Name:

Ticket:N3
Group:E27-24

Eldar
Questions:
1.Feature engineering:You are developing a model to predict car prices based on
features such as mileage,age,and condition.Explain how you would create new
features from this data to improve model performance.
2.Model selection:You are tasked with predicting heart disease based on patient
healt records.How would you decide between using logistic regression and
decision trees for this classification problem?
3.Cross-validation:You have developed a machine learning model fir housing price
prediction and want to test its robustness.How would you implement k-fold cross
vakudation to ensure your model generalizes well to unseen data?
4.Hyperparameter tuning:You are using XGBoost for a classification task,but your
model is overfitting.How you would adjust the learning rate and other
hyperprameters to address this issue?
5.Evalution metrics:in a binary classification problem with a highly imbalanced
dataset what evaluation metric would you prioritize to avoid the problem of
misleading accuracy?
 Answers:

1. Feature Engineering for Car Price Prediction:

1. Mileage Binning:
Group mileage into categories like "low," "medium," and "high" to
capture nonlinear relationships.
2. Age Buckets:
Create age ranges, e.g., "0-3 years," "4-7 years," etc., to better
represent depreciation patterns.
3. Condition Encoding:
Convert categorical "condition" values (e.g., "excellent," "good,"
"fair") into numeric labels or use one-hot encoding.
4. Mileage per Year:
Create a new feature: mileage divided by age, representing how
intensively the car was used annually.
5. Interaction Features:
Combine features such as age × mileage or age × condition to
capture interactions affecting price.
6. Log Transformation:
Apply log transformation to skewed features like mileage to
normalize their distribution.
7. Age-Condition Interaction:
Combine age and condition into a single feature to show how wear
and tear varies by age.
2. Model Selection for Heart Disease Prediction:

1. Logistic Regression:
o Suitable if the relationship between features and the target is
approximately linear.
o Works well with fewer, independent, and continuous
features.
o Provides interpretable results (e.g., feature coefficients
showing impact on heart disease).
o Less prone to overfitting if data is limited.
2. Decision Trees:
o Handles nonlinear relationships and interactions between
features effectively.
o Works well with mixed data types (numerical and
categorical).
o Provides intuitive decision rules but is prone to overfitting
without pruning or regularization.

Approach for Decision:

 Data Analysis: Explore feature relationships and check for

nonlinearity or interactions.
 Cross-Validation: Evaluate both models using metrics like
accuracy, precision, recall, and AUC on a validation set.
 Scalability: Consider logistic regression for simpler and faster
implementation; use decision trees for more complex relationships.
  Interpretability: If interpretability is critical, logistic regression is
preferable.

3. Implementing K-Fold Cross-Validation for Housing Price Prediction

K-fold cross-validation is a robust technique to evaluate a machine learning model's performance
by ensuring that the model generalizes well to unseen data. Here's how it can be implemented
step by step:

1. Select the Value of K:

Choose the number of folds, kkk. A common choice is k=5k = 5k=5 or k=10k = 10k=10,
balancing computational efficiency and robust evaluation.

2. Split the Dataset:

Divide the dataset into kkk equally-sized (or nearly equal) subsets (folds). Ensure the splitting is
random but stratified if the target variable has an imbalanced distribution to maintain
proportionality across folds.

3. Train and Validate:

For each of the kkk iterations:

 Training Data: Use k−1k-1k−1 folds as the training set.

 Validation Data: Use the remaining 1 fold as the validation set.

4. Repeat for Each Fold:

Rotate the validation fold so that every fold is used exactly once as a validation set. This ensures
the model is tested on all data points without overlap between training and validation in any
iteration.

5. Aggregate Results:

 Calculate performance metrics (e.g., mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error
(RMSE), or R2R^2R2) for each fold.
  Compute the average and standard deviation of these metrics to get an overall measure of
the model's performance and robustness.

6. Additional Considerations:

 Feature Scaling: Apply feature scaling (e.g., normalization or standardization) inside

each fold to prevent data leakage.
 Hyperparameter Tuning: Use nested cross-validation where an inner loop tunes
hyperparameters and an outer loop evaluates the tuned model.
 Data Preprocessing: Ensure consistent preprocessing (e.g., handling missing values,
encoding categorical variables) within each fold.

Advantages:

 Provides a reliable estimate of model performance on unseen data.

 Reduces variance in performance metrics compared to a single train-test split.
 Ensures the model has been trained and validated on all parts of the data.

By implementing k-fold cross-validation, you can confidently assess your housing price
prediction model's ability to generalize, avoiding overfitting and ensuring stable performance.
4. Hyperparameter Tuning in XGBoost to Address Overfitting
XGBoost (Extreme Gradient Boosting) is a powerful algorithm, but it can overfit, especially if
the model is too complex or improperly tuned. Below are strategies for tuning key
hyperparameters to mitigate overfitting.

1. Adjust the Learning Rate (η\etaη):

The learning rate controls the step size at each iteration when optimizing weights.

 Lower the Learning Rate (η\etaη): Reduce it to a smaller value (e.g., from 0.3 to 0.01 or
0.001).
 Compensate with More Trees: When lowering η\etaη, increase the number of boosting
rounds (n_estimators) to allow the model to learn gradually and reduce the risk of
overfitting.

2. Tune Tree-Specific Parameters:

XGBoost uses decision trees as base learners, so tree-specific parameters significantly impact
model complexity:

 max_depth: Limit the depth of each tree.

o Use a smaller value (e.g., 3-6) to prevent over-complex trees that fit noise.
 min_child_weight: Set a minimum sum of instance weights (or sample size) needed in a
child node.
o Increase it to enforce more regularization. Typical values range from 1 to 10.
 gamma: Specify the minimum loss reduction needed to split a leaf node.
o Increase it (e.g., from 0 to 1 or higher) to make the algorithm more conservative
when creating splits.

3. Adjust Regularization Parameters:

Regularization terms add penalties to the model to prevent overfitting:

 lambda (L2 regularization): Increase this parameter to reduce the impact of large weights.
 alpha (L1 regularization): Use this to drive certain weights to zero, especially for sparse
data.
4. Reduce Tree Complexity:

 subsample: Use a fraction of the training data for each tree (e.g., 0.5-0.8).
 colsample_bytree: Use a fraction of features for each tree (e.g., 0.5-0.8).
 These parameters introduce randomness and reduce the risk of overfitting.

5. Early Stopping:

 Use early stopping to monitor performance on a validation set. Stop training when the
validation loss or error does not improve after a certain number of rounds (e.g.,
early_stopping_rounds=50).

6. Cross-Validation:

 Use kkk-fold cross-validation to evaluate the model’s generalization ability. Select

hyperparameters that perform consistently well across all folds.
5. In a binary classification problem with a highly imbalanced dataset, accuracy can be
misleading because it does not account for class imbalance. Instead, the following
evaluation metrics are prioritized to better understand the model's performance:

1. Precision, Recall, and F1-Score:

These metrics are crucial for imbalanced datasets, as they focus on individual class
performance:

 Precision: Measures how many predicted positives are actually positive.

Precision=True Positives (TP)TP+False Positives (FP)\text{Precision} = \frac{\

text{True Positives (TP)}}{\text{TP} + \text{False Positives
(FP)}}Precision=TP+False Positives (FP)True Positives (TP)

o High precision is important if the cost of false positives is high.

 Recall (Sensitivity): Measures how many actual positives are correctly
identified.

Recall=TPTP+False Negatives (FN)\text{Recall} = \frac{\text{TP}}{\text{TP} + \

text{False Negatives (FN)}}Recall=TP+False Negatives (FN)TP

o High recall is crucial when missing true positives has severe

consequences (e.g., diagnosing diseases).
 F1-Score: The harmonic mean of precision and recall, balancing the two.

F1-Score=2×Precision⋅RecallPrecision+Recall\text{F1-Score} = 2 \times \frac{\

text{Precision} \cdot \text{Recall}}{\text{Precision} + \text{Recall}}F1-
Score=2×Precision+RecallPrecision⋅Recall

o F1-score is ideal when both false positives and false negatives are
important.

2. Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUC-PR):

 Why Use AUC-PR?

o It is specifically designed for imbalanced datasets and focuses on the
positive class.
o A higher AUC-PR indicates better performance in distinguishing positives
from negatives.

3. Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC):

 Definition: A balanced metric that considers all four confusion matrix

components (TP, TN, FP, FN). MCC=TP×TN−FP×FN(TP+FP)(TP+FN)(TN+FP)
 (TN+FN)\text{MCC} = \frac{\text{TP} \times \text{TN} - \text{FP} \times \text{FN}}{\
sqrt{(\text{TP} + \text{FP})(\text{TP} + \text{FN})(\text{TN} + \text{FP})(\text{TN}
+ \text{FN})}}MCC=(TP+FP)(TP+FN)(TN+FP)(TN+FN)TP×TN−FP×FN
o MCC ranges from -1 (total disagreement) to 1 (perfect prediction). It
provides a single score for binary classification, even with imbalanced
datasets.

4. Confusion Matrix Analysis:

 Analyze the confusion matrix to understand the true positives, true negatives,
false positives, and false negatives. This helps tailor metrics to your use case.

5. ROC-AUC (Receiver Operating Characteristic - Area Under Curve):

 When to Use: If the negative class is also important, ROC-AUC can be helpful.
 Caveat: In highly imbalanced datasets, ROC-AUC may give overly optimistic
results due to the large number of true negatives.

6. Key Metric Selection Based on Context:

 Precision-Recall Trade-Off: Use F1-Score if false positives and false negatives

are equally problematic.
 High Recall: Prioritize recall for scenarios like medical diagnoses, where missing
positives can be critical.
 High Precision: Focus on precision for tasks like fraud detection, where false
alarms are costly.

Example:

For a binary classification task detecting a rare disease:

 Use Recall: To identify as many diseased patients as possible.

 Monitor Precision: To ensure the system doesn’t overwhelm with false alarms.
 Evaluate F1-Score: For a balanced view.
 Inspect AUC-PR: To analyze performance on the positive class
comprehensively.

By focusing on these metrics, you can ensure meaningful evaluation in imbalanced

scenarios and avoid the pitfalls of misleading accuracy.