Factors Influencing Drug Injection History among Prisoners: A Comparison between Classification and Regression Trees and Logistic Regression Analysis

Background: Due to the importance of medical studies, researchers of this field should be familiar with various types of statistical analyses to select the most appropriate method based on the characteristics of their data sets. Classification and regression trees (CARTs) can be as complementary to regression models. We compared the performance of a logistic regression model and a CART in predicting drug injection among prisoners. Methods: Data of 2720 Iranian prisoners was studied to determine the factors influencing drug injection. The collected data was divided into two groups of training and testing. A logistic regression model and a CART were applied on training data. The performance of the two models was then evaluated on testing data. Findings: The regression model and the CART had 8 and 4 significant variables, respectively. Overall, heroin use, history of imprisonment, age at first drug use, and marital status were important factors in determining the history of drug injection. Subjects without the history of heroin use or heroin users with short-term imprisonment were at lower risk of drug injection. Among heroin addicts with long-term imprisonment, individuals with higher age at first drug use and married subjects were at lower risk of drug injection. Although the logistic regression model was more sensitive than the CART, the two models had the same levels of specificity and classification accuracy. Conclusion: In this study, both sensitivity and specificity were important. While the logistic regression model had better performance, the graphical presentation of the CART simplifies the interpretation of the results. In general, a combination of different analytical methods is recommended to explore the effects of variables. Keywords: Classification and regression trees, Logistic regression model, History of drug injection, Drug abus

Predictive modelling applied to propensity to buy personal accidents insurance products

Internship Report presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced AnalyticsPredictive models have been largely used in organizational scenarios with the increasing popularity of machine learning. They play a fundamental role in the support of customer acquisition in marketing campaigns. This report describes the development of a propensity to buy model for personal accident insurance products. The entire process from business understanding to the deployment of the final model is analyzed with the objective of linking the theory to practice

Building well-performing classifier ensembles: model and decision level combination.

There is a continuing drive for better, more robust generalisation performance from classification systems, and prediction systems in general. Ensemble methods, or the combining of multiple classifiers, have become an accepted and successful tool for doing this, though the reasons for success are not always entirely understood. In this thesis, we review the multiple classifier literature and consider the properties an ensemble of classifiers - or collection of subsets - should have in order to be combined successfully. We find that the framework of Stochastic Discrimination provides a well-defined account of these properties, which are shown to be strongly encouraged in a number of the most popular/successful methods in the literature via differing algorithmic devices. This uncovers some interesting and basic links between these methods, and aids understanding of their success and operation in terms of a kernel induced on the training data, with form particularly well suited to classification. One property that is desirable in both the SD framework and in a regression context, the ambiguity decomposition of the error, is de-correlation of individuals. This motivates the introduction of the Negative Correlation Learning method, in which neural networks are trained in parallel in a way designed to encourage de-correlation of the individual networks. The training is controlled by a parameter λ governing the extent to which correlations are penalised. Theoretical analysis of the dynamics of training results in an exact expression for the interval in which we can choose λ while ensuring stability of the training, and a value λ∗ for which the training has some interesting optimality properties. These values depend only on the size N of the ensemble. Decision level combination methods often result in a difficult to interpret model, and NCL is no exception. However in some applications, there is a need for understandable decisions and interpretable models. In response to this, we depart from the standard decision level combination paradigm to introduce a number of model level combination methods. As decision trees are one of the most interpretable model structures used in classification, we chose to combine structure from multiple individual trees to build a single combined model. We show that extremely compact, well performing models can be built in this way. In particular, a generalisation of bottom-up pruning to a multiple-tree context produces good results in this regard. Finally, we develop a classification system for a real-world churn prediction problem, illustrating some of the concepts introduced in the thesis, and a number of more practical considerations which are of importance when developing a prediction system for a specific problem

Building well-performing classifier ensembles : model and decision level combination

There is a continuing drive for better, more robust generalisation performance from classification systems, and prediction systems in general. Ensemble methods, or the combining of multiple classifiers, have become an accepted and successful tool for doing this, though the reasons for success are not always entirely understood. In this thesis, we review the multiple classifier literature and consider the properties an ensemble of classifiers - or collection of subsets - should have in order to be combined successfully. We find that the framework of Stochastic Discrimination provides a well-defined account of these properties, which are shown to be strongly encouraged in a number of the most popular/successful methods in the literature via differing algorithmic devices. This uncovers some interesting and basic links between these methods, and aids understanding of their success and operation in terms of a kernel induced on the training data, with form particularly well suited to classification. One property that is desirable in both the SD framework and in a regression context, the ambiguity decomposition of the error, is de-correlation of individuals. This motivates the introduction of the Negative Correlation Learning method, in which neural networks are trained in parallel in a way designed to encourage de-correlation of the individual networks. The training is controlled by a parameter λ governing the extent to which correlations are penalised. Theoretical analysis of the dynamics of training results in an exact expression for the interval in which we can choose λ while ensuring stability of the training, and a value λ∗ for which the training has some interesting optimality properties. These values depend only on the size N of the ensemble. Decision level combination methods often result in a difficult to interpret model, and NCL is no exception. However in some applications, there is a need for understandable decisions and interpretable models. In response to this, we depart from the standard decision level combination paradigm to introduce a number of model level combination methods. As decision trees are one of the most interpretable model structures used in classification, we chose to combine structure from multiple individual trees to build a single combined model. We show that extremely compact, well performing models can be built in this way. In particular, a generalisation of bottom-up pruning to a multiple-tree context produces good results in this regard. Finally, we develop a classification system for a real-world churn prediction problem, illustrating some of the concepts introduced in the thesis, and a number of more practical considerations which are of importance when developing a prediction system for a specific problem.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo