^2\log\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{\beta}_{old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}\partial\mathbf{\beta}^T}\right)^{-1}\cdot \frac{\partial\log\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{\beta}_{old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}}$$where
$$\frac{\partial\log\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{\beta}_{old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}}=\mathbf{X}^T(\mathbf{y}-\mathbf{p}_{old})$$and$$\frac{\partial^2\log\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{\beta}_{old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}\partial\mathbf{\beta}^T}=-\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}\mathbf{X}$$where $\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}$ is the diagonal matrix with terms $\mathbf{p}_{old}(1-\mathbf{p}_{old})$ on the diagonal.

Thus$$\mathbf{\beta}_{new} = \mathbf{\beta}_{old} + (\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}\mathbf{X})^{-1}\mathbf{X}^T[\mathbf{y}-\mathbf{p}_{old}]$$that we can also write$$\mathbf{\beta}_{new} =(\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}\mathbf{X})^{-1}\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}\mathbf{z}$$where $\mathbf{z}=\mathbf{X}\mathbf{\beta}_{old}+\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}^{-1}[\mathbf{y}-\mathbf{p}_{old}]$. Here, on the penalized problem, we can easily prove that$$\frac{\partial\log\mathcal{L}_p(\mathbf{\beta}_{\lambda,old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}}=\frac{\partial\log\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{\beta}_{\lambda,old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}}-2\lambda\mathbf{\beta}_{old}$$while$$\frac{\partial^2\log\mathcal{L}_p(\mathbf{\beta}_{\lambda,old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}\partial\mathbf{\beta}^T}=\frac{\partial^2\log\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{\beta}_{\lambda,old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}\partial\mathbf{\beta}^T}-2\lambda\mathbb{I}$$Hence$$\mathbf{\beta}_{\lambda,new} =(\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}\mathbf{X}+2\lambda\mathbb{I})^{-1}\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}\mathbf{z}$$
The code is then

Y = myocarde$PRONO X = myocarde[,1:7] for(j in 1:7) X[,j] = (X[,j]-mean(X[,j]))/sd(X[,j]) X = as.matrix(X) X = cbind(1,X) colnames(X) = c("Inter",names(myocarde[,1:7])) beta = as.matrix(lm(Y~0+X)$coefficients,ncol=1) for(s in 1:9){ pi = exp(X%*%beta[,s])/(1+exp(X%*%beta[,s])) Delta = matrix(0,nrow(X),nrow(X));diag(Delta)=(pi*(1-pi)) z = X%*%beta[,s] + solve(Delta)%*%(Y-pi) B = solve(t(X)%*%Delta%*%X+2*lambda*diag(ncol(X))) %*% (t(X)%*%Delta%*%z) beta = cbind(beta,B)} beta[,8:10] [,1] [,2] [,3] XInter 0.59619654 0.59619654 0.59619654 XFRCAR 0.09217848 0.09217848 0.09217848 XINCAR 0.77165707 0.77165707 0.77165707 XINSYS 0.69678521 0.69678521 0.69678521 XPRDIA -0.29575642 -0.29575642 -0.29575642 XPAPUL -0.23921101 -0.23921101 -0.23921101 XPVENT -0.33120792 -0.33120792 -0.33120792 XREPUL -0.84308972 -0.84308972 -0.84308972

Again, it seems that convergence is very fast.

And interestingly, with that algorithm, we can also derive the variance of the estimator$$\text{Var}[\widehat{\mathbf{\beta}}_{\lambda}]=[\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}\mathbf{X}+2\lambda\mathbb{I}]^{-1}\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}\text{Var}[\mathbf{z}]\mathbf{\Delta}\mathbf{X}[\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}\mathbf{X}+2\lambda\mathbb{I}]^{-1}$$where$\text{Var}[\mathbf{z}]=\mathbf{\Delta}^{-1}$

The code to compute $\widehat{\mathbf{\beta}}_{\lambda}$ as a function of $\lambda$ is then

newton_ridge = function(lambda=1){ beta = as.matrix(lm(Y~0+X)$coefficients,ncol=1)*runif(8) for(s in 1:20){ pi = exp(X%*%beta[,s])/(1+exp(X%*%beta[,s])) Delta = matrix(0,nrow(X),nrow(X));diag(Delta)=(pi*(1-pi)) z = X%*%beta[,s] + solve(Delta)%*%(Y-pi) B = solve(t(X)%*%Delta%*%X+2*lambda*diag(ncol(X))) %*% (t(X)%*%Delta%*%z) beta = cbind(beta,B)} Varz = solve(Delta) Varb = solve(t(X)%*%Delta%*%X+2*lambda*diag(ncol(X))) %*% t(X)%*% Delta %*% Varz %*% Delta %*% X %*% solve(t(X)%*%Delta%*%X+2*lambda*diag(ncol(X))) return(list(beta=beta[,ncol(beta)],sd=sqrt(diag(Varb))))} We can visualize the evolution of $\widehat{\mathbf{\beta}}_{\lambda}$ (as a function of $\lambda$) v_lambda=c(exp(seq(-2,5,length=61))) est_ridge=Vectorize(function(x) newton_ridge(x)$beta)(v_lambda) library("RColorBrewer") colrs=brewer.pal(7,"Set1") plot(v_lambda,est_ridge[1,],col=colrs[1],type="l") for(i in 2:7) lines(v_lambda,est_ridge[i,],col=colrs[i])

and to get the evolution of the variance

v_lambda=c(exp(seq(-2,5,length=61))) est_ridge=Vectorize(function(x) newton_ridge(x)$sd)(v_lambda) library("RColorBrewer") colrs=brewer.pal(7,"Set1") plot(v_lambda,est_ridge[1,],col=colrs[1],type="l") for(i in 2:7) lines(v_lambda,est_ridge[i,],col=colrs[i],lwd=2) Recall that when $\lambda=0$ (on the left of the graphs), $\widehat{\mathbf{\beta}}_{0}=\widehat{\mathbf{\beta}}^{mco}$ (no penalty). Thus as $\lambda$ increase (i) the bias increase (estimates tend to 0) (ii) the variances deacrease. ## Ridge, using glmnet As always, there are R functions availble to run a ridge regression. Let us use the glmnet function, with $\alpha=0$ y = myocarde$PRONO X = myocarde[,1:7] for(j in 1:7) X[,j] = (X[,j]-mean(X[,j]))/sd(X[,j]) X = as.matrix(X) library(glmnet) glm_ridge = glmnet(X, y, alpha=0) plot(glm_ridge,xvar="lambda",col=colrs,lwd=2)

as a function of the norm

the $\ell_1$ norm here, I don’t know why. I don’t know either why all graphs obtained with different optimisation routines are so different… Maybe that will be for another post…

## Ridge with orthogonal covariates

An interesting case is obtained when covariates are orthogonal. This can be obtained using a PCA of the covariates.

library(factoextra) pca = princomp(X) pca_X = get_pca_ind(pca)$coord Let us run a ridge regression on those (orthogonal) covariates library(glmnet) glm_ridge = glmnet(pca_X, y, alpha=0) plot(glm_ridge,xvar="lambda",col=colrs,lwd=2) plot(glm_ridge,col=colrs,lwd=2) We clearly observe the shrinkage of the parameters, in the sense that $$\widehat{\mathbf{\beta}}_{\lambda}^{\perp}=\frac{\widehat{\mathbf{\beta}}^{mco}}{1+\lambda}$$ ## Application Let us try with our second set of data df0 = df df0$y=as.numeric(df$y)-1 plot_lambda = function(lambda){ m = apply(df0,2,mean) s = apply(df0,2,sd) for(j in 1:2) df0[,j] = (df0[,j]-m[j])/s[j] reg = glmnet(cbind(df0$x1,df0$x2), df0$y==1, alpha=0,lambda=lambda) u = seq(0,1,length=101) p = function(x,y){ xt = (x-m[1])/s[1] yt = (y-m[2])/s[2] predict(reg,newx=cbind(x1=xt,x2=yt),type='response')} v = outer(u,u,p) image(u,u,v,col=clr10,breaks=(0:10)/10) points(df$x1,df$x2,pch=c(1,19)[1+z],cex=1.5) contour(u,u,v,levels = .5,add=TRUE) }

We can try various values of $\lambda$

reg = glmnet(cbind(df0$x1,df0$x2), df0$y==1, alpha=0) par(mfrow=c(1,2)) plot(reg,xvar="lambda",col=c("blue","red"),lwd=2) abline(v=log(.2)) plot_lambda(.2) or reg = glmnet(cbind(df0$x1,df0$x2), df0$y==1, alpha=0) par(mfrow=c(1,2)) plot(reg,xvar="lambda",col=c("blue","red"),lwd=2) abline(v=log(1.2)) plot_lambda(1.2)

Next step is to change the norm of the penality, with the $\ell_1$ norm (to be continued…)

# Classification from scratch, logistic regression 1/8

Let us start today our series on classification from scratch

The logistic regression is based on the assumption that given covariates $\mathbf{x}$, $Y$ has a Bernoulli distribution,$$Y|\mathbf{X}=\mathbf{x}\sim\mathcal{B}(p_{\mathbf{x}}),~~~~p_\mathbf{x}=\frac{\exp[\mathbf{x}^T\mathbf{\beta}]}{1+\exp[\mathbf{x}^T\mathbf{\beta}]}$$The goal is to estimate parameter $\mathbf{\beta}$.

Recall that the heuristics for the use of that function for the probability is that$$\log[\text{odds}(Y=1)]=\log\frac{\mathbb{P}[Y=1]}{\mathbb{P}[Y=0]}=\mathbf{x}^T\mathbf{\beta}$$

## Maximimum of the (log)-likelihood function

The log-likelihood is here$$\log\mathcal{L} = \sum_{i=1}^n y_i\log p_i+(1-y_i)\log (1-p_i)$$ where $p_{i}=(1+\exp[-\mathbf{x}_i^T\mathbf{\beta}])^{-1}$. Numerical techniques are based on (numerical) gradient descent to compute the maximum of the likelihood function. The (negative) log-likelihood is the following function

y = myocarde$PRONO X = cbind(1,as.matrix(myocarde[,1:7])) negLogLik = function(beta){ -sum(-y*log(1 + exp(-(X%*%beta))) - (1-y)*log(1 + exp(X%*%beta))) } We use the minus sign since standard optimization routines compute minima, not maxima. Now, to find the minimum of that function, we need a starting point to initiate the algorithm beta_init = lm(PRONO~.,data=myocarde)$coefficients

Why not start with the parameter of the OLS. Somehow, we might think that at least, sign should be ok for instance. Anyway, we need a starting point, and let us use that one.

logistic_opt = optim(par = beta_init, negLogLik, hessian=TRUE, method = "BFGS", control=list(abstol=1e-9))

Here, we obtain

 logistic_opt$par (Intercept) FRCAR INCAR INSYS 1.656926397 0.045234029 -2.119441743 0.204023835 PRDIA PAPUL PVENT REPUL -0.102420095 0.165823647 -0.081047525 -0.005992238 Let us verify here that this output is valid. For instance, what if we change the value of the starting point (randomly) simu = function(i){ logistic_opt_i = optim(par = rnorm(8,0,3)*beta_init, negLogLik, hessian=TRUE, method = "BFGS", control=list(abstol=1e-9)) logistic_opt_i$par[2:3] } v_beta = t(Vectorize(simu)(1:1000)) plot(v_beta) par(mfrow=c(1,2)) hist(v_beta[,1],xlab=names(myocarde)[1]) hist(v_beta[,2],xlab=names(myocarde)[2])

Ooops. There is a problem here. Clearly, we cannot rely on numerical optimization here. We can think about using another optimization routine

library(optimx) logit = function(mX, vBeta) { exp(mX %*% vBeta)/(1+ exp(mX %*% vBeta)) } logLikelihoodLogitStable = function(vBeta, mX, vY) { -sum(vY*(mX %*% vBeta - log(1+exp(mX %*% vBeta))) + (1-vY)*(-log(1 + exp(mX %*% vBeta)))) } likelihoodScore = function(vBeta, mX, vY) { return(t(mX) %*% (logit(mX, vBeta) - vY) ) } optimLogitLBFGS = optimx(beta_init, logLikelihoodLogitStable, method = 'L-BFGS-B', gr = likelihoodScore, mX = X, vY = y, hessian=TRUE)

The optimum is here

attr(optimLogitLBFGS, "details")[[2]] [,1] 0.066680272 FRCAR 0.003080542 INCAR 0.079031364 INSYS -0.001586194 PRDIA 0.040500697 PAPUL -0.041870705 PVENT -0.014162756 REPUL 0.195632244

Let’s be honest here, I do not feel confortable with those techniques. So, what happened here ?

Here, the technique we use is based on the following idea,$$\mathbf{\beta}_{new}=\mathbf{\beta}_{old} -\left(\frac{\partial^2\log\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{\beta}_{old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}\partial\mathbf{\beta}^T}\right)^{-1}\cdot \frac{\partial\log\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{\beta}_{old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}}$$The problem is that my computer does not know this first and second derivatives. So it will compute them using approximation techniques.

Actually, it is possible to use functions dedicated to such computation

library(numDeriv) library(MASS) logit = function(x){1/(1+exp(-x))} logLik = function(beta, X, y){ -sum(y*log(logit(X%*%beta)) + (1-y)*log(1-logit(X%*%beta))) } optim_second = function(beta, num_iter){ LL = vector() for(i in 1:num_iter){ grad = (t(X)%*%(logit(X%*%beta) - y)) H = hessian(logLik, beta, method = "complex", X = X, y = y) beta = beta - ginv(H)%*%grad LL[i] = logLik(beta, X, y) } result = list(beta, H) return(result) }

With our OLS starting point, we obtain

opt0 = optim_second(beta_init,500) opt0[[1]] [,1] [1,] 0.951074420 [2,] 0.018860280 [3,] 0.275428978 [4,] 0.144803636 [5,] -0.058535606 [6,] 0.001182178 [7,] -0.108651776 [8,] -0.002940315

But if we try with another starting point

opt1 = optim_second(beta_init*runif(8),500) opt1[[1]] [,1] [1,] 0.052894794 [2,] 0.024718435 [3,] 0.167953661 [4,] 0.171662947 [5,] -0.057458066 [6,] -0.011361034 [7,] -0.107532114 [8,] -0.002679064

Clearly, some coefficients are rather close. But other aren’t. From my point of viezw, that is a major problem (keep in mind that we do not deal here with massive data ! There are only 7 explanatory variables, and only 71 observations).

Why not try to be clever, and use the analytical values of those derivatives ? Even if some people claim the oppositive, sometimes, it can actually be usefull to do the maths, instead of considering only numerical values.

## Newton (or Fisher) Algorithm

If you open any Econometrics textbooks (one can also try to derive it), you will get $$\frac{\partial\log\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{\beta}_{old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}}=\mathbf{X}^T(\mathbf{y}-\mathbf{p}_{old})$$
while$$\frac{\partial^2\log\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{\beta}_{old})}{\partial\mathbf{\beta}\partial\mathbf{\beta}^T}=-\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}\mathbf{X}$$

Y=myocarde$PRONO X=cbind(1,as.matrix(myocarde[,1:7])) colnames(X)=c("Inter",names(myocarde[,1:7])) beta=as.matrix(lm(Y~0+X)$coefficients,ncol=1) for(s in 1:9){ pi=exp(X%*%beta[,s])/(1+exp(X%*%beta[,s])) gradient=t(X)%*%(Y-pi) omega=matrix(0,nrow(X),nrow(X));diag(omega)=(pi*(1-pi)) Hessian=-t(X)%*%omega%*%X beta=cbind(beta,beta[,s]-solve(Hessian)%*%gradient)}

Observe that here, I use only ten iterations of the algorithm !

 beta[,8:10] [,1] [,2] [,3] XInter -10.187641685 -10.187641696 -10.187641696 XFRCAR 0.138178119 0.138178119 0.138178119 XINCAR -5.862429035 -5.862429037 -5.862429037 XINSYS 0.717084018 0.717084018 0.717084018 XPRDIA -0.073668171 -0.073668171 -0.073668171 XPAPUL 0.016756506 0.016756506 0.016756506 XPVENT -0.106776012 -0.106776012 -0.106776012 XREPUL -0.003154187 -0.003154187 -0.003154187

The thing is that is seems to converge extremely fast. And it is rather robust ! Look at what we get if we change our starting point

beta=as.matrix(lm(Y~0+X)$coefficients,ncol=1)*runif(8) for(s in 1:9){ pi=exp(X%*%beta[,s])/(1+exp(X%*%beta[,s])) gradient=t(X)%*%(Y-pi) omega=matrix(0,nrow(X),nrow(X));diag(omega)=(pi*(1-pi)) Hessian=-t(X)%*%omega%*%X beta=cbind(beta,beta[,s]-solve(Hessian)%*%gradient)} beta[,8:10] [,1] [,2] [,3] XInter -10.187641586 -10.187641696 -10.187641696 XFRCAR 0.138178118 0.138178119 0.138178119 XINCAR -5.862429017 -5.862429037 -5.862429037 XINSYS 0.717084013 0.717084018 0.717084018 XPRDIA -0.073668172 -0.073668171 -0.073668171 XPAPUL 0.016756508 0.016756506 0.016756506 XPVENT -0.106776012 -0.106776012 -0.106776012 XREPUL -0.003154187 -0.003154187 -0.003154187 Nice, isn’t it? Looks like we got our winner, don’t we? And one can use the inverse of the Hessian matrix to get standard deviations. ## Weighted Least-Squares Let us go one step further. We’ve seen that we want to compute something like$$\mathbf{\beta}_{new} =(\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}\mathbf{X})^{-1}\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}\mathbf{z}$$(if we do substitute matrices in the analytical expressions) where $\mathbf{z}=\mathbf{X}\mathbf{\beta}_{old}+\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}^{-1}[\mathbf{y}-\mathbf{p}_{old}]$. But actually, that’s simply a standard least-square problem$$\mathbf{\beta}_{new} = \text{argmin}\left\lbrace(\mathbf{z}-\mathbf{X}\mathbf{\beta})^T\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}^{-1}(\mathbf{z}-\mathbf{X}\mathbf{\beta})\right\rbrace$$The only problem here is that weights $\mathbf{\Delta}_{old}$ are functions of unknown $\mathbf{\beta}_{old}$. But actually, if we keep iterating, we should be able to solve it : given the $\mathbf{\beta}$ we got the weights, and with the weights, we can use weighted OLS to get an updated $\mathbf{\beta}$. That’s the idea of iteratively reweighted least squares. The algorithm will be df = myocarde beta_init = lm(PRONO~.,data=df)$coefficients X = cbind(1,as.matrix(myocarde[,1:7])) beta = beta_init for(s in 1:1000){ p = exp(X %*% beta) / (1+exp(X %*% beta)) omega = diag(nrow(df)) diag(omega) = (p*(1-p)) df$Z = X %*% beta + solve(omega) %*% (df$PRONO - p) beta = lm(Z~.,data=df[,-8], weights=diag(omega))\$coefficients }

and the output is here

 beta (Intercept) FRCAR INCAR INSYS PRDIA -10.187641696 0.138178119 -5.862429037 0.717084018 -0.073668171 PAPUL PVENT REPUL 0.016756506 -0.106776012 -0.003154187

which is almost what we’ve obtained before. Nice isn’t it ? Actually, here we also have standard deviations of estimators

summary( lm(Z~.,data=df[,-8], weights=diag(omega)))   Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(&gt;|t|) (Intercept) -10.187642 10.668138 -0.955 0.343 FRCAR 0.138178 0.102340 1.350 0.182 INCAR -5.862429 6.052560 -0.969 0.336 INSYS 0.717084 0.503527 1.424 0.159 PRDIA -0.073668 0.261549 -0.282 0.779 PAPUL 0.016757 0.306666 0.055 0.957 PVENT -0.106776 0.099145 -1.077 0.286 REPUL -0.003154 0.004386 -0.719 0.475

## The standard glm function

Of course, it is possible to use an R built-in function to get our estimate

summary(glm(PRONO~.,data=myocarde,family=binomial(link = "logit")))   Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(&gt;|z|) (Intercept) -10.187642 11.895227 -0.856 0.392 FRCAR 0.138178 0.114112 1.211 0.226 INCAR -5.862429 6.748785 -0.869 0.385 INSYS 0.717084 0.561445 1.277 0.202 PRDIA -0.073668 0.291636 -0.253 0.801 PAPUL 0.016757 0.341942 0.049 0.961 PVENT -0.106776 0.110550 -0.966 0.334 REPUL -0.003154 0.004891 -0.645 0.519

## Application and visualisation

Let us visualize the prediction obtained from the logistic regression, on our second dataset

x = c(.4,.55,.65,.9,.1,.35,.5,.15,.2,.85) y = c(.85,.95,.8,.87,.5,.55,.5,.2,.1,.3) z = c(1,1,1,1,1,0,0,1,0,0) df = data.frame(x1=x,x2=y,y=as.factor(z)) reg = glm(y~x1+x2,data=df,family=binomial(link = "logit")) u = seq(0,1,length=101) p = function(x,y) predict.glm(reg,newdata=data.frame(x1=x,x2=y),type="response") v = outer(u,u,p) image(u,u,v,xlab="Variable 1",ylab="Variable 2",col=clr10,breaks=(0:10)/10) points(x,y,pch=19,cex=1.5,col="white") points(x,y,pch=c(1,19)[1+z],cex=1.5) contour(u,u,v,levels = .5,add=TRUE)

Here level curves – or iso-probabilities – are linear, so the space is divided in two (0 and 1, survival and death, white and black) by a straight line (or an hyperplane in higher dimension). Furthermore, since we have a linear model, if we change the cutoff (the threshold used to create the two classes), we obtain another straight line (or hyperplane) parallel to the first one.

Next time, we will introduce splines to smooth those continuous covariates… to be continued.

# Optimization and mixture estimation

Recently, one of my students asked me about optimization routines in R. He told me he that R performed well on the estimation of a time series model with different regimes, while he had trouble with a (simple) GARCH process, and he was wondering if R was good in optimization routines. Actually, I always thought that mixtures (and regimes) was something difficult to estimate, so I was a bit surprised…

Indeed, it reminded me some trouble I experienced once, while I was talking about maximum likelihooh estimation, for non standard distribution, i.e. when optimization had to be done on the log likelihood function. And even when generating nice samples, giving appropriate initial values (actually the true value used in random generation), each time I tried to optimize my log likelihood, it failed. So I decided to play a little bit with standard optimization functions, to see which one performed better when trying to estimate mixture parameter (from a mixture based sample). Here, I generate a mixture of two gaussian distributions, and I would like to see how different the mean should be to have a high probability to estimate properly the parameters of the mixture.

The density is here  proportional to

The true model is , and  being a parameter that will change, from 0 to 4.
The log likelihood (actually, I add a minus since most of the optimization functions actually minimize functions) is
> logvraineg <- function(param, obs) {
+ p <- param[1]
+ m1 <- param[2]
+ sd1 <- param[3]
+ m2 <- param[4]
+  sd2 <- param[5]
+  -sum(log(p * dnorm(x = obs, mean = m1, sd = sd1) + (1 – p) *
+ dnorm(x = obs, mean = m2, sd = sd2)))
+  }
The code to generate my samples is the following,
>X1 = rnorm(n,0,1)
> X20 = rnorm(n,0,1)
> Z  = sample(c(1,2,2),size=n,replace=TRUE)
> X2=m+X20
> X = c(X1[Z==1],X2[Z==2])
Then I use two functions to optimize my log likelihood, with identical intial values,
> O1=nlm(f = logvraineg, p = c(.5, mean(X)-sd(X)/5, sd(X), mean(X)+sd(X)/5, sd(X)), obs = X)
> logvrainegX <- function(param) {logvraineg(param,X)}
> O2=optim( par = c(.5, mean(X)-sd(X)/5, sd(X), mean(X)+sd(X)/5, sd(X)),
+   fn = logvrainegX)
Actually, since I might have identification problems, I take either  or , depending whether  or  is the smallest parameter.

On the graph above, the x-axis is the difference between means of the mixture (as on the animated grap above). Then, the red point is the median of estimated parameter I have (here ), and I have included something that can be interpreted as a confidence interval, i.e. where I have been in 90% of my scenarios: theblack vertical segments. Obviously, when the sample is not enough heterogeneous (i.e.  and  rather different), I cannot estimate properly my parameters, I might even have a probability that exceed 1 (I did not add any constraint). The blue plain horizontal line is the true value of the parameter, while the blue dotted horizontal line is the initial value of the parameter in the optimization algorithm (I started assuming that the mixture probability was around 0.2).
The graph below is based on the second optimization routine (with identical  starting values, and of course on the same generated samples),

(just to be honest, in many cases, it did not converge, so the loop stopped, and I had to run it again… so finally, my study is based on a bit less than 500 samples (times 15 since I considered several values for the mean of my second underlying distribution), with 200 generated observations from a mixture).
The graph below compares the two (empty circles are the first algorithm, while plain circles the second one),

On average, it is not so bad…. but the probability to be far away from the tru value is not small at all… except when the difference between the two means exceeds 3…
If I change starting values for the optimization algorithm (previously, I assumed that the mixture probability was 1/5, here I start from 1/2), we have the following graph

which look like the previous one, except for small differences between the two underlying distributions (just as if initial values had not impact on the optimization, but it might come from the fact that the surface is nice, and we are not trapped in regions of local minimum).
Thus, I am far from being an expert in optimization routines in R (see here for further information), but so far, it looks like R is not doing so bad… and the two algorithm perform similarly (maybe the first one being a bit closer to the trueparameter).