bcselector 0.0.42
Python package to help you in variable selection.
License: MIT
Requires Python: >=3.7

==========
Bcselector
==========
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* Documentation: https://kaketo.github.io/bcselector.
* Repository: https://github.com/kaketo/bcselector.

What is it?
-----------
Feature selection is a crucial problem in many machine learning tasks. Usually the considered
variables are cheap to collect and store but in some situations the acquisition of feature values
can be problematic. For example, when predicting the occurrence of the disease we may consider
the results of some diagnostic tests which can be very expensive.
The existing feature selection methods usually ignore costs associated with the considered
features. The goal of cost- sensitive feature selection is to select a subset of features which allow
to predict the target variable (e.g. occurrence of the diseases) successfully within the assumed
budget.

The main purpose of this package is to provide filter methods of feature selection based
on information theory and to propose new variants of these methods considering feature costs.


Installation
------------

bcselector can be installed from [PyPI] (https://pypi.org/project/bcselector)::

    pip install bcselector

Quickstart
----------

First of all we must have a dataset with classification target variable and a cost assigned to each feature.
Good sample data could be `hepatitis <https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/citation_policy.html>`_ from *UCI* repository [1].

Lets say that that we have dataset loaded to Python, we need to create `Selector` class and call `fit` method with proper arguments on it:

.. code-block:: python

   from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
   from sklearn.metrics import roc_auc_score

   from bcselector.variable_selection import FractionVariableSelector
   from bcselector.datasets import load_sample

   # Arguments for feature selection
   # r - cost scaling parameter, 
   # beta - kwarg for j_criterion_func,
   # model - model that is fitted on data.
   r = 1
   beta = 0.5
   model = LogisticRegression(max_iter=1000)

   # Data
   X,y,costs = load_sample()

   # Feature selection
   fvs = FractionVariableSelector()
   fvs.fit(data=X, target_variable=y, costs=costs, r=r, j_criterion_func='cife', beta=beta)

Now we can obtain feature selection results by calling simple getter:

.. code-block:: python

   fvs.get_cost_results()

Or we can score and plot our results with any sklearn model and classification metric:

.. code-block:: python

  fvs.score(model=model, scoring_function=roc_auc_score)
  fvs.plot_scores(compare_no_cost_method=True, model=model, annotate=True)

Which results in BC-plot:

.. image:: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Kaketo/bcselector/master/docs/img/bc_plot.png

On *OX axis* we have accumulated cost and on *OY axis* we see test set score of currently selected set of features:

- **Blue line** is cost-sensitive method selected features order.
- **Red line** is NO-cost method selected features order.
- **Blue vertical line** is maximum budget avaliable (user parameter)

Small numbers above or below the curve are indexes of selected features. Therefore we can see that first variable selected by cost-sensitive method is on 14th column in dataset *X*.

Bibliography
------------
- [1] Dua, D. and Graff, C. (2019). UCI Machine Learning Repository [http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml]. Irvine, CA: University of California, School of Information and Computer Science.

Citations
---------
TBD