vladperervenko / polyreg

polyreg, an Alternative to Neural Networks

Development of a package to automate formation and evaluation of multivariate polynomial regression models.

Motivation: A simpler, equally effective alternative to neural networks. in Polynomial Regression As an Alternative to Neural Nets, by Cheng, Khomtchouk, Matloff and Mohanty, 2018

Usage:

Other than the various cross-validation functions, the main functions are polyfit() and predict.polyFit(). One can fit either regression or classification models, with an option to perform PCA for dimension reduction on the predictors/features.

Example: Programmer/engineer 2000 Census data, Silicon Valley.

Built in to the latest version of the regtools package. Install package or download directly here. In the former case, getPE() reads in the dataset and does some preprocessing, producing a data frame pe.

getPE()  # get dataset 
# predict wage income
# try simple example, only a few predictors; wageinc last
pe <- pe[,c(1,2,4,6,7,3)]
# take a look
head(pe,2)
#        age sex wkswrkd ms phd wageinc
# 1 50.30082   0      52  0   0   75000
# 2 41.10139   1      20  0   0   12300
pfout <- polyFit(pe,2)  # quadratic model
# predict wage of person age 40, male, 52 weeks worked, BS degree
# need in data frame form, same names
newx <- pe[1,]  # dummy 1-row data frame
newx <- newx[,-6]  # no Y value
newx$age <- 40
newx$sex <- 1
newx
#   age sex wkswrkd ms phd
# 1  40   1      52  0   0
predict(pfout,newx)  # about $68K

Example: Vertebral Column data from the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository. Various spinal measurements, with three conditions, Normal, Disk Hernia and Spondylolisthesis. Let's predict the conditions.

# vert <- read.table('~/Research/DataSets/Vertebrae/column_3C.dat',header=FALSE)
vert$V7 <- as.character(vert$V7)  # Y must be a vector, not a factor
head(vert)
#      V1    V2    V3    V4     V5    V6 V7
# 1 63.03 22.55 39.61 40.48  98.67 -0.25 DH
# 2 39.06 10.06 25.02 29.00 114.41  4.56 DH
# 3 68.83 22.22 50.09 46.61 105.99 -3.53 DH
# 4 69.30 24.65 44.31 44.64 101.87 11.21 DH
# 5 49.71  9.65 28.32 40.06 108.17  7.92 DH
# 6 40.25 13.92 25.12 26.33 130.33  2.23 DH
pfout <- polyFit(vert,2,use='glm')
newx <- vert[1,-7]
newx[1] <- 30  # what if V1 were only 30 for case 1?
newx
#   V1    V2    V3    V4    V5    V6
# 1 30 22.55 39.61 40.48 98.67 -0.25
predict(pfout,newx)
# [1] "NO"