# Bagging with scikit-learn¶

Bagging is an ensemble method that focuses on the manipulation of the training data. When bagging, we sample, with replacement, $m$ subsets of the training data, each of $n$ size. We train a model on each of these subsets; when predicting, we then feed the data point through each of the $m$ models we've created, taking the average of them if the model is a regressor, and the majority vote of them if the model is a classifier.

Using bagging allows us to reduce overfitting in our model; however, there is a catch. Bagging tends to work better with models that are unstable, such as decision trees. Models that tend not to change as much with available data, such as KNN, will not see much benefit from bagging.

### Using Bagging¶

Scikit-learn provides two main methods for using bagging: BaggingClassifier and BaggingRegressor. We'll start by taking a look at our dataset, which consists and Fire and Electric type pokemon.

In [24]:
%matplotlib inline

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from sklearn import neighbors as ne
import pandas as pd
from matplotlib.colors import ListedColormap
import matplotlib.patches as mpatches

poke['TN'] = poke['Type 1'].astype('category').cat.codes
type_num = {'Fire':0, 'Electric':1}

xcol = ['Speed', 'Sp. Atk']
ycol = 'TN'

cmb = ListedColormap(['#cf3e28', '#f2cb3a'])

plt.figure()

plt.scatter(EorF['Speed'].as_matrix(), EorF['Sp. Atk'].as_matrix(), c=EorF[ycol], cmap=cmb, edgecolor='black', label=ycol)

plt.xlabel("Speed")
plt.ylabel("Sp. Atk")
plt.legend(bbox_to_anchor=(1.05, 1), loc=2, borderaxespad=0., handles=[mpatches.Patch(color='#cf3e28', label="Fire"),
mpatches.Patch(color='#f2cb3a', label="Electric")])

plt.show()

print("Basline: ", EorF[ycol].value_counts().iloc[0] / EorF[ycol].shape[0])

Basline:  0.541666666667


Next, we'll see how a single decision tree does at predicting the type.

In [16]:
from sklearn import tree
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split

X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(EorF[['Speed', 'Sp. Atk']], EorF[ycol],
test_size=0.33, random_state=151)

clf = tree.DecisionTreeClassifier()
clf.fit(X_train, y_train)

preds = clf.predict(X_test)

print("Prediction Accuracy: ", np.equal(preds, y_test).sum() / preds.shape[0])

Prediction Accuracy:  0.53125


Ouch, didn't even meet the baseline...that stings. Rather than trying something else immediately, why don't we first give bagging a try?

In [39]:
from sklearn.ensemble import BaggingClassifier

# Create a bagging model of 5 models which each hold 1% of the data
bag = BaggingClassifier(base_estimator=tree.DecisionTreeClassifier(), n_estimators=5, max_samples=.1)
bag.fit(X_train, y_train)

preds = bag.predict(X_test)

print("Prediction Accuracy: ", np.equal(preds, y_test).sum() / preds.shape[0])

Prediction Accuracy:  0.59375


And we managed to get 6% higher accuracy, beating the baseline (slightly). Now, in reality, you'd certainly want to use something other than a decision tree for this problem; however, I do hope this example has shown you how to use a bagging model, and that it can lead to increased performance on our testing data.