Extract the coefficients for the best tuning parameters of a glmnet model in caret

Question

I am running elastic net regularization in caret using glmnet.

I pass sequence of values to trainControl for alpha and lambda, then I perfo

Answer 1

After a bit of playing with your code I find it very odd that glmnet train chooses different lambda ranges depending on the seed. Here is an example:

library(caret)
library(glmnet)
set.seed(13)
model.test <- caret::train(asthma ~ age + gender + bmi_p + m_edu + p_edu + f_color, data = x, method = "glmnet", 
                           family = "binomial", trControl = fitControl, tuneGrid = tuneGrid, 
                           metric = "ROC")

c(head(model.test$finalModel$lambda, 5), tail(model.test$finalModel$lambda, 5))
#output
 [1] 3.7796447301 3.4438715094 3.1379274562 2.8591626295 2.6051625017 0.0005483617 0.0004996468 0.0004552595 0.0004148155
[10] 0.0003779645

optimum lambda is:

model.test$finalModel$lambdaOpt
#output
#[1] 0.05

and this works:

coef(model.test$finalModel, model.test$finalModel$lambdaOpt)
#12 x 1 sparse Matrix of class "dgCMatrix"
                        1
(Intercept)   -0.03158974
age            0.03329806
genderX1      -1.24093677
bmi_p          1.65156913
m_eduX1        0.45314106
m_eduX2       -0.09934991
m_eduX3       -0.72360297
p_eduX1       -0.51949828
p_eduX2       -0.80063642
p_eduX3       -2.18231433
f_colorred     0.87618211
f_coloryellow -1.52699254

giving the coefficients at best alpha and lambda

when using this model to predict some y are predicted as X1 and some as X2

 [1] X1 X1 X0 X1 X1 X0 X0 X1 X1 X1 X0 X1 X1 X1 X0 X0 X0 X1 X1 X1 X1 X0 X1 X1
Levels: X0 X1

now with the seed you used

set.seed(1352)
model.test <- caret::train(asthma ~ age + gender + bmi_p + m_edu + p_edu + f_color, data = x, method = "glmnet", 
                           family = "binomial", trControl = fitControl, tuneGrid = tuneGrid, 
                           metric = "ROC")

c(head(model.test$finalModel$lambda, 5), tail(model.test$finalModel$lambda, 5))
#output
 [1] 2.699746e-01 2.459908e-01 2.241377e-01 2.042259e-01 1.860830e-01 3.916870e-05 3.568906e-05 3.251854e-05 2.962968e-05
[10] 2.699746e-05

lambda values are 10 times smaller and this gives empty coefficients since lambdaOpt is not in the range of tested lambda:

coef(model.test$finalModel, model.test$finalModel$lambdaOpt)
#output
12 x 1 sparse Matrix of class "dgCMatrix"
              1
(Intercept)   .
age           .
genderX1      .
bmi_p         .
m_eduX1       .
m_eduX2       .
m_eduX3       .
p_eduX1       .
p_eduX2       .
p_eduX3       .
f_colorred    .
f_coloryellow .

model.test$finalModel$lambdaOpt
#output
0.5

now when predicting upon this model only X0 is predicted (the first level):

predict(model.test, x)
#output
 [1] X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0 X0
Levels: X0 X1

quite odd behavior, probably worth reporting