What are the most important attributes that distinguish 3 nominal labels from each other?

Answers

• BalazsBarany Administrator, Moderator, Employee-RapidMiner, RapidMiner Certified Analyst, RapidMiner Certified Expert Posts: 955 Unicorn

  December 2022

  Hi!
  
  AutoModel can be used to automatically test some machine learning algorithms on your data and also to get an assessment of attribute importance. 
  
  If you don't have that available, you can use some of the "Weight by" operators. There is no "best" among those, so you'll need to try at least some and summarize their results. Just as there are machine learning algorithms with different approaches, determining the importance or weight of attributes depends on the approach taken.
  
  Regards,
  Balázs

  1
• lauschi Member Posts: 4 Learner I

  December 2022

  Dear Balázs,

  
  

  thank you very much for your feedback.
  

  Well, I have the AutoModel available and I have also used it a lot. However, since I have 3 different categorical labels in my dataset, AutoModel always looks for the variables to predict one category at a time.
  

  
  

  Unfortunately, the meaning of the variables for the prediction of all 3 categories is always different.
  I will perhaps reduce the set of possible variables to a few. Maybe this is a good first step.
  

  Thank you for your support and feedback.

  
  

  Best regards,

  Lauschi

  
  
  

  0
• BalazsBarany Administrator, Moderator, Employee-RapidMiner, RapidMiner Certified Analyst, RapidMiner Certified Expert Posts: 955 Unicorn

  December 2022

  Hi,
  
  yes, in machine learning the importance of attributes can differ between the algorithms being used, but also between data sets.
  
  You could always build a process that loops over different samples of the data, sets the three label attributes in a loop one by one, and then uses some of the Weight by ... operators to calculate the attribute importance for that sample, that label and that algorithm. Summarizing the results will possibly keep you some insights on the overall importance. You'll probably need "Weights to Data" to convert the weight table to a normal data table.
  
  Regards,
  Balázs

  1
• lauschi Member Posts: 4 Learner I

  December 2022

  Dear Balazs Barany,
  

  Thank you very much for the very good comments.

  Could you send me a sample workflow of such a process? Then I could use it as a guide.
  
  

  Thank you again and best regards

  Lauschi
  

  
  

  0
• BalazsBarany Administrator, Moderator, Employee-RapidMiner, RapidMiner Certified Analyst, RapidMiner Certified Expert Posts: 955 Unicorn

  December 2022

  Hi!
  
  I don't have a readily available sample workflow. This is a complex process. But you're trying to solve a complex problem, so that's expected.
  
  The outer loop (for the samples) could be a plain Loop operator.
  
  Inside that I would use Loop Attributes and select the three possible labels as the attributes to loop on.
  
  Inside that loop, you could use another Loop and Select Subprocess with the different learning operators to get the weights. 
  
  At the end of most loops you'll receive a Collection of tables. You can use Append to convert these collections of tables to simpler tables. 
  
  Regards,
  Balázs

  5
• lauschi Member Posts: 4 Learner I

  December 2022

  Dear Balázs

  Thank you very much for the very good advice.

  I think I have already been able to work a little on the solution.
  Thank you very much and happy holidays.
  Kind regards
  Lauschi
  
  
  

  0