IVOA KDD-IG: A user guide for Data Mining in Astronomy

5: Which algorithm to use?

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer, because the differing characteristics of different algorithms render them more or less suitable for different problems. While within in the data mining community there is much literature, for example, comparing different algorithms on a specific dataset, or looking at their theoretical properties in idealized (read: unrealistic) situations, there is much less available to help make a practical choice with real data. We attempt to remedy that here by comparing and contrasting the characteristics of some commonly used algorithms.

Given the number of factors influencing the decision, we do not recommend a particular algorithm. However, if it is truly unknown where to start, the decision tree is a good bet, because, although it may not provide the best results, it is generally robust to issues encountered in real-world data.

An interesting point to note is that, aside from their relative popularity, none of the attributes of the algorithms mentioned are specific to astronomy, or, indeed, any given problem. This emphasizes their generic utility for a variety of analyses, and hence, science goals.

Material for this table is based on section 4 of this guide, Table 1 of Ball & Brunner (2010), and Table 10.1 of Hastie et al. (2001).


AlgorithmSorted ascending Advantages Disadvantages
Easily parallelized Susceptible to local minima
Good predictive power Non-trivial architecture: many adjustable parameters
Extensively used in astronomy Sensitive to noise
Robust to irrelevant or redundant attributes Can overfit
Training can be slow
No missing values
Can input and output numerical or categorical variables Generally poorer predictive power than ANN, SVM or kNN
Interpretable model, easily converted to rules Can overfit
Robust to outliers, noisy or redundant attributes, missing values Many adjustable parameters
Good computational scalability Building the tree can be slow (data sorting)
Easily parallelized Non-trivial choice of fitness function and solution representation
Can be slow to converge
Gives expected error rate No model is created
Good predictive power Long training time
Popular algorithm in astronomy Poor interpretability
Can approximate nonlinear functions Poor at handling missing or irrelevant attributes
Good scalability to high-dimensional data Can overfit
Gives unique solution (no local minima) Some adjustable parameters
Does not require training No model is created
Easily parallelized Susceptible to noise and irrelevant attributes
Few or no adjustable parameters Performs poorly with high-dimensional data
Good predictive power
Uses numerical data
Conceptually simple, and easy to code
Good at handling missing values and outliers
Many extensions, e.g., Biased towards finding spherical clusters
probabilistic cluster membership Has difficulties with different densities in the clusters
constrained k-means, guided by training data Affected by outliers
Requires numerical inputs if using Euclidean distance
Not guaranteed to find local minimum
Basic algorithm requires no overlap between classes
Suitable for clusters of differerent density, size and shape Local minima
Copes with missing data Doesn't work well with a large number of components
Can give class labels for semi-supervised learning Can be slow to converge
Requires numerical data, not categorical
Requires normalized data
Susceptible to outliers
Often requires a large number of iterations through the data
Can be extended to the nonlinear case and noisy data Requires whitening of the data as preprocessing step
Sensitive to outliers if maximum likelihood is used
Artificial Neural Network Good approximation of nonlinear functions Black-box model
Decision Tree Popular real-world data mining algorithm Can generate large trees that require pruning
Decompositions (SVD, PCA, ICA) PCA is extensively used in astronomy Applicable to numerical data only
Genetic algorithm Able to avoid getting trapped in local minima Not guaranteed to find the local minimum
k-means clustering Well-known, simple, popular algorithm Susceptible to noise
k-Nearest Neighbor Uses all available information Computationally intensive (but can be mitigated, e.g., k-d tree)
Kohonen Self-Organizing maps Well-known, popular algorithm Susceptible to noise
Mixture Models & Expectation Maximization Gives number of clusters in the data Can be biased toward Gaussians
Support Vector Machine Copes with noise Harder to classify > 2 classes

References

  1. Ball N.M. & Brunner R.J., "Data Mining and Machine Learning in Astronomy", International Journal of Modern Physics D 19 (7) 1049-1106 (2010); arXiv/0906.2173
  2. Hastie T., Tibshirani R. & Friedman J., The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Springer Series in Statistics, 1st edn. (Springer, New York, 2001).


-- NickBall - 05 Sep 2010
-- NickBall - 23 Sep 2011


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