Parfit — quick and powerful hyper-parameter optimization with visualizations

Intro to Machine Learning (2018)
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Hi all!

I wrote a blog post about a new package that I created called parfit!

The package is a more flexible version of GridSearchCV (also used for sklearn machine learning models), developed with speed (parallel processing) and ease of use (one function call to run) in mind, and built-in visualizations of the results.

The key advantages of this package are as follows:

  • Flexibly choose the validation set you wish to score on (no need to cross-validate on the training set. i.e. useful for time series data e.g. grocery kaggle competition and many other real-world problems)
  • Flexibly choose your scoring metric (any function that compares two vectors should work, but intended for sklearn metrics)
  • Optionally (by default) plot the scores over the grid of hyper-parameters entered (visualize scores that vary of 1-3 parameters)
  • Automatically return the best model (associated hyper-parameters) and score of that model
  • Do all of this with a single function call (or split it up into multiple component function calls if you wish)

Since this is my first time creating a package and writing about it, I have some humble requests:
I would absolutely love and appreciate it if anyone would be willing to (A) give me some feedback on my first blog post (5min read) before I publish it,
(B) test out my package and see if it is (i) helpful for you or (ii) if you can break it,
and © contribute to the package!

Thank you so much for any input any of you can provide!

7 Likes
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Very nice job! I like the way it’s all very well polished :slight_smile: I don’t have anything much to add I think - let me know when you’re happy to publish it.

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@jeremy thank you for the feedback and encouragement! The article is now published, at the same web address in the links above, or listed here

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Very nice!

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What’s your twitter handle?

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jcarpenter542

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Jason, in your post, when you say:

Notice below that I have only specified the RandomForestClassifier class, not instantiated the object with parentheses ().

What does it mean to instantiate an object?

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I mean that for my package, users simple need to reference the class name rather than create an object of that class using parentheses (instantiate). It would be redundant to do so as the creation of the model is also done inside of my fitModels function. Maybe it would be more effective communication if I said “create an object of that class” instead of instantiate.

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I think its fairly common language, I just didn’t know what it meant :smile: