Comparison Between Grid Search and Successive Halving

Introduction

This lab compares two popular parameter search algorithms in machine learning: Grid Search and Successive Halving. We will be using the scikit-learn library in Python to perform the comparison. These algorithms are used to find the best hyperparameters for a given machine learning model.

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Skills Graph

Import the necessary libraries and dataset

We first import the necessary libraries and dataset needed for this lab. We will be using the scikit-learn library to generate a synthetic dataset and perform the parameter search.

from time import time
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
from sklearn.svm import SVC
from sklearn import datasets
from sklearn.model_selection import GridSearchCV
from sklearn.experimental import enable_halving_search_cv
from sklearn.model_selection import HalvingGridSearchCV

rng = np.random.RandomState(0)
X, y = datasets.make_classification(n_samples=1000, random_state=rng)

gammas = [1e-1, 1e-2, 1e-3, 1e-4, 1e-5, 1e-6, 1e-7]
Cs = [1, 10, 100, 1e3, 1e4, 1e5]
param_grid = {"gamma": gammas, "C": Cs}

clf = SVC(random_state=rng)

Perform Grid Search

We will use Grid Search to perform parameter search on the SVC model. We will use the generated synthetic dataset and the parameter grid generated in Step 1.

tic = time()
gs = GridSearchCV(estimator=clf, param_grid=param_grid)
gs.fit(X, y)
gs_time = time() - tic

Perform Successive Halving

We will now perform parameter search using Successive Halving on the same SVC model and dataset used in Step 2.

tic = time()
gsh = HalvingGridSearchCV(
    estimator=clf, param_grid=param_grid, factor=2, random_state=rng
)
gsh.fit(X, y)
gsh_time = time() - tic

Visualize the Results

We will now visualize the results of the parameter search algorithms using heatmaps. The heatmaps show the mean test score of the parameter combinations for the SVC instance. The Successive Halving heatmap also shows the iteration at which the combinations were last used.

def make_heatmap(ax, gs, is_sh=False, make_cbar=False):
    """Helper to make a heatmap."""
    results = pd.DataFrame(gs.cv_results_)
    results[["param_C", "param_gamma"]] = results[["param_C", "param_gamma"]].astype(
        np.float64
    )
    if is_sh:
        ## SH dataframe: get mean_test_score values for the highest iter
        scores_matrix = results.sort_values("iter").pivot_table(
            index="param_gamma",
            columns="param_C",
            values="mean_test_score",
            aggfunc="last",
        )
    else:
        scores_matrix = results.pivot(
            index="param_gamma", columns="param_C", values="mean_test_score"
        )

    im = ax.imshow(scores_matrix)

    ax.set_xticks(np.arange(len(Cs)))
    ax.set_xticklabels(["{:.0E}".format(x) for x in Cs])
    ax.set_xlabel("C", fontsize=15)

    ax.set_yticks(np.arange(len(gammas)))
    ax.set_yticklabels(["{:.0E}".format(x) for x in gammas])
    ax.set_ylabel("gamma", fontsize=15)

    ## Rotate the tick labels and set their alignment.
    plt.setp(ax.get_xticklabels(), rotation=45, ha="right", rotation_mode="anchor")

    if is_sh:
        iterations = results.pivot_table(
            index="param_gamma", columns="param_C", values="iter", aggfunc="max"
        ).values
        for i in range(len(gammas)):
            for j in range(len(Cs)):
                ax.text(
                    j,
                    i,
                    iterations[i, j],
                    ha="center",
                    va="center",
                    color="w",
                    fontsize=20,
                )

    if make_cbar:
        fig.subplots_adjust(right=0.8)
        cbar_ax = fig.add_axes([0.85, 0.15, 0.05, 0.7])
        fig.colorbar(im, cax=cbar_ax)
        cbar_ax.set_ylabel("mean_test_score", rotation=-90, va="bottom", fontsize=15)


fig, axes = plt.subplots(ncols=2, sharey=True)
ax1, ax2 = axes

make_heatmap(ax1, gsh, is_sh=True)
make_heatmap(ax2, gs, make_cbar=True)

ax1.set_title("Successive Halving\ntime = {:.3f}s".format(gsh_time), fontsize=15)
ax2.set_title("GridSearch\ntime = {:.3f}s".format(gs_time), fontsize=15)

plt.show()

Summary

We have compared two popular parameter search algorithms in machine learning: Grid Search and Successive Halving. We used the scikit-learn library in Python to perform the comparison. We generated a synthetic dataset and performed parameter search on the SVC model using both algorithms. We then visualized the results using heatmaps. We saw that the Successive Halving algorithm was able to find parameter combinations that are just as accurate as Grid Search, in much less time.