In this explanatory README file we will explain the techniques to deploy an Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) given the demopgraphic and company-based data given by the company ABATech located in Medellin, Colombia. This company provides outsourcing and consultancy services to clinical and custom corporation in the United States. Here we will explain first the EDA with the instruction to deploy it and also the instructions to evaluate three different classifiers, such as, logistic, SVM, and Neural Network for satisfaction decoding from two-class problem with data trials labelled with satisfied and dissatisfied. In this implementation we extend statistical features from the original features of the data, thus obtaining an accuracy equal to 0.96 with the best classifier and for a 5-fold crossvalidation. To clarify, we do not utilize an autoencoder to reduce the dimensionality of the features due to the evident unbalance between the number of sample and the number of features n_samples >> n_features. This fact encourage us to extend or generate more features from the 22 original features. The original features included in this implementation were Gender, Patient Type, Age, Ensurance, Class, Clinic Distance, Wifi, Time convenience, Online booking, Clinic location, Food and drink, Waiting room, Comfort of the facilities, Inflight entertainment, Pre-entry service, Post-entry service, Visitor service, Check-in service, Medic service, Cleanliness, Waiting time (min), and Delay in care (min). Some of them were categorical, other integer, and some few float type, such as, the time-based features. Now we proceed to explain the EDA and the model evaluations.
In the EDA we implement two types of analysis. 1) an univariate analysis plotting a) stem and leaf plots using the stemgraphic package, b) a histogram plot separating the satisfied and dissatisfied distributions, and c) a boxplot comparing the satisfied and dissatisfied distributions one to the side of the other. This analysis is doing univariate, this means that the user can parse the index or the name of the individual feature he/she want to analyze. If more than one feature index or name is given to the code a 2) multivariate analysis is deployed including a)grouped-feature boxplot plotting the variation of all the selected features put as parameters comparing satisfied and dissatisfied distributions one to the side of the other, and b) a scatter-plot for each combination of features given as input parameters.
Remember to run this before start running any Python code or command. Remember to have installed a version of Python>=3.8 as well as pip and python-dev. Now the first step to start running the code is to install the requirements specified in the requirements.txt file, please download it. You can proceed with the following command in pip.
pip install -r requirements.txt
After you clone this folder and you are located in the root folder you can proceed to convert the .xlsx file including the data, to a .csv to make your data managing simpler and faster. You can see this process following the EDA notebook in the notebooks folder, but you can do it easier running the following Python command.
python read_data_excel.py technical_test.xlsx
In this command you will read the name of the data file technical_test.xlsx and you will generate a .csv file with the same name technical_test.csv. The next step is to fill up the spots of the file that do not have a value or are empty. For doing this you need to use the command sed of bash as follows.
sed -i 's/,,/,0,/g' technical_test.csv
After running this the user will be ready to run the EDA in property. As we described above the code receives the amount of feature indexes or names as you consider. Of course you can only plot and analyze the 22 features you have at once. The two types of command you can utilize, one for indexes and one for features name, are the following. Remember that you can also include number/indexes and features-names (strings) at the same time. The code can proces that input.
python read_csv_EDA.py technical_test.csv 1 2 3 4...
python read_csv_EDA.py technical_test.csv "feature-name1" "feature-name2" "feature-name3"...
In the following images we will show examples of stem and leaf, histogram, boxplot, and scatter-plot examples extracted for particular examples of certain features contained in the technical_test.csv file. Some of the boxplots show a statistical difference between the satisfied and dissatisfied distributions. These differences show that the participants that score higher values in the features (around 4-5) are more satisfied in comparison with the dissatisfied participants. First we start showing some stem and leaf plots for the Age feature.
This plot/figure shows the stem and leaf plot for the Age feature for the distribution satisfied. This plot shows an approximate normal distribution for this particular features
This plot/figure shows the stem and leaf plot for the Age feature for the distribution dissatisfied. This plot shows an approximate normal distribution for this particular feature. A histogram plot showing these distributions in the same axis comfirm that the difference between the means of this feature is not very different. For this type of continuous variable/feature, the tendency is not showing an evident difference between the satisfied and dissatisfied distributions.
On the other hand, the 0-5 feature answer denoted as medic service show a more plausible difference in the histograms with higher frequencies asssociated with higher values in the satisfied distribution in comparison with the dissatisfied one. Here we show this particular histogram and the effect is more evident in comparison with the Age feature.
This effect happens in other categorical variables, as we can see that in the boxplots of other features such as post entry and check-in service. Again here the satisfied distribution shows higher values in comparison with the dissatisfied one , thus implying a significant statistical difference in this marginal data. In the following plots we show the post entry and check-in service boxplots.
The same effect can be observable when the code is executed in a multivariate analysis where multiple features show a similar behavior with higher ratings in the satisfied in comparison with the dissatisfied. This effect must be taken into account by the classifiers and the feature generator algorithms that we use in this repository - to obtain better satisfied and dissatisfied identification (classification) trials. To check the higher values associated with satisfied we can plot a grouped bar-plot between the features post entry, Visitor service, check-in service, and Medic service. We present these barplots as follows.
The data is showing a general tendency consisting in the participants who feel more approval with certain company services are more correlated with the satisfied trials, and the participants that dissapproves those services are more related to the dissatisfied trials. This seems a logical behavior in this particular type of data, and the effect is confirmed in multiple features. The main issue with this dataset appears more when scatter-plots do not show a tendency or a pattern of differentiation between satisfied and dissatisfied distributions. This occurs because there are multiple participants that gives overlapped answers in the categorical features. The continuous features are more sparse, and as well as the categorical, they are very overlapped. We can see this effect in the following scatter-plots, the first between post entry and Visitor service, and the second between Age and Delay in care (min).
The effect observed after pairing the features between them, force us to look for more features or features extracted statistically to obtain a potential good performance in the satisfied and dissatisfied distributions decoding. We will discuss in the following section that consists in the evaluation of three classifiers/models such as logistic linear, linear SVM, and a two hidden-layer Neural Network, each of this model was evaluated following the original features and features generated from the original on statistical maps provided by scikit-learn package in Python.
In this repository we evaluate three classifiers, as we mentioned above, 1) logistic linear, 2) linear SVM, and 3) two-hidden layer Neural Network. Each of this classifiers was evaluated in two feature-set scenarios, 1) the first adding the 22 features in this dataset scaled with MinMaxScaler, and 2) the second generating 124 more features. A) 22 from the MinMaxScaler, B) 22 from the StandardScaler, C) 22 from the RobustScaler, D) 22 from the QuantileTransformer that tranform each feature distribution to more normal and avoid the effect of the outliers, E) 22 from KBinsDiscretizer that binarize the data in a series of uniform intervals, F) 7 from PCA decomposition that extract the 7 more variable components from a lower-dimension SVD feature space, and G) 7 from TruncatedSVD that deploys another SVD decomposition but without centering the data, thus preserving the sparsity of each feature in a new feature-space. The following figure shows the pipeline that we evaluate in this repository and the one that represents the better results.
If the user does not want to go in detail into the notebooks for running the models evaluation, can run the following Python commands to execute the baselines incluing only the normalized 22 features. The commands include the value of Kfold evaluation (for our particular case k=5) and the selector to plot a ROC curve for each fold. You can run the following Python commands to run the model baselines for the logistic linear, linear SVM, and the two hidden-layer Neural Network classifiers.
python baseline_logistic.py technical_test.csv <folding_parameter> <plotting_selector>
python baseline_svm.py technical_test.csv <folding_parameter> <plotting_selector>
python baseline_nn.py technical_test.csv <folding_parameter> <plotting_selector>
Similarly, for the 124 features we have three different .py files associated with the execution/evaluation of the three classifiers we included in this project logistic linear, linear SVM, and the two hidden-layer Neural Network classifiers. The Python commands have the same input parameters, the value of the Kfold evaluation and plotting selector for allowing the ROC curves per fold. You can run the following Python commands to run the adding-features model for the logistic linear, linear SVM, and the two hidden-layer Neural Network classifiers.
python model_evaluation_adding_features.py technical_test.csv <folding_parameter> <plotting_selector>
python model_evaluation_adding_features_svm.py technical_test.csv <folding_parameter> <plotting_selector>
python model_evaluation_adding_features_nn.py technical_test.csv <folding_parameter> <plotting_selector>
You can follow the previous Python commands if you don't want to follow the details of the notebooks in the notebooks folder, but you can take any alternative for evaluating the models. In this evaluation we test a 5-fold crossvalidation (as we mentioned above) for the baselines and the added-features models (124 features). In the following table we report the average and the standard deviation of the accuracy for each modality and each classifier.
feat/class | Logistic | SVM | 2-layer NN |
---|---|---|---|
22 features | 0.87271 ± 0.00267 | 0.87193 ± 0.00216 | 0.94372 ± 0.00288 |
124 features | 0.92167 ± 0.00187 | 0.92521 ± 0.00097 | 0.96072 ± 0.00112 |
The best accuracy we found when we extend the features to 124 and train the two-layer Neural Network. The accuracy values across the folds are higher than ACC>=0.95. Adding new statistical features and analyzing the new features with an autoencoder can be possibilities of a future work - and maybe improve more the decoding performance. However, the performance achieved with the proposed system and the aggregated features is significant having 129880 samples, and trying to balance the difference between the samples and features is a good option for this model evaluation. In the following Figure, we show the average ROC curve (across the 5 folds) for the two-layer Neural Network feeding the classifier with extended 124 features. The AUC=0.99 for this combination of feature set and classifier. Other metrics for the best classifier performance, in this case the two-layer Neural Network, are for instance:
- Precision = 0.98288 ± 0.00175
- Recall = 0.94945 ± 0.00315
- F1= 0.96587 ± 0.001067
To illustrate better the performance of the two-layer Neural Network feeding the classifier with extended 124 features, we measure a confusion matrix showing (A) the number of trials on each cell, and (B) the rate relative to the total trials located on each cell. We can see that the amount of trials classified correctly is significant in comparison with the error of this classifier, specifically the two-layer Neural Network, thus representing the best performance for satisfied and dissatisfied trials decoding. The following plot/figure show the macro confusion matrix for the two modalities described above.
We added an extra option to emulate our based classifier and metrics using Tensorflow with keras. They are installed following the requirements.txt list. To evaluate the implementation of the Neural Network classifier we modeled in scikit-learn in Tensorflow with keras you can run the following command in Python. In this case, the plotting selector equal to 1, will make appear the learning curve showing the training and test lost for each fold.
python model_evaluation_adding_features_deep.py technical_test.csv <folding_parameter> <plotting_selector>
Now to automatize the app a little bit more, we implemented a simple web-app in Flask, javascript, and html. From this web-app it is possible to execute the models specifying any feature-set, any folding parameter, and any classifier. You just need to run it locally in the address http://0.0.0.0:8080 or check the automatic address Flask is giving to you when you are running the app up. For this app always access the port 8080 you can mount this app in the web using ngrok. Please open a new account and install the last ngrok version. You can run a ngrok server for this app using the following command.
ngrok http 8080
Having or not having ngrok installed you can run the app locally from Flask server. Simply run a Python command to activate the flask web-app in http://0.0.0.0:8080 or http://10.50.120.157:8080/, and be sure you are in the root folder accessing the folders static and templates.
python app.py
After you run this command from you root folder you can open http://0.0.0.0:8080 or http://10.50.120.157:8080/ in your more suitable web-browser. We suggest Firefox or Google Chrome to run this web-app. Please recheck in what address the app.py file will be running and change the address in app.js for doing the corresponding fetches to Flask. The following screen will appear in your browser when you load this local address. There you will be able to see a section for login marked with a blue rectangle, a section for setting the parameters marked with a red rectangle 1) the classifiers with a mutually exclusive checkbox, 2) the folding parameter form input as a text slide, and 3) a checkbox to select the original 22 features or extend them to 124. A status section is marked with a green rectangle, in this section we will report the result for the corresponding model evaluation.
The application will let you evaluate your model when filled all the fields, such as, the username, folding parameter, classifier, and feature-set. If any of these fields is empty the application will rebound and won't let you/user evaluate your selected model letting you know you/user need to fill all the fields. To continue adding your data to the Flask application you need to click the button Run Evaluation. After you clicked this button the application will confirm it received your data and if you will continue with your selected model evaluation. The following screen show the status update in a red rectangle. This status section shows the data reception confirmation. After this status is updated, you/user need to click the Run Evaluation button to run the model deploying in the background - clicking the button a second time.
After you clicked the Run Evaluation button for the second time and the model is deployed, the Flask-based web-app will wait until the Kfold validation finishes. Depending on the model and the feature-set you/user have selected, the Kfold evaluation will take less or more time to finish. The status section will be updated when the model process finishes in the background. The status section will receive the results from Python stoud/stdin. Accuracies for each fold will be reported in the status section as well as the average and the standard deviation of the accuracies across the folds. The following screen show the moment when the application received the models evaluation. Accuracy results appear in the red rectangle.
I feel very motivated doing this project for ABATech, I hope it will be a starting point to implement more complete and ambitious projects in the future, and more important I hope to work/collaborate with you in the near future.