Naive Bayes Classifier: Machine Learning Algorithm

"In machine learning, naive Bayes classifiers are a family of simple "probabilistic classifiers" based on applying Bayes' theorem with strong (naive) independence assumptions between the features. Naive Bayes classifiers are highly scalable, requiring a number of parameters linear in the number of variables (features/predictors) in a learning problem. 

Naive Bayes is a simple technique for constructing classifiers: models that assign class labels to problem instances. All naive Bayes classifiers assume that the value of a particular feature is independent of the value of any other feature, given the class variable. For example, a fruit may be considered to be an apple if it is red, round, and about 10 cm in diameter. A naive Bayes classifier considers each of these features to contribute independently to the probability that this fruit is an apple, regardless of any possible correlations between the color, roundness, and diameter features.

An advantage of naive Bayes is that it only requires a small number of training data to estimate the parameters necessary for classification." (Wikipedia) "Naive Bayes model is easy to build and particularly useful for very large data sets. Along with simplicity, Naive Bayes is known to outperform even highly sophisticated classification methods. 

Where,

• P(c|x) is the posterior probability of class (c, target) given predictor (x, attributes).
• P(c) is the prior probability of class.
• P(x|c) is the likelihood which is the probability of predictor given class.
• P(x) is the prior probability of predictor.

How Naive Bayes algorithm works?

Let’s use an example. Below are training data set of weather and corresponding target variable ‘Play’ (suggesting possibilities of playing). Now, we need to classify whether players will play or not based on weather condition. Let’s follow the below steps to perform it.

Step 1: Convert the data set into a frequency table

Step 2: Create Likelihood table by finding the probabilities like Overcast probability = 0.29 and probability of playing is 0.64.

Step 3: Now, use Naive Bayesian equation to calculate the posterior probability for each class. The class with the highest posterior probability is the outcome of prediction.

Problem: Players will play if weather is sunny. Is this statement is correct?

We can solve it using above discussed method of posterior probability.

P(Yes | Sunny) = P( Sunny | Yes) * P(Yes) / P (Sunny)

Here we have P (Sunny |Yes) = 3/9 = 0.33, P(Sunny) = 5/14 = 0.36, P( Yes)= 9/14 = 0.64

Now, P (Yes | Sunny) = 0.33 * 0.64 / 0.36 = 0.60, which has higher probability.

Naive Bayes uses a similar method to predict the probability of different class based on various attributes. This algorithm is mostly used in text classification and with problems having multiple classes.

Applications of Naive Bayes Algorithms

• Real time Prediction: Naive Bayes is an eager learning classifier and it is sure fast. Thus, it could be used for making predictions in real time.
• Multi class Prediction: This algorithm is also well known for multi class prediction feature. Here we can predict the probability of multiple classes of target variable.
• Text classification/ Spam Filtering/ Sentiment Analysis: Naive Bayes classifiers mostly used in text classification (due to better result in multi class problems and independence rule) have higher success rate as compared to other algorithms. As a result, it is widely used in Spam filtering (identify spam e-mail) and Sentiment Analysis (in social media analysis, to identify positive and negative customer sentiments)
• Recommendation System: Naive Bayes Classifier and Collaborative Filtering together builds a Recommendation System that uses machine learning and data mining techniques to filter unseen information and predict whether a user would like a given resource or not

A basic model using Naive Bayes in Python

Again, scikit learn (python library) will help here to build a Naive Bayes model in Python. There are three types of Naive Bayes model under scikit learn library:

Gaussian: It is used in classification and it assumes that features follow a normal distribution.

Multinomial: It is used for discrete counts. For example, let’s say, we have a text classification problem. Here we can consider bernoulli trials which is one step further and instead of “word occurring in the document”, we have “count how often word occurs in the document”, you can think of it as “number of times outcome number x_i is observed over the n trials”.

Bernoulli: The binomial model is useful if your feature vectors are binary (i.e. zeros and ones). One application would be text classification with ‘bag of words’ model where the 1s & 0s are “word occurs in the document” and “word does not occur in the document” respectively.

Based on your data set, you can choose any of above discussed model. Below is the example of Gaussian model."

Python Code

#Import Library of Gaussian Naive Bayes model
from sklearn.naive_bayes import GaussianNB
import numpy as np

#assigning predictor and target variables
x= np.array([[-3,7],[1,5], [1,2], [-2,0], [2,3], [-4,0], [-1,1], [1,1], [-2,2], [2,7], [-4,1], [-2,7]])
Y = np.array([3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 4])

#Create a Gaussian Classifier
model = GaussianNB()

# Train the model using the training sets 
model.fit(x, y)

#Predict Output 
predicted= model.predict([[1,2],[3,4]])
print predicted

Output: ([3,4])

Sources (texts, images and code):

1. Wikipedia
2. https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2017/09/naive-bayes-explained/ (Sunil Ray)