AUC-base Features Importance using Random Forest

Question

I\'m trying to predict a binary variable with both random forests and logistic regression. I\'ve got heavily unbalanced classes (approx 1.5% of Y=1).

The default feature

Answer 1

After doing some researchs, this is what I came out with :

from sklearn.cross_validation import ShuffleSplit
from collections import defaultdict

names = db_train.iloc[:,1:].columns.tolist()

# -- Gridsearched parameters
model_rf = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=500,
                                 class_weight="auto",
                                 criterion='gini',
                                 bootstrap=True,
                                 max_features=10,
                                 min_samples_split=1,
                                 min_samples_leaf=6,
                                 max_depth=3,
                                 n_jobs=-1)
scores = defaultdict(list)

# -- Fit the model (could be cross-validated)
rf = model_rf.fit(X_train, Y_train)
acc = roc_auc_score(Y_test, rf.predict(X_test))

for i in range(X_train.shape[1]):
    X_t = X_test.copy()
    np.random.shuffle(X_t[:, i])
    shuff_acc = roc_auc_score(Y_test, rf.predict(X_t))
    scores[names[i]].append((acc-shuff_acc)/acc)

print("Features sorted by their score:")
print(sorted([(round(np.mean(score), 4), feat) for
              feat, score in scores.items()], reverse=True))

Features sorted by their score:
[(0.0028999999999999998, 'Var1'), (0.0027000000000000001, 'Var2'), (0.0023999999999999998, 'Var3'), (0.0022000000000000001, 'Var4'), (0.0022000000000000001, 'Var5'), (0.0022000000000000001, 'Var6'), (0.002, 'Var7'), (0.002, 'Var8'), ...]

The output is not very sexy, but you got the idea. The weakness of this approach is that feature importance seems to be very parameters dependent. I ran it using differents params (max_depth, max_features..) and I'm getting a lot different results. So I decided to run a gridsearch on parameters (scoring = 'roc_auc') and then apply this VIM (Variable Importance Measure) to the best model.

I took my inspiration from this (great) notebook.

All suggestions/comments are most welcome !