Machine learning – Logistic regression tutorial

Download this tutorial: doc or pdf
and the dataset: zip

Let’s create some random data that are split into two different classes, ‘class 0’ and ‘class 1’.

We will use these data as a training set for logistic regression.

 

 

Import your data

This dataset represents 100 samples classified in two classes as 0 or 1 (stored in the third column), according to two parameters (stored in the first and second column):

data_classification.csv

Directly import your data in Scilab with the following command:

t=csvRead("data_classification.csv");

These data has been generated randomly by Scilab with the following script:

b0 = 10;
t = b0 * rand(100,2);
t = [t 0.5+0.5*sign(t(:,2)+t(:,1)-b0)];

b = 1;
flip = find(abs(t(:,2)+t(:,1)-b0))

The data from different classes overlap slightly. The degree of overlapping is controlled by the parameter b in the code.

Represent your data

Before representing your data, you need to split them into two classes t0 and t1 as followed:

t0 = t(find(t(:,$)==0),:);
t1 = t(find(t(:,$)==1),:);

clf(0);scf(0);
plot(t0(:,1),t0(:,2),'bo')
plot(t1(:,1),t1(:,2),'rx')

Build a classification model

We want to build a classification model that estimates the probability that a new, incoming data belong to the class 1.

First, we separate the data into features and results:

x = t(:, 1:$-1); y = t(:, $);

[m, n] = size(x);

Then, we add the intercept column to the feature matrix

// Add intercept term to x
x = [ones(m, 1) x];

The logistic regression hypothesis is defined as:

h(θ, x) = 1 / (1 + exp(−θTx) )

It’s value is the probability that the data with the features x belong to the class 1.

The cost function in logistic regression is

J = [−yT log(h) − (1−y)T log(1−h)]/m

where log is the “element-wise” logarithm, not a matrix logarithm.

Gradient descent

If we use the gradient descent algorithm, then the update rule for the θ is

θ → θ − α ∇J = θ − α xT (h − y) / m

The code is as follows

// Initialize fitting parameters
theta = zeros(n + 1, 1);

// Learning rate and number of iterations

a = 0.01;
n_iter = 10000;

for iter = 1:n_iter do
    z = x * theta;
    h = ones(z) ./ (1+exp(-z));
    theta = theta - a * x' *(h-y) / m;
    J(iter) = (-y' * log(h) - (1-y)' * log(1-h))/m;
end

Visualize the results

Now, the classification can be visualized:

// Display the result

disp(theta)

u = linspace(min(x(:,2)),max(x(:,2)));

clf(1);scf(1);
plot(t0(:,1),t0(:,2),'bo')
plot(t1(:,1),t1(:,2),'rx')
plot(u,-(theta(1)+theta(2)*u)/theta(3),'-g')

 

 

Looks good.

Convergence of the model

The graph of the cost at each iteration is:

// Plot the convergence graph

clf(2);scf(2);
plot(1:n_iter, J');
xtitle('Convergence','Iterations','Cost')

 

 

Credits/licence:

Article kindly contributed by Vlad Gladkikh (Copyright owner)

Layout by Yann Debray @ Scilab

More resources:

MOOC on Cousera about Machine Learning from Andrew Ng, Stanford University
https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/home/welcom