# Multiclass Classification¶

Multiclass Classification is a type of modeling wherein the output is discrete. For example, an integer 1-10, an animal at the zoo, or a primary color. These models have a specialized set of charts and metrics for their evaluation.

The prevailing metrics for evaluating a multiclass classification model are:

• Accuracy: The proportion of predictions that were correct. It is generally converted to a percentage where 100% is a perfect classifier. For a balanced dataset, an accuracy of $$\frac{100\%}{k}$$ where $$k$$ is the number of classes, is a random classifier. An accuracy of 0% is a perfectly wrong classifier.

• Hamming Loss: The proportion of predictions that were incorrectly classified and is equivalent to $$1-accuracy$$. This means a Hamming loss score of 0 is a perfect classifier. A score of $$\frac{k-1}{k}$$ is a random classifier for a balanced dataset, and 1.0 is a perfectly incorrect classifier.

• Kappa Score: Cohen’s kappa coefficient is a statistic that measures inter-annotator agreement. This function computes Cohen’s kappa, a score that expresses the level of agreement between two annotators on a classification problem. It is defined as:

$\kappa = (p_o - p_e) / (1 - p_e)$

$$p_o$$ is the empirical probability of agreement on the label assigned to any sample (the observed agreement ratio). $$p_e$$ is the expected agreement when both annotators assign labels randomly. $$p_e$$ is estimated using a per-annotator empirical prior over the class labels.

• Precision (weighted, macro or micro): This is the proportion of a class that was predicted to be in a given class and are actually in that class. In multiclass classification, it is common to report the precision for each class and this is called the per-class precision. It is computed using the same approach use in binary classification. For example, $$\frac{TP}{TP + FP}$$, but only the class under consideration is used. A value of 1 means that the classifier was able to perfectly predict, for that class. A value of 0 means that the classifier was never correct, for that class. There are three other versions of precision that are used in multiclass classification and they are weighted, macro and micro-precision. Weighted precision, $$P_w$$, combines the per-class precision by the number of true labels in a class:

$P_w = W_1 P_1 + \cdots + W_n P_n$

$$W_i$$ is the proportion of the true labels in class i $$P_i$$ is the per-class precision for the $$i^{th}$$ class

The macro-precision, $$P_m$$, is the mean of all the per-class, $$P_i$$, precisions.

$P_m = \frac{1}{n} \sum_{i} P_i$

The micro-precision, $$P_{\mu}$$, is the same as the accuracy, micro-recall, and micro $$F_1$$.

• Recall (weighted, macro or micro): This is the proportion of the True class predictions that were correctly predicted over the number of True predictions (correct or incorrect) $$\frac{TP}{TP + FN}$$. This is also known as the True Positive Rate (TPR) or Sensitivity. In multiclass classification, it is common to report the recall for each class and this is called the micro-recall. It is computed using the same approach as in the case of binary classification, but is reported for each class. A recall of 1 is perfect recall, 0 is “bad” recall.

As with precision, there are three other versions of recall that are used in multiclass classification. They are weighted, macro and micro-recall. The definitions are the same except the per-class recall replaces the per-class precision in the preceding equations.

• $$\mathbf{F_1}$$ Score (weighted, macro or micro): There is generally a trade-off between the precision and recall and the $$F_1$$ score is a metric that combines them into a single number. The per-class $$F_1$$ score is the harmonic mean of precision and recall:

$F_1 = 2 * \frac{Precision * Recall}{Precision + Recall}$

As with precision, there are a number of other versions of $$F_1$$ that are used in multiclass classification. The micro and weighted $$F_1$$ is computed the same as with precision, but with the per-class $$F_1$$ replacing the per-class precision. However, the macro $$F_1$$ is computed a little differently. The precision and recall are computed by summing the TP, FN, and FP across all classes, and then using them in the standard formulas.

Generally, several of these metrics are used in combination to describe the performance of a multiclass classification model.

The prevailing charts and plots for multiclass classification are the Precision-Recall Curve, the ROC curve, the Lift Chart, the Gain Chart, and the Confusion Matrix. These are inter-related with preceding metrics, and are common across most multiclass classification literature.

For multiclass classification you can view the following using show_in_notebook():

• confusion_matrix: A matrix of the number of actual versus predicted values for each class, see [Read More].

• pr_curve: A plot of a precision versus recall (the proportion of positive class predictions that were correct versus the proportion of positive class objects that were correctly identified), see [Read More].

• roc_curve: A plot of a true positive rate versus a false positive rate (recall vs the proportion of negative class objects that were identified incorrectly), see [Read More].

• precision_by_label: Consider one label as a positive class and rest as negative. Compute precision for each, precision numbers in this example, see [Read More].

• recall_by_label: Consider one label as a positive class and rest as negative. Compute recall for each, recall numbers in this example, [Read More].

• f1_by_label: Harmonic mean of precision_by_label and recall_by_label. Compute f1 for each, f1 scores in this example, see [Read More]

• jaccard_by_label: Computes the similarity for each label distribution, see [Read More].

To generate all of these metrics and charts for a list of multiclass classification models on the test dataset test, you can run the following:

lr_clf = LogisticRegression(random_state=0, solver='lbfgs',
multi_class='multinomial').fit(X_train, y_train)
rf_clf = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=10).fit(X_train, y_train)



To use ADSEvaluator, models have to be converted into ADSModel types.

The ADSModel class in the ADS package has a from_estimator function that takes as input a fitted estimator and converts it into an ADSModel object. With classification, you have to pass the class labels in the class argument too. The ADSModel object is used for evaluation using the ADSEvaluator object.

To show all of the metrics in a table, run:

evaluator.metrics


Evaluator Metrics (repr)

evaluator.show_in_notebook()


Multiclass Confusion Matrix

Multiclass ROC Curve

Multiclass PR Curve

Multiclass Precision By Label

Multiclass F1 By Label

Multiclass Jaccard By Label

Multiclass classification includes the following:

• accuracy: The number of correctly classified examples divided by total examples.

• hamming_loss: 1 - accuracy

• precision_weighted: The weighted average of precision_by_label. Weights are proportional to the number of true instances for each label.

• precision_micro: Global precision. Calculated by using global true positives and false positives.

• recall_weighted: The weighted average of recall_by_label. Weights are proportional to the number of true instances for each label.

• recall_micro: Global recall. Calculated by using global true positives and false negatives.

• f1_weighted: The weighted average of f1_by_label. Weights are proportional to the number of true instances for each label.

• f1_micro: Global f1. It can be calculated by using the harmonic mean of precision_micro and recall_micro.

All of these metrics can be computed directly from the confusion matrix.

If the preceding metrics don’t include the specific metric you want to use, maybe an F2 score, simply add it to your evaluator object as in this example:

from ads.evaluations.evaluator import ADSEvaluator
evaluator = ADSEvaluator(test, models=[modelA, modelB, modelC modelD])

from sklearn.metrics import fbeta_score
def F2_Score(y_true, y_pred):
return fbeta_score(y_true, y_pred, 2)