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Overview

anomaly

Anomaly detection.

The estimators in the anomaly module have a slightly different API. Instead of a predict_one method, each anomaly detector has a score_one. The latter returns an anomaly score for a given set of features. High scores indicate anomalies, whereas low scores indicate normal observations. Note that the range of the scores is relative to each estimator.

base

Base interfaces.

Every estimator in river is a class, and as such inherits from at least one base interface. These are used to categorize, organize, and standardize the many estimators that river contains.

This module contains mixin classes, which are all suffixed by Mixin. Their purpose is to provide additional functionality to an estimator, and thus need to be used in conjunction with a non-mixin base class.

This module also contains utilities for type hinting and tagging estimators.

cluster

Unsupervised clustering.

compat

Compatibility tools.

This module contains adapters for making river estimators compatible with other libraries, and vice-versa whenever possible. The relevant adapters will only be usable if you have installed the necessary library. For instance, you have to install scikit-learn in order to use the compat.convert_sklearn_to_river function.

Classes

Functions

compose

Model composition.

This module contains utilities for merging multiple modeling steps into a single pipeline. Although pipelines are not the only way to process a stream of data, we highly encourage you to use them.

datasets

Datasets.

This module contains a collection of datasets for multiple tasks: classification, regression, etc. The data corresponds to popular datasets and are conveniently wrapped to easily iterate over the data in a stream fashion. All datasets have fixed size. Please refer to river.synth if you are interested in infinite synthetic data generators.

drift

Concept Drift Detection.

This module contains concept drift detection methods. The purpose of a drift detector is to raise an alarm if the data distribution changes. A good drift detector method is the one that maximizes the true positives while keeping the number of false positives to a minimum.

dummy

Dummy estimators.

This module is here for testing purposes, as well as providing baseline performances.

ensemble

Ensemble learning.

This module includes ensemble methods. This kind of methods improve predictive performance by combining the prediction of their members.

evaluate

Model evaluation.

This module provides utilities to evaluate an online model. The goal is to reproduce a real-world scenario with high fidelity. The core function of this module is progressive_val_score, which allows to evaluate a model via progressive validation.

This module also exposes "tracks". A track is a predefined combination of a dataset and one or more metrics. This allows a principled manner to compare models with each other. For instance, the load_binary_clf_tracks returns tracks that are to be used to evaluate the performance of a binary classification model.

The benchmarks directory at the root of the River repository uses these tracks.

Classes

Functions

expert

Expert learning.

This module regroups a variety of methods that may be used for performing model selection. An expert learner is provided with a list of models, which are also called experts, and is tasked with performing at least as well as the best expert. Indeed, initially the best model is not known. The performance of each model becomes more apparent as time goes by. Different strategies are possible, each one offering a different tradeoff in terms of accuracy and computational performance.

Expert learning can be used for tuning the hyperparameters of a model. This may be done by creating a copy of the model for each set of hyperparameters, and treating each copy as a separate model. The utils.expand_param_grid function can be used for this purpose.

Note that this differs from the ensemble module in that methods from the latter are designed to improve the performance of a single model. Both modules may thus be used in conjunction with one another.

facto

Factorization machines.

feature_extraction

Feature extraction.

This module can be used to extract information from raw features. This includes encoding categorical data as well as looking at interactions between existing features. This differs from the processing module in that the latter's purpose is rather to clean the data so that it may be processed by a particular machine learning algorithm.

feature_selection

Feature selection.

imblearn

Sampling methods.

linear_model

Linear models.

meta

Meta-models.

metrics

Evaluation metrics.

All the metrics are updated one sample at a time. This way we can track performance of predictive methods over time.

cluster

Internal clustering metrics

This submodule includes all internal clustering metrics that are updated with one sample, its label and the current cluster centers at a time. Using this, we can track the performance of the clustering algorithm without having to store information of all previously passed points.

multiclass

Multi-class classification.

multioutput

Multi-output models.

naive_bayes

Naive Bayes algorithms.

neighbors

Neighbors-based learning.

Also known as lazy methods. In these methods, generalisation of the training data is delayed until a query is received.

neural_net

Neural networks.

activations

optim

Stochastic optimization.

initializers

Weight initializers.

losses

Loss functions.

Each loss function is intended to work with both single values as well as numpy vectors.

schedulers

Learning rate schedulers.

preprocessing

Feature preprocessing.

The purpose of this module is to modify an existing set of features so that they can be processed by a machine learning algorithm. This may be done by scaling numeric parts of the data or by one-hot encoding categorical features. The difference with the feature_extraction module is that the latter extracts new information from the data

proba

Probability distributions.

reco

Recommender systems.

stats

Running statistics

stream

Streaming utilities.

The module includes tools to iterate over data streams.

Classes

Functions

synth

Synthetic datasets.

Each synthetic dataset is a stream generator. The benefit of using a generator is that they do not store the data and each data sample is generated on the fly. Except for a couple of methods, the majority of these methods are infinite data generators.

time_series

Time series forecasting.

tree

This module implements incremental Decision Tree (iDT) algorithms for handling classification and regression tasks.

Each family of iDT will be presented in a dedicated section.

At any moment, iDT might face situations where an input feature previously used to make a split decision is missing in an incoming sample. In this case, the river's trees follow the conventions:

  • Learning: choose the subtree branch most traversed so far to pass the instance on.
    • In case of nominal features, a new branch is created to accommodate the new category.
  • Predicting: Use the last "reachable" decision node to provide responses.

1. Hoeffding Trees

This family of iDT algorithms use the Hoeffding Bound to determine whether or not the incrementally computed best split candidates would be equivalent to the ones obtained in a batch-processing fashion.

All the available Hoeffding Tree (HT) implementation share some common functionalities:

  • Set the maximum tree depth allowed (max_depth).

  • Handle Active and Inactive nodes: Active learning nodes update their own internal state to improve predictions and monitor input features to perform split attempts. Inactive learning nodes do not update their internal state and only keep the predictors; they are used to save memory in the tree (max_size).

  • Enable/disable memory management.

  • Define strategies to sort leaves according to how likely they are going to be split. This enables deactivating non-promising leaves to save memory.

  • Disabling ‘poor’ attributes to save memory and speed up tree construction. A poor attribute is an input feature whose split merit is much smaller than the current best candidate. Once a feature is disabled, the tree stops saving statistics necessary to split such a feature.

  • Define properties to access leaf prediction strategies, split criteria, and other relevant characteristics.

All HTs have the following parameters, in addition to their own, that can be selected using **kwargs. The following default values are used, unless otherwise explicitly stated in the tree documentation.

Parameter Description Default
max_depth The maximum depth a tree can reach. If None, the tree will grow indefinitely. None
binary_split If True, only allow binary splits. False
max_size The maximum size the tree can reach, in Megabytes (MB). 100
memory_estimate_period Interval (number of processed instances) between memory consumption checks. 1_000_000
stop_mem_management If True, stop growing as soon as memory limit is hit. False
remove_poor_attrs If True, disable poorly descriptive attributes to reduce memory usage. False
merit_preprune If True, enable merit-based tree pre-pruning. True

splitter

This module implements the Attribute Observers (AO) (or tree splitters) that are used by the iDTs. AOs are a core aspect of the iDT construction, and might represent one of the major bottlenecks when building the trees. The correct choice and setup of a splitter might result in significant differences in the running time and memory usage of the iDTs.

Splitters for classification and regression trees can be differentiated by using the property is_target_class (True for splitters designed to classification tasks). An error will be raised if one tries to use a classification splitter in a regression tree and vice-versa.

utils

Utility classes and functions.

Classes

Functions

math

Mathematical utility functions (intended for internal purposes).

A lot of this is experimental and has a high probability of changing in the future.

pretty

Helper functions for making things readable by humans.