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RuleFit & quantreg: partial dependence plots; showing an effect

5 messages · Mark Difford, Ravi Varadhan, Roger Koenker

#
Dear List,

I would greatly appreciate help on the following matter:

The RuleFit program of Professor Friedman uses partial dependence plots
to explore the effect of an explanatory variable on the response
variable, after accounting for the average effects of the other
variables.  The plot method [plot(summary(rq(y ~ x1 + x2,
t=seq(.1,.9,.05))))] of Professor Koenker's quantreg program appears to
do the same thing.


Question:
Is there a difference between these two types of plot in the manner in which they depict the relationship between explanatory variables and the response variable ?

Thank you inav for your help.

Regards,
Mark Difford.

------------------------------------------------------------- 
Mark Difford
Ph.D. candidate, Botany Department,
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University,
Port Elizabeth, SA.
#
They are entirely different:  Rulefit is a fiendishly clever  
combination of decision tree  formulation
of models and L1-regularization intended to select parsimonious fits  
to very complicated
responses yielding e.g. piecewise constant functions.  Rulefit   
estimates the  conditional
mean of the response over the covariate space, but permits a very  
flexible, but linear in
parameters specifications of the covariate effects on the conditional  
mean.  The quantile
regression plotting you refer to adopts a fixed, linear specification  
for conditional quantile
functions and given that specification depicts how the covariates  
influence the various
conditional quantiles of the response.   Thus, roughly speaking,  
Rulefit is focused on
flexibility in the x-space, maintaining the classical conditional  
mean objective; while
QR is trying to be more flexible in the y-direction, and maintaining  
a fixed, linear
in parameters specification for the covariate effects at each quantile.


url:    www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger            Roger Koenker
email    rkoenker at uiuc.edu            Department of Economics
vox:     217-333-4558                University of Illinois
fax:       217-244-6678                Champaign, IL 61820
On Dec 20, 2006, at 4:17 AM, Mark Difford wrote:

            
#
Dear Roger,

Is it possible to combine the two ideas that you mentioned: (1) algorithmic
approaches of Breiman, Friedman, and others that achieve flexibility in the
predictor space, and (2) robust and flexible regression like QR that achieve
flexibility in the response space, so as to achieve complete flexibility?
If it is possible, are you or anyone else in the R community working on
this?

Thanks,
Ravi.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------

Ravi Varadhan, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, The Center on Aging and Health

Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology 

Johns Hopkins University

Ph: (410) 502-2619

Fax: (410) 614-9625

Email: rvaradhan at jhmi.edu

Webpage:  http://www.jhsph.edu/agingandhealth/People/Faculty/Varadhan.html

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
[mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of roger koenker
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 8:57 AM
To: Mark Difford
Cc: R-help list
Subject: Re: [R] RuleFit & quantreg: partial dependence plots; showing an
effect

They are entirely different:  Rulefit is a fiendishly clever  
combination of decision tree  formulation
of models and L1-regularization intended to select parsimonious fits  
to very complicated
responses yielding e.g. piecewise constant functions.  Rulefit   
estimates the  conditional
mean of the response over the covariate space, but permits a very  
flexible, but linear in
parameters specifications of the covariate effects on the conditional  
mean.  The quantile
regression plotting you refer to adopts a fixed, linear specification  
for conditional quantile
functions and given that specification depicts how the covariates  
influence the various
conditional quantiles of the response.   Thus, roughly speaking,  
Rulefit is focused on
flexibility in the x-space, maintaining the classical conditional  
mean objective; while
QR is trying to be more flexible in the y-direction, and maintaining  
a fixed, linear
in parameters specification for the covariate effects at each quantile.


url:    www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger            Roger Koenker
email    rkoenker at uiuc.edu            Department of Economics
vox:     217-333-4558                University of Illinois
fax:       217-244-6678                Champaign, IL 61820
On Dec 20, 2006, at 4:17 AM, Mark Difford wrote:

            
______________________________________________
R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
#
On Dec 20, 2006, at 8:43 AM, Ravi Varadhan wrote:

            
There are some tentative steps in this direction.  One is the rqss()  
fitting
in my quantreg package which does QR fitting with additive models
using total variation as a roughness penalty for nonlinear terms.
Another, along more tree structured lines, is Nicolai Meinshausen's
quantregforest package.
#
Thanks, Roger.  These should be very useful tools.

Ravi.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------

Ravi Varadhan, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, The Center on Aging and Health

Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology 

Johns Hopkins University

Ph: (410) 502-2619

Fax: (410) 614-9625

Email: rvaradhan at jhmi.edu

Webpage:  http://www.jhsph.edu/agingandhealth/People/Faculty/Varadhan.html

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------


-----Original Message-----
From: roger koenker [mailto:rkoenker at uiuc.edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 10:59 AM
To: Ravi Varadhan
Cc: 'Mark Difford'; 'R-help list'
Subject: Re: [R] RuleFit & quantreg: partial dependence plots; showing an
effect
On Dec 20, 2006, at 8:43 AM, Ravi Varadhan wrote:

            
There are some tentative steps in this direction.  One is the rqss()  
fitting
in my quantreg package which does QR fitting with additive models
using total variation as a roughness penalty for nonlinear terms.
Another, along more tree structured lines, is Nicolai Meinshausen's
quantregforest package.