# Machine Learning in Action - Naïve Bayes

I am currently reading Machine Learning in Action, as I need something light between sessions with Concrete Mathematics. This book introduces a number of important machine learning algorithms, each time with a complete implementation and one or more test data sets; it also explains the underlying mathematics, and provides information about additional reference material (mostly heavier and more expensive books).

However, in Chapter 4 about Naïve Bayes classifiers, I didn’t see how the implementation derived by the maths. Eventually, I confirm that it could not, and try to correct it.

It is of course possible that the implementation is eventually correct, and derives from more advanced theoretical concepts or practical concerns, but the book mentions neither; on the other hands, I found papers (here or here) that seem to confirm my corrections.

Everything that follows assumes the book’s implementation was wrong. Humble and groveling apologies to the author if it was not.

## What exactly is the model

The book introduces the concept of conditional probability using balls in buckets. This makes the explanation clearer, but this is just one possible model; each model (or distribution) uses dedicated formulas.

The problem is that the book then uses set of words or bags of words as it these were the same underlying model, which they are not.

### Set of words

If we are only interested in whether a given word is present in a message or not, then the correct model is that of a biased coin where tails indicate the absence of the word, and heads its presence.

This is also known as a Bernoulli trial, and the estimator for the probability of presence is the mean presence: the number of documents in which the word is present, divided by the total number of documents.

The book algorithm does not implement this model correctly, as its numerator is the count of documents in which the word is present (correct), but the denominator is the total number of words (incorrect).

### Bag of words

If we want to consider the number of times a word is present in messages, then the balls in buckets model is correct (it is a also known as Categorical distribution), and the code in the book adequately implements it.

## There is a word for it: Additive Smoothing

The book then improves the algorithm in two different ways. One is the use of logarithms to prevent underflow. The other is to always use one as the basic count for words, whether they are present or not.

This is in fact not so much a trick as a concept called Additive smoothing, where a basic estimator $\theta_i = \frac{w_i}{N}$ is replaced by $\hat{\theta}_i = \frac{w_i + \alpha}{N + \alpha d}$

$\alpha$ is a so-called smoothing parameter, and $d$ is the total number of words.

If the model is Bernoulli trial, $w_i$ is the number of documents where word $i$ is present, and $N$ is the total number of documents.

If the model is categorical distribution, $w_i$ is the total count of word $i$ is the documents and $N$ is the total count of words in the documents.

As we are interested in $P(w_i|C_j)$ (with $C_0, C_1$ the two classes we are building a classifier for), $N$ above is restricted to documents in the relevant class; $\alpha$ and $d$ are independent of classes.

So the correct formula becomes

\begin{aligned} \hat{\theta}_{i,j} = \frac{x_i,j+\alpha}{N_j+\alpha d}\\ \end{aligned}

With $\alpha=1$ as a smoothing parameter, the book should have used numWords instead of 2.0 as an initial value for both p0Denom and p1Denom.

## Putting it together

The differences with the code from the book are minor: first I introduce a flag to indicates whether I’m using set of words (Bernoulli trials) or bags of words (categorical distribution) as a model. Then I initialise p0Denom and p1Denom with numWords as explained above; finally I check the bag flag to know what to add to either denominators.

## Evaluation

For the Spam test, the book version has an average error of 6%. The rewritten version has an error between 3% and 4%. The Spam test uses messages as set, for which my version is the most different.

For the New-York/San Francisco messages classification, I did not measure any difference in error rates; this test uses messages as bags, for which the book version was mostly correct (the only difference was in the denominators).

## So what?

OK, well, but the book algorithm still works, at least on the original data.

But how well exactly would it work with other data? As the algorithm does not seem to implement any kind of sound model, is there any way to quantify the error we can expect? By building on theoretical foundations, at least we can quantify the outcome, and rely on the work of all the brilliant minds who improved that theory.

Theories (the scientific kind, not the hunch kind) provide well studied abstractions. There are always cases where they do not apply, and other cases where they do, but only partially or imperfectly. This should be expected as abstractions ignore part of the real world problem to make it tractable.

Using a specific theory to address a problem is very much similar to looking for lost keys under a lamppost: maybe the keys are not there, but that’s where the light is brightest, so there is little chance to find them anywhere else anyway.

## A bad book then?

So far, this was the only chapter where I had anything bad to say about the book. And even then, it was not that bad.

The rest of the book is very good; the underlying concepts are well explained (indeed, that’s how I found the problem in the first place), there is always data to play with, and the choice of language and libraries (Python, Numpy and matplotlib) is very well suited to the kind of exploratory programming that makes learning much easier.

So I would recommend this book as an introduction to this subject, and I’m certainly glad I bought it.