COMP3308 – Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Semester 1, 2020
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Assignment 2: Classification
Deadlines
Submission: 11:59pm, Monday 11th May, 2020 (week 11)
Late submissions policy
Late submissions are allowed for up to 3 days late. A penalty of 5% per day late will apply. Assignments
more than 3 days late will not be accepted (i.e. will get 0 marks). The day cut-off time is 11:59pm.
Marking
This assignment is worth 24% of your final mark. It can be completed individually or in pairs (no more
than 2 students are allowed). See the submission details sections for more information about how to
setup an individual or pair submission in PASTA.
Task description
In this assignment you will implement the K-Nearest Neighbour and Naïve Bayes algorithms and
evaluate them on a real dataset using the stratified cross validation method. You will also evaluate the
performance of other classifiers on the same dataset using Weka. Finally, you will investigate the
effect of feature selection, in particular the Correlation-based Feature Selection method (CFS) from
Weka.
Programming languages
Your implementation can be written in Python, Java, C, C++ or MATLAB. The assignment will be tested
automatically on PASTA, so your code must be compatible with the language versions listed in the
“Input” section of this specification. You are not allowed to use any of the built-in classification
libraries for the purposes of this assignment.
Submission
This assignment (code and report) will be submitted using PASTA. However, you also need to submit
the report separately in Canvas for plagiarism checking. Please see the submission details sections for
more information.
PASTA is located at https://comp3308.it.usyd.edu.au/PASTA/. In order to connect to the website,
you’ll need to be connected to the university VPN.
If you are not in China should use the University Cisco VPN client https://vpn.sydney.edu.au; please
read this page to find out how to connect to the VPN using the Cisco VPN client.
The students in China impacted by the travel ban should use the new VPN (FortiClient), which is the
special VPN for accessing university resources from China. Only students in China should use this
VPN. To access PASTA from China, it may also be necessary to run both the FortiClient and Cisco VPN;
connect to FortiClient first and then to Cisco VPN.
If you are on-campus and connected to the University wireless network, you don’t need a VPN to
access PASTA.
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PASTA will allow you to make as many submissions as you wish, and each submission will provide you
with feedback on each of the components of the assignment. Your last submission before the
assignment deadline will be marked, and the mark displayed on PASTA will be the final mark for your
code (12 marks).
Any assignment components that need to be submitted to PASTA will be included in a box like
this one, describing what to submit.
1. Dataset preparation
The data
The dataset for this assignment is the Pima Indian Diabetes dataset. It contains 768 instances
described by 8 numeric attributes. There are two classes - yes and no. Each entry in the dataset
corresponds to a patient’s record; the attributes are personal characteristics and test measurements;
the class shows if the person shows signs of diabetes or not. The patients are from Pima Indian
heritage, hence the name of the dataset.
A copy of the dataset can be downloaded from Canvas. There are 2 files associated with the dataset.
The first file, pima-indians-diabetes.names, describes the data, including the number and the
type of the attributes and classes, as well as their meaning. This file can be opened in any text editor
and exists only to give you information about the dataset. Make sure you read the whole file to learn
more about the meaning of the attributes and the classes.
The second file, pima-indians-diabetes.data, contains the data itself. Your task is to predict the
class, where the class can be yes or no.
Note: The original dataset can be sourced from UCI Machine Learning Repository. However, you
need to use the dataset available on Canvas as it has been modified for consistency.
Data pre-processing
In order to use the data in this assignment, you’re going to need to do some pre-processing on the
pima-indians-diabetes.data file.
Use Weka’s in-built normalisation filter to normalise the values of each attribute to make sure they
are in the range [0,1]. The normalisation should be done along each column (attribute), not each row
(entry). The class attribute is not normalised – it should remain unchanged. Save the pre-processed
file as pima.csv.
Warning: Weka assumes that any data file you give it has a header row (a row of column names
at the top of the file). In order to ensure that Weka can process the data, you will need to add
a header row to the data file and save it as a .csv file. It doesn’t matter what you name the
columns; just make sure you understand them! You can do this in any text editor. Make sure
you remove the headers from pima.csv after pre-processing.
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All further activities with the data will be performed using pima.csv as the data file; if you have
correctly processed the data, you will no longer need the pima-indians-diabetes.data file.
Include pima.csv in your submission to PASTA, and PASTA will check that you have correctly
normalised the file.
2. Classification algorithms
You will now write two classifiers to predict the class (yes or no) given some new examples. These
classifiers will be automatically tested by PASTA, so you need to make sure you follow the input and
output instructions carefully.
K-Nearest Neighbour
The K-Nearest Neighbour algorithm should be implemented for any K value and should use Euclidean
distance as the distance measure. If there is ever a tie between the two classes, choose class yes.
Naïve Bayes
The Naïve Bayes should be implemented for numeric attributes, using a probability density function.
Assume a normal distribution, i.e. use the probability density function for a normal distribution. As
before, if there is ever a tie between the two classes, choose class yes.
Input
Your program will need to be named MyClassifier, however may be written in any of the languages
mentioned in the “Programming languages” section.
Your program should take 3 command line arguments. The first argument is the path to the training
data file, the second is the path to the testing data file, and the third is the name of the algorithm to
be executed (NB for Naïve Bayes and kNN for the Nearest Neighbour, where k is replaced with a
number; e.g. 5NN).
The file paths given to you (as the first and second arguments) represent files that will be supplied to
your program for reading. You can test your submission using any files you like, but PASTA will provide
your submission with its own files for testing, so do not assume any specific filenames.
For example, if you were to make a submission in Java, your main class would be
MyClassifier.java, and the following are examples of possible inputs to the program:
$ java MyClassifier pima.csv newexamples.csv NB
$ java MyClassifier training.csv testing.csv 4NN
Training data file
The input training file will consist of several rows of data, each with attributes plus a single class
value (yes or no). The file will not have a header row, will have one example per line, and each line
will consist of a normalised value for each of the non-class attributes separated by commas, followed
by a class value. This example has 8 attributes, like pima.csv:
0.084,0.192,0.569,0.274,0.105,0.179,0.090,0.284,yes
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0.091,0.287,0.255,0.234,0.191,0.175,0.174,0.000,no
0.000,0.929,0.681,0.106,0.238,0.348,0.003,0.000,no
0.193,0.455,0.379,0.284,0.187,0.355,0.058,0.096,yes
0.489,0.774,0.578,0.218,0.122,0.829,0.104,0.000,no
0.378,0.839,0.489,0.118,0.173,0.885,0.045,0.691,yes
Testing data file
The input testing data file will consist of several new examples to test your data on. The file will not
have a header row, will have one example per line, and each line will consist of a normalised value for
each of the non-class attributes separated by commas. An example input file could look as follows:
0.588,0.628,0.574,0.263,0.136,0.463,0.054,0.333
0.243,0.274,0.224,0.894,0.113,0.168,0.735,0.321
0.738,0.295,0.924,0.113,0.693,0.666,0.486,0.525
Note: your program should be able to handle any number of attributes; not just the 8 attributes
from pima.csv. You can assume that if the input training file has attributes + a class column,
then the testing file will also have attributes.
The following examples show how the program would be run for each of the submission languages,
assuming we want to run the NB classifier, the training data is in a file called training.txt, and the
testing data is in a file called testing.txt.
Python (version 3.7.0):
python MyClassifier.py training.txt testing.txt NB
Java (version 8):
javac MyClassifier.java
java MyClassifier training.txt testing.txt NB
C (gcc version 6.3.0):
gcc –lm -w -std=c99 –o MyClassifier MyClassifier.c *.c
./MyClassifier training.txt testing.txt NB
C++ (gcc version 6.3.0):
g++ –c MyClassifier.cpp *.cpp *.h
gcc –lstdc++ -lm –o MyClassifier *.o
./MyClassifier training.txt testing.txt NB
MATLAB (R2018a):
mcc -m -o MyClassifier -R -nodisplay -R -nojvm MyClassifier
./run_MyClassifier.sh training.txt testing.txt NB
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Note: MATLAB must be run this way (compiled first) to speed up MATLAB running submissions.
The arguments are passed to your MyClassifier function as strings. For example, the
example above will be executed as a function call like this:
MyClassifier('training.txt', 'testing.txt', 'NB')
Output
Your program will output to standard output (a.k.a. “the console”). The output should be one class
value (yes or no) per line – each line representing your program’s classification of the corresponding
line in the input file. An example output could look as follows:
yes
no
yes
Note: These outputs are in no way related to the sample inputs given above. If you have any
questions or need any clarifications about program input or output, ask a question on Piazza or
ask your tutor. Since your program will be automatically tested by PASTA, it is important that
you follow the instructions exactly.
Include your classifier code in your submission to PASTA, and PASTA will test whether you have
correctly implemented the two classifiers.
Make sure that your main code file (MyClassifier.*) is at the top level of the submission
folder; i.e. don’t put MyClassifier.* in a subfolder, or PASTA will not be able to find it.
PASTA will only be testing your code for correctness; i.e. does your code get the results that it should,
given some expected inputs? Your classifiers are not expected to be able to classify new examples
with some specified level of accuracy.
3. Evaluating your classifiers
Now that you have implemented some classifiers, you need to evaluate them; i.e. find out how well
they actually perform as classifiers.
Implementation
In order to evaluate the performance of the classifiers, you will have to implement 10-fold stratified
cross-validation as an extension to your classifier code. Your program should be able to show the
algorithm’s average accuracy over the 10 folds. This information will be required to complete the
report; you need to know the average accuracy of your NB and kNN algorithms (for various values of
k).
If you are unsure how to modify your code to show average accuracy using 10-fold cross
validation, see Appendix 1 – 10-fold cross validation for a diagram describing how 10-fold cross
validation works as an evaluation method.
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Make sure your folds are stratified, otherwise your accuracy results can be wrong. For more
information see Appendix 2 – Stratification.
Your implementation of 10-fold stratified cross-validation is not required to be part of your PASTA
submission, as it will not be automatically tested, however feel free to include it in your submission
for reference.
Sample folds
To show that you understand how 10-fold stratified cross-validation works, you will need to generate
a file called pima-folds.csv from the original pima.csv. This file can be generated in any manner
you choose (manually or using code).
pima-folds.csv should contain 10 folds, each containing the approximately the same number of
examples, and the ratio of yes examples to no examples should be approximately the same for each
fold.
Each fold should be in the following format:
Name of the fold, fold1 to fold10.
Contents of the fold, with each entry on a new line.
A single blank line to separate the folds from each other.
An example of the pima-folds.csv file would look as follows (made up data):
fold1
0.588,0.628,0.574,0.263,0.136,0.463,0.054,0.333,yes
0.243,0.274,0.224,0.894,0.113,0.168,0.735,0.321,no
fold2
0.588,0.628,0.574,0.263,0.136,0.463,0.054,0.333,yes
0.243,0.274,0.224,0.894,0.113,0.168,0.735,0.321,no
...
fold10
0.588,0.628,0.574,0.263,0.136,0.463,0.054,0.333,yes
0.243,0.274,0.224,0.894,0.113,0.168,0.735,0.321,no
Note: The number of instances per fold should not vary by more than one. If the total number
of instances is not divisible by ten, the remaining items should be distributed amongst the folds
rather than being placed in one fold.
Include pima-folds.csv in your submission to PASTA, and PASTA will check that you have
correctly created the folds and applied stratification.
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4. Feature selection
Correlation-based feature selection (CFS) is a method for selecting a subset of the original features
(attributes). It searches for the best subset of features, where best is defined by a heuristic which
considers how good the individual features are at predicting the class and how much they correlate
with the other features. Good subsets of features contain features that are highly correlated with the
class and uncorrelated with each other.
Load the pima.csv file in Weka, and apply CFS to reduce the number of features. It is available from
the “Select attributes” tab in Weka. Use “Best-First Search” as the search method. Save the CSV file
with the reduced number of attributes (this can be done in Weka) and name it pima-CFS.csv.
Note: As before, in order to ensure Weka can understand the data, you’ll need to add headers.
Once you are done processing, remove the headers
Include pima-CFS.csv in your submission to PASTA, and PASTA will check that you have
correctly applied CFS to pima.csv.
5. Evaluating Weka’s classifiers
In Weka, select 10-fold cross validation (it is actually 10-fold stratified cross validation) and run the
following algorithms: ZeroR, 1R, k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN; IBk in Weka), Naïve Bayes (NB), Decision
Tree (DT; J48 in Weka), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Support Vector Machine (SVM; SMO in Weka)
and Random Forest (RF).
Compare the performance of the Weka’s classifiers with your k-Nearest Neighbour and Naïve Bayes
classifiers. Do this for the case without feature selection (using pima.csv) and with CFS feature
selection (using pima-CFS.csv).
6. Report
You will have to describe your analysis and findings in a report similar to a research paper. Your report
should include (at least) the following 5 sections. There is no minimum or maximum length for the
report – you will be marked on the quality of the content that you provide. Make sure you put enough
detail in each section.
Your report should be written as if you were describing the study to someone who has not seen the
data or this assignment before.
Aim
This section should briefly state the aim of your study and include a paragraph about why this study
is important.
Data
This section should describe the dataset, mentioning the number of attributes and classes. It should
also briefly describe the CFS method and list the attributes selected by the CFS.
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Results and discussion
The accuracy results should be presented (in percentage, using 10-fold cross validation) in the
following table where My1NN, My5NN and MyNB are your implementations of the 1NN, 5NN and NB
algorithms, evaluated using your stratified 10-fold cross validation.
ZeroR 1R 1NN 5NN NB DT MLP SVM RF
No feature
selection
CFS
My1NN My5NN MyNB
No feature
selection
CFS
In the discussion, compare the performance of the classifiers, with and without feature selection.
Compare your implementations of k-NN and NB with Weka’s. Discuss the effect of the feature
selection – did CFS select a subset of the original features, and if so, did the selected subset make
intuitive sense to you? Was feature selection beneficial, i.e. did it improve accuracy, or have any other
advantages? Why do you think this is the case? Include anything else that you consider important.
Conclusion
Summarise your main findings and suggest future work.
Reflection
Write one or two paragraphs describing the most important thing that you have learned throughout
this assignment.
Include your report in your submission to PASTA, as that is where it will be marked. The report
will be marked by hand after the due date of the assignment.
Remember to also submit your report (only the report) in Canvas for plagiarism checking.
7. Submission details - PASTA
This assignment is to be submitted electronically via the PASTA submission system. If you are
submitting the assignment as a pair, only one of you needs to submit on PASTA, and it will show up
for both of you. If you are submitting on your own, you still need to set up a group in PASTA; follow
the steps below for instructions.
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Individual submissions setup
The first thing you must do is create an individual group on PASTA. This is due to a limitation of PASTA.
To create a group, follow the instructions below:
1. Click on the “Group Management” button (3 people icon), next to the submit button.
2. Click on the plus button in the bottom right to add a new group.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the list of groups and click on “Join Group” next to the group you just
created.
4. Click on “Lock Group” to lock the group and stop others from joining the group (optional).
Pair submissions setup
The first thing you must do is create/join a group on PASTA. Follow the instructions below:
1. Click on the “Group Management” button (3 people icon), next to the submit button.
2. If your pair has not yet formed a group on PASTA, click on the plus button in the bottom right
to add a new group, otherwise go to step 3.
3. Click on “Join Group” next to your group in the “Other Existing Groups” section.
4. If you wish to stop anyone from joining your group, click on “Lock Group”.
All submissions
Your submission should be zipped together in a single .zip file and include the following:
The report in PDF format.
The source code with a main program called MyClassifier. Valid extensions are .java,
.py, .c, .cpp, .cc, and .m.
Three data files: pima.csv, pima-CFS.csv and pima-folds.csv.
Upload your submission on PASTA under Assignment 2 - Classification. Make sure you tick the box
saying that you’re submitting on behalf of your group (even if you’re working individually). The
submission won’t work if you don’t.
When submitted to PASTA, a valid submission
might look like this:
Note: Make sure you only zip up the files
needed for the submission; not a folder
containing these files. If your submission
looks like this in PASTA, you have
included a folder and PASTA will not be
able to read your files:
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8. Submission details – Canvas
You are also required to submit the report part of your assignment in Canvas (in the “Assignment2
Report” dropbox), for checking for plagiarism using TurnItIn. If you work in a pair, only one of you
needs to submit.
9. Marking criteria
[12 marks] Code – based on the tests in PASTA; automatic marking
[12 marks] Report:
[1 mark] Introduction
What is the aim of the study?
Why is this study (or the problem) important?
[1 mark] Data – well explained
• Dataset – brief description of the dataset
• Attribute selection – brief summary of CFS and a list of the selected attributes
[6.5 marks] Results and discussion
• All results presented
• Correct and deep discussion of the results
• Effect of the feature selection – beneficial or not (accuracy, other advantages)
• Comparison between the classifiers (accuracy, other advantages)
[2 marks] Conclusions and future work
• Meaningful conclusions based on the results
• Meaningful future work suggested
[0.5 marks] Reflection (meaningful and relevant personal reflection)
[1 marks] English and presentation
• Academic style, grammatical sentences, no spelling mistakes
• Good structure and layout; consistent formatting