projpred-package {projpred}R Documentation

Projection predictive feature selection

Description

The R package projpred performs the projection predictive variable (or "feature") selection for various regression models. We recommend to read the README file (available with enhanced formatting online) and the main vignette (topic = "projpred", but also available online) before continuing here.

Terminology

Throughout the whole package documentation, we use the term "submodel" for all kinds of candidate models onto which the reference model is projected. For custom reference models, the candidate models don't need to be actual submodels of the reference model, but in any case (even for custom reference models), the candidate models are always actual submodels of the full formula used by the search procedure. In this regard, it is correct to speak of submodels, even in case of a custom reference model.

The following model type abbreviations will be used at multiple places throughout the documentation: GLM (generalized linear model), GLMM (generalized linear multilevel—or "mixed"—model), GAM (generalized additive model), and GAMM (generalized additive multilevel—or "mixed"—model). Note that the term "generalized" includes the Gaussian family as well.

Draw-wise divergence minimizers

For the projection of the reference model onto a submodel, projpred currently relies on the following functions as draw-wise divergence minimizers (in other words, these are the workhorse functions employed by projpred's internal default div_minimizer functions, see init_refmodel()):

Verbosity, messages, warnings, errors

Setting global option projpred.extra_verbose to TRUE will print out which submodel projpred is currently projecting onto as well as (if method = "forward" and verbose = TRUE in varsel() or cv_varsel()) which submodel has been selected at those steps of the forward search for which a percentage (of the maximum submodel size that the search is run up to) is printed. In general, however, we cannot recommend setting this global option to TRUE for cv_varsel() with validate_search = TRUE (simply due to the amount of information that will be printed, but also due to the progress bar which will not work as intended anymore).

By default, projpred catches messages and warnings from the draw-wise divergence minimizers and throws their unique collection after performing all draw-wise divergence minimizations (i.e., draw-wise projections). This can be deactivated by setting global option projpred.warn_prj_drawwise to FALSE.

Furthermore, by default, projpred checks the convergence of the draw-wise divergence minimizers and throws a warning if any seem to have not converged. This warning is thrown after the warning message from global option projpred.warn_prj_drawwise (see above) and can be deactivated by setting global option projpred.check_conv to FALSE.

Parallelization

The projection of the reference model onto a submodel can be run in parallel (across the projected draws). This is powered by the foreach package. Thus, any parallel (or sequential) backend compatible with foreach can be used, e.g., the backends from packages doParallel, doMPI, or doFuture. Using the global option projpred.prll_prj_trigger, the number of projected draws below which no parallelization is applied (even if a parallel backend is registered) can be modified. Such a "trigger" threshold exists because of the computational overhead of a parallelization which makes the projection parallelization only useful for a sufficiently large number of projected draws. By default, the projection parallelization is turned off, which can also be achieved by supplying Inf (or NULL) to option projpred.prll_prj_trigger. Note that we cannot recommend the projection parallelization on Windows because in our experience, the parallelization overhead is larger there, causing a parallel run to take longer than a sequential run. Also note that the projection parallelization works well for submodels which are GLMs (and hence also for the latent projection if the submodel has no multilevel or additive predictor terms), but for all other types of submodels, the fitted submodel objects are quite big, which—when running in parallel—may lead to excessive memory usage which in turn may crash the R session (on Unix systems, setting an appropriate memory limit via unix::rlimit_as() may avoid crashing the whole machine). Thus, we currently cannot recommend parallelizing projections onto submodels which are GLMs (in this context, the latent projection onto a submodel without multilevel and without additive terms may be regarded as a projection onto a submodel which is a GLM). However, for cv_varsel(), there is also a CV parallelization (i.e., a parallelization of projpred's cross-validation) which can be activated via argument parallel.

Multilevel models: "Integrating out" group-level effects

In case of multilevel models, projpred offers two global options for "integrating out" group-level effects: projpred.mlvl_pred_new and projpred.mlvl_proj_ref_new. When setting projpred.mlvl_pred_new to TRUE (default is FALSE), then at prediction time, projpred will treat group levels existing in the training data as new group levels, implying that their group-level effects are drawn randomly from a (multivariate) Gaussian distribution. This concerns both, the reference model and the (i.e., any) submodel. Furthermore, setting projpred.mlvl_pred_new to TRUE causes as.matrix.projection() and as_draws_matrix.projection() to omit the projected group-level effects (for the group levels from the original dataset). When setting projpred.mlvl_proj_ref_new to TRUE (default is FALSE), then at projection time, the reference model's fitted values (that the submodels fit to) will be computed by treating the group levels from the original dataset as new group levels, implying that their group-level effects will be drawn randomly from a (multivariate) Gaussian distribution (as long as the reference model is a multilevel model, which—for custom reference models—does not need to be the case). This also affects the latent response values for a latent projection correspondingly. Setting projpred.mlvl_pred_new to TRUE makes sense, e.g., when the prediction task is such that any group level will be treated as a new one. Typically, setting projpred.mlvl_proj_ref_new to TRUE only makes sense when projpred.mlvl_pred_new is already set to TRUE. In that case, the default of FALSE for projpred.mlvl_proj_ref_new ensures that at projection time, the submodels fit to the best possible fitted values from the reference model, and setting projpred.mlvl_proj_ref_new to TRUE would make sense if the group-level effects should be integrated out completely.

Memory usage

By setting the global option projpred.run_gc to TRUE, projpred will call gc() at some places (e.g., after each size that the forward search passes through) to free up some memory. These gc() calls are not always necessary to reduce the peak memory usage, but they add runtime (hence the default of FALSE for that global option).

Other notes

Most examples are not executed when called via example(). To execute them, their code has to be copied and pasted manually to the console.

Functions

init_refmodel(), get_refmodel()

For setting up an object containing information about the reference model, the submodels, and how the projection should be carried out. Explicit calls to init_refmodel() and get_refmodel() are only rarely needed.

varsel(), cv_varsel()

For running the search part and the evaluation part for a projection predictive variable selection, possibly with cross-validation (CV).

summary.vsel(), print.vsel(), plot.vsel(), suggest_size.vsel(), ranking(), cv_proportions(), plot.cv_proportions(), performances()

For post-processing the results from varsel() and cv_varsel().

project()

For projecting the reference model onto submodel(s). Typically, this follows the variable selection, but it can also be applied directly (without a variable selection).

as.matrix.projection() and as_draws_matrix.projection()

For extracting projected parameter draws.

proj_linpred(), proj_predict()

For making predictions from a submodel (after projecting the reference model onto it).

Author(s)

Maintainer: Frank Weber fweber144@protonmail.com

Authors:

Other contributors:

See Also

Useful links:

[Package projpred version 2.8.0 Index]