Chapter 8.

Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
1
 Supervised vs. Unsupervised Learning
■ Supervised learning (classification)
■ Supervision: The training data (observations,
measurements, etc.) are accompanied by labels indicating
the class of the observations
■ New data is classified based on the training set
■ Unsupervised learning (clustering)
■ The class labels of training data is unknown
■ Given a set of measurements, observations, etc. with the
aim of establishing the existence of classes or clusters in
the data
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 Prediction Problems: Classification vs.
Numeric Prediction
■ Classification
■ predicts categorical class labels (discrete or nominal)

■ classifies data (constructs a model) based on the training

set and the values (class labels) in a classifying attribute
and uses it in classifying new data
■ Numeric Prediction
■ models continuous-valued functions, i.e., predicts unknown
or missing values
■ Typical applications
■ Credit/loan approval:

■ Medical diagnosis: if a tumor is cancerous or benign

■ Fraud detection: if a transaction is fraudulent

■ Web page categorization: which category it is

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 Classification—A Two-Step Process
■ Model construction: describing a set of predetermined classes
■ Each tuple/sample is assumed to belong to a predefined class, as
determined by the class label attribute
■ The set of tuples used for model construction is training set
■ The model is represented as classification rules, decision trees, or
mathematical formulae
■ Model usage: for classifying future or unknown objects
■ Estimate accuracy of the model
■ The known label of test sample is compared with the classified

result from the model

■ Accuracy rate is the percentage of test set samples that are

correctly classified by the model

■ Test set is independent of training set (otherwise overfitting)

■ If the accuracy is acceptable, use the model to classify new data

■ Note: If the test set is used to select models, it is called validation (test) set
4
Process (1): Model Construction

Classification
Algorithms
Training
Data

Classifier
(Model)

IF rank = ‘professor’
OR years > 6
THEN tenured = ‘yes’
5
Process (2): Using the Model in Prediction

Classifier

Testing Unseen
Data Data

(Jeff, Professor, 4)

Tenured?

6
 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
7
 Decision Tree Induction: An Example
❑ Training data set: Buys_computer
❑ The data set follows an example of
Quinlan’s ID3 (Playing Tennis)
❑ Resulting tree:
age?

<=30 overcast
31..40 >40

student? yes credit rating?

no yes excellent fair

no yes no yes
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 Algorithm for Decision Tree Induction
■ Basic algorithm (a greedy algorithm)
■ Tree is constructed in a top-down recursive

divide-and-conquer manner
■ At start, all the training examples are at the root

■ Attributes are categorical (if continuous-valued, they are

discretized in advance)
■ Examples are partitioned recursively based on selected

attributes
■ Test attributes are selected on the basis of a heuristic or

statistical measure (e.g., information gain)

■ Conditions for stopping partitioning
■ All samples for a given node belong to the same class

■ There are no remaining attributes for further partitioning –

majority voting is employed for classifying the leaf

■ There are no samples left
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 Brief Review of Entropy
■

m=2

10
 Attribute Selection Measure: Information
Gain (ID3/C4.5)
■ Select the attribute with the highest information gain
■ Let pi be the probability that an arbitrary tuple in D belongs to
class Ci, estimated by |Ci, D|/|D|
■ Expected information (entropy) needed to classify a tuple in D:

■ Information needed (after using A to split D into v partitions) to

classify D:

■ Information gained by branching on attribute A

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 Attribute Selection: Information Gain
g Class P: buys_computer = “yes”
g Class N: buys_computer = “no”

means “age <=30” has 5 out of

14 samples, with 2 yes’es and 3
no’s. Hence

Similarly,

12
 Computing Information-Gain for
Continuous-Valued Attributes
■ Let attribute A be a continuous-valued attribute
■ Must determine the best split point for A
■ Sort the value A in increasing order
■ Typically, the midpoint between each pair of adjacent values
is considered as a possible split point
■ (ai+ai+1)/2 is the midpoint between the values of ai and ai+1
■ The point with the minimum expected information
requirement for A is selected as the split-point for A
■ Split:
■ D1 is the set of tuples in D satisfying A ≤ split-point, and D2 is
the set of tuples in D satisfying A > split-point
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 Gain Ratio for Attribute Selection (C4.5)
■ Information gain measure is biased towards attributes with a
large number of values
■ C4.5 (a successor of ID3) uses gain ratio to overcome the
problem (normalization to information gain)

■ GainRatio(A) = Gain(A)/SplitInfo(A)
■ Ex.

■ gain_ratio(income) = 0.029/1.557 = 0.019

■ The attribute with the maximum gain ratio is selected as the
splitting attribute
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 Gini Index (CART, IBM IntelligentMiner)
■ If a data set D contains examples from n classes, gini index,
gini(D) is defined as

where pj is the relative frequency of class j in D

■ If a data set D is split on A into two subsets D1 and D2, the gini
index gini(D) is defined as

■ Reduction in Impurity:

■ The attribute provides the smallest ginisplit(D) (or the largest

reduction in impurity) is chosen to split the node (need to
enumerate all the possible splitting points for each attribute)
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 Computation of Gini Index
■ Ex. D has 9 tuples in buys_computer = “yes” and 5 in “no”

■ Suppose the attribute income partitions D into 10 in D1: {low,

medium} and 4 in D2

Gini{low,high} is 0.458; Gini{medium,high} is 0.450. Thus, split on the

{low,medium} (and {high}) since it has the lowest Gini index
■ All attributes are assumed continuous-valued
■ May need other tools, e.g., clustering, to get the possible split
values
■ Can be modified for categorical attributes
16
 Comparing Attribute Selection Measures

■ The three measures, in general, return good results but

■ Information gain:
■ biased towards multivalued attributes
■ Gain ratio:
■ tends to prefer unbalanced splits in which one partition is
much smaller than the others
■ Gini index:
■ biased to multivalued attributes
■ has difficulty when # of classes is large
■ tends to favor tests that result in equal-sized partitions
and purity in both partitions
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 Overfitting and Tree Pruning
■ Overfitting: An induced tree may overfit the training data
■ Too many branches, some may reflect anomalies due to

noise or outliers
■ Poor accuracy for unseen samples

■ Two approaches to avoid overfitting

■ Prepruning: Halt tree construction early ̵ do not split a node

if this would result in the goodness measure falling below a

threshold
■ Difficult to choose an appropriate threshold

■ Postpruning: Remove branches from a “fully grown”

tree—get a sequence of progressively pruned trees

■ Use a set of data different from the training data to

decide which is the “best pruned tree”

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 Enhancements to Basic Decision Tree Induction

■ Allow for continuous-valued attributes

■ Dynamically define new discrete-valued attributes that
partition the continuous attribute value into a discrete set of
intervals
■ Handle missing attribute values
■ Assign the most common value of the attribute
■ Assign probability to each of the possible values
■ Attribute construction
■ Create new attributes based on existing ones that are
sparsely represented
■ This reduces fragmentation, repetition, and replication

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 Classification in Large Databases
■ Classification—a classical problem extensively studied by
statisticians and machine learning researchers
■ Scalability: Classifying data sets with millions of examples and
hundreds of attributes with reasonable speed
■ Why is decision tree induction popular?
■ relatively faster learning speed (than other classification
methods)
■ convertible to simple and easy to understand classification
rules
■ can use SQL queries for accessing databases

■ comparable classification accuracy with other methods

■ RainForest (VLDB’98 — Gehrke, Ramakrishnan & Ganti)

■ Builds an AVC-list (attribute, value, class label)

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 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
21
 Bayesian Classification: Why?
■ A statistical classifier: performs probabilistic prediction, i.e.,
predicts class membership probabilities
■ Foundation: Based on Bayes’ Theorem.
■ Performance: A simple Bayesian classifier, naïve Bayesian
classifier, has comparable performance with decision tree and
selected neural network classifiers
■ Incremental: Each training example can incrementally
increase/decrease the probability that a hypothesis is correct —
prior knowledge can be combined with observed data
■ Standard: Even when Bayesian methods are computationally
intractable, they can provide a standard of optimal decision
making against which other methods can be measured
22
 Bayes’ Theorem: Basics
■ Total probability Theorem:

■ Bayes’ Theorem:

■ Let X be a data sample (“evidence”): class label is unknown

■ Let H be a hypothesis that X belongs to class C
■ Classification is to determine P(H|X), (i.e., posteriori probability): the
probability that the hypothesis holds given the observed data sample X
■ P(H) (prior probability): the initial probability
■ E.g., X will buy computer, regardless of age, income, …

■ P(X): probability that sample data is observed

■ P(X|H) (likelihood): the probability of observing the sample X, given that
the hypothesis holds
■ E.g., Given that X will buy computer, the prob. that X is 31..40,

medium income
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 Prediction Based on Bayes’ Theorem
■ Given training data X, posteriori probability of a hypothesis H,
P(H|X), follows the Bayes’ theorem

■ Informally, this can be viewed as

posteriori = likelihood x prior/evidence
■ Predicts X belongs to Ci iff the probability P(Ci|X) is the highest
among all the P(Ck|X) for all the k classes
■ Practical difficulty: It requires initial knowledge of many
probabilities, involving significant computational cost

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Classification Is to Derive the Maximum Posteriori
■ Let D be a training set of tuples and their associated class labels,
and each tuple is represented by an n-D attribute vector X = (x1,
x2, …, xn)
■ Suppose there are m classes C1, C2, …, Cm.
■ Classification is to derive the maximum posteriori, i.e., the
maximal P(Ci|X)
■ This can be derived from Bayes’ theorem

■ Since P(X) is constant for all classes, only

needs to be maximized

25
 Naïve Bayes Classifier
■ A simplified assumption: attributes are conditionally
independent (i.e., no dependence relation between attributes):

■ This greatly reduces the computation cost: Only counts the

class distribution
■ If Ak is categorical, P(xk|Ci) is the # of tuples in Ci having value xk
for Ak divided by |Ci, D| (# of tuples of Ci in D)
■ If Ak is continous-valued, P(xk|Ci) is usually computed based on
Gaussian distribution with a mean μ and standard deviation σ

and P(xk|Ci) is

26
 Naïve Bayes Classifier: Training Dataset

Class:
C1:buys_computer = ‘yes’
C2:buys_computer = ‘no’

Data to be classified:
X = (age <=30,
Income = medium,
Student = yes
Credit_rating = Fair)

27
 Naïve Bayes Classifier: An Example
■ P(Ci): P(buys_computer = “yes”) = 9/14 = 0.643
P(buys_computer = “no”) = 5/14= 0.357
■ Compute P(X|Ci) for each class
P(age = “<=30” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 2/9 = 0.222
P(age = “<= 30” | buys_computer = “no”) = 3/5 = 0.6
P(income = “medium” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 4/9 = 0.444
P(income = “medium” | buys_computer = “no”) = 2/5 = 0.4
P(student = “yes” | buys_computer = “yes) = 6/9 = 0.667
P(student = “yes” | buys_computer = “no”) = 1/5 = 0.2
P(credit_rating = “fair” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 6/9 = 0.667
P(credit_rating = “fair” | buys_computer = “no”) = 2/5 = 0.4
■ X = (age <= 30 , income = medium, student = yes, credit_rating = fair)
P(X|Ci) : P(X|buys_computer = “yes”) = 0.222 x 0.444 x 0.667 x 0.667 = 0.044
P(X|buys_computer = “no”) = 0.6 x 0.4 x 0.2 x 0.4 = 0.019
P(X|Ci)*P(Ci) : P(X|buys_computer = “yes”) * P(buys_computer = “yes”) = 0.028
P(X|buys_computer = “no”) * P(buys_computer = “no”) = 0.007
Therefore, X belongs to class (“buys_computer = yes”)
28
 Naïve Bayes Classifier: Comments
■ Advantages
■ Easy to implement

■ Good results obtained in most of the cases

■ Disadvantages
■ Assumption: class conditional independence, therefore loss of
accuracy
■ Practically, dependencies exist among variables

■ E.g., hospitals: patients: Profile: age, family history, etc.

Symptoms: fever, cough etc., Disease: lung cancer,

diabetes, etc.
■ Dependencies among these cannot be modeled by Naïve

Bayes Classifier
■ How to deal with these dependencies? Bayesian Belief Networks
(Chapter 9)
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 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
30
 Using IF-THEN Rules for Classification
■ Represent the knowledge in the form of IF-THEN rules
R: IF age = youth AND student = yes THEN buys_computer = yes
■ Rule antecedent/precondition vs. rule consequent
■ Assessment of a rule: coverage and accuracy
■ ncovers = # of tuples covered by R
■ ncorrect = # of tuples correctly classified by R
coverage(R) = ncovers /|D| /* D: training data set */
accuracy(R) = ncorrect / ncovers
■ If more than one rule are triggered, need conflict resolution
■ Size ordering: assign the highest priority to the triggering rules that has
the “toughest” requirement (i.e., with the most attribute tests)
■ Class-based ordering: decreasing order of prevalence or misclassification
cost per class
■ Rule-based ordering (decision list): rules are organized into one long
priority list, according to some measure of rule quality or by experts
31
Classifier Evaluation Metrics: Confusion Matrix
Confusion Matrix:
Actual class\Predicted class C1 ¬ C1
C1 True Positives (TP) False Negatives (FN)
¬ C1 False Positives (FP) True Negatives (TN)

Example of Confusion Matrix:

Actual class\Predicted buy_computer buy_computer Total
class = yes = no
buy_computer = yes 6954 46 7000
buy_computer = no 412 2588 3000
Total 7366 2634 10000

■ Given m classes, an entry, CMi,j in a confusion matrix indicates

# of tuples in class i that were labeled by the classifier as class j
■ May have extra rows/columns to provide totals
32
 Classifier Evaluation Metrics: Accuracy,
Error Rate, Sensitivity and Specificity
A\P C ¬C ■ Class Imbalance Problem:
C TP FN P
■ One class may be rare, e.g.
¬C FP TN N
fraud, or HIV-positive
P’ N’ All
■ Significant majority of the

■ Classifier Accuracy, or negative class and minority of

recognition rate: percentage of the positive class
test set tuples that are correctly ■ Sensitivity: True Positive
classified recognition rate
Accuracy = (TP + TN)/All ■ Sensitivity = TP/P

■ Error rate: 1 – accuracy, or ■ Specificity: True Negative

Error rate = (FP + FN)/All recognition rate

■ Specificity = TN/N

33
 Classifier Evaluation Metrics:
Precision and Recall, and F-measures
■ Precision: exactness – what % of tuples that the classifier
labeled as positive are actually positive

■ Recall: completeness – what % of positive tuples did the

classifier label as positive?
■ Perfect score is 1.0
■ Inverse relationship between precision & recall
■ F measure (F1 or F-score): harmonic mean of precision and
recall,

■ Fß: weighted measure of precision and recall

■ assigns ß times as much weight to recall as to precision

34
 Classifier Evaluation Metrics: Example

Actual Class\Predicted class cancer = yes cancer = no Total Recognition(%)

cancer = yes 90 210 300 30.00 (sensitivity
cancer = no 140 9560 9700 98.56 (specificity)
Total 230 9770 10000 96.40 (accuracy)

■ Precision = 90/230 = 39.13% Recall = 90/300 = 30.00%

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