The iml
package can now handle bigger datasets. Earlier
problems with exploding memory have been fixed for
FeatureEffect
, FeatureImp
and
Interaction
. It’s also possible now to compute
FeatureImp
and Interaction
in parallel. This
document describes how.
First we load some data, fit a random forest and create a Predictor object.
set.seed(42)
library("iml")
library("randomForest")
#> randomForest 4.7-1.2
#> Type rfNews() to see new features/changes/bug fixes.
data("Boston", package = "MASS")
rf <- randomForest(medv ~ ., data = Boston, n.trees = 10)
X <- Boston[which(names(Boston) != "medv")]
predictor <- Predictor$new(rf, data = X, y = Boston$medv)
Parallelization is supported via the {future} package. All you need
to do is to choose a parallel backend via
future::plan()
.
library("future")
library("future.callr")
# Creates a PSOCK cluster with 2 cores
plan("callr", workers = 2)
Now we can easily compute feature importance in parallel. This means that the computation per feature is distributed among the 2 cores I specified earlier.
imp <- FeatureImp$new(predictor, loss = "mae")
library("ggplot2")
#>
#> Attaching package: 'ggplot2'
#> The following object is masked from 'package:randomForest':
#>
#> margin
plot(imp)
That wasn’t very impressive, let’s actually see how much speed up we get by parallelization.
bench::system_time({
plan(sequential)
FeatureImp$new(predictor, loss = "mae")
})
#> process real
#> 1.97s 1.94s
bench::system_time({
plan("callr", workers = 2)
FeatureImp$new(predictor, loss = "mae")
})
#> process real
#> 139.02ms 1.98s
A little bit of improvement, but not too impressive. Parallelization is more useful in the case where the model uses a lot of features or where the feature importance computation is repeated more often to get more stable results.
bench::system_time({
plan(sequential)
FeatureImp$new(predictor, loss = "mae", n.repetitions = 10)
})
#> process real
#> 3.39s 3.33s
bench::system_time({
plan("callr", workers = 2)
FeatureImp$new(predictor, loss = "mae", n.repetitions = 10)
})
#> process real
#> 144.33ms 2.93s
Here the parallel computation is twice as fast as the sequential computation of the feature importance.
The parallelization also speeds up the computation of the interaction statistics:
bench::system_time({
plan(sequential)
Interaction$new(predictor, grid.size = 15)
})
#> process real
#> 7.3s 7.19s
bench::system_time({
plan("callr", workers = 2)
Interaction$new(predictor, grid.size = 15)
})
#> process real
#> 154.9ms 5.1s
Same for FeatureEffects
:
bench::system_time({
plan(sequential)
FeatureEffects$new(predictor)
})
#> process real
#> 731ms 720ms
bench::system_time({
plan("callr", workers = 2)
FeatureEffects$new(predictor)
})
#> process real
#> 491.68ms 2.52s