This reproducible example is from the help of 'gbm' in R. I ran the following code in R, and works fine as long as the response is numeric. The problem starts when I convert the response from numeric to binary (0/1). It gives me an error.
My question is, is converting the response from numeric to binary will have this much effect. Help page code: N <- 1000 X1 <- runif(N) X2 <- 2*runif(N) X3 <- ordered(sample(letters[1:4],N,replace=TRUE),levels=letters[4:1]) X4 <- factor(sample(letters[1:6],N,replace=TRUE)) X5 <- factor(sample(letters[1:3],N,replace=TRUE)) X6 <- 3*runif(N) mu <- c(-1,0,1,2)[as.numeric(X3)] SNR <- 10 # signal-to-noise ratio Y <- X1**1.5 + 2 * (X2**.5) + mu sigma <- sqrt(var(Y)/SNR) Y <- Y + rnorm(N,0,sigma) # introduce some missing values X1[sample(1:N,size=500)] <- NA X4[sample(1:N,size=300)] <- NA data <- data.frame(Y=Y,X1=X1,X2=X2,X3=X3,X4=X4,X5=X5,X6=X6) # fit initial model gbm1 <- gbm(Y~X1+X2+X3+X4+X5+X6, # formula data=data, # dataset var.monotone=c(0,0,0,0,0,0), # -1: monotone decrease, # +1: monotone increase, # 0: no monotone restrictions distribution="gaussian", # see the help for other choices n.trees=1000, # number of trees shrinkage=0.05, # shrinkage or learning rate, # 0.001 to 0.1 usually work interaction.depth=3, # 1: additive model, 2: two-way interactions, etc. bag.fraction = 0.5, # subsampling fraction, 0.5 is probably best train.fraction = 0.5, # fraction of data for training, # first train.fraction*N used for training n.minobsinnode = 10, # minimum total weight needed in each node cv.folds = 3, # do 3-fold cross-validation keep.data=TRUE, # keep a copy of the dataset with the object verbose=FALSE) # don't print out progress gbm1 summary(gbm1) Now I slightly change the response variable to make it binary. Y[Y < mean(Y)] = 0 #My edit Y[Y >= mean(Y)] = 1 #My edit data <- data.frame(Y=Y,X1=X1,X2=X2,X3=X3,X4=X4,X5=X5,X6=X6) fmla = as.formula(factor(Y)~X1+X2+X3+X4+X5+X6) #My edit gbm2 <- gbm(fmla, # formula data=data, # dataset distribution="bernoulli", # My edit n.trees=1000, # number of trees shrinkage=0.05, # shrinkage or learning rate, # 0.001 to 0.1 usually work interaction.depth=3, # 1: additive model, 2: two-way interactions, etc. bag.fraction = 0.5, # subsampling fraction, 0.5 is probably best train.fraction = 0.5, # fraction of data for training, # first train.fraction*N used for training n.minobsinnode = 10, # minimum total weight needed in each node cv.folds = 3, # do 3-fold cross-validation keep.data=TRUE, # keep a copy of the dataset with the object verbose=FALSE) # don't print out progress gbm2 > gbm2 gbm(formula = fmla, distribution = "bernoulli", data = data, n.trees = 1000, interaction.depth = 3, n.minobsinnode = 10, shrinkage = 0.05, bag.fraction = 0.5, train.fraction = 0.5, cv.folds = 3, keep.data = TRUE, verbose = FALSE) A gradient boosted model with bernoulli loss function. 1000 iterations were performed. The best cross-validation iteration was . The best test-set iteration was . Error in 1:n.trees : argument of length 0 My question is, Is binarizing the response will have so much effect that it does not find anythin useful in the predictors? Thanks -- ------------- Mary Kindall Yorktown Heights, NY USA [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org 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.