Exercise

Collective Inferencing

Collective inferencing is a procedure to simultaneously label nodes in interconnected data to reduce classification error.

In this exercise you will perform collective inferencing and see the effect it has on the churn prediction using the AUC performance measure. AUC, or area under the ROC curve, is commonly used to assess the performance of classification techniques.

  • AUC = probability that a randomly chosen churner is ranked higher by the model than a randomly chosen non-churner
  • AUC = number between 0.5 and 1, where a higher number means a better model

Does collective inferencing increase the AUC value?

Instructions

100 XP
  • Compute the AUC of the relational neighbor classifier by calling the auc function in the pROC package, using the actual churn labels customers$churn and the churnProb as the predicted value.
  • Write a for loop where you apply the probabilistic relational neighbor classifier ten times, and assign the value again to the churnProb vector in each iteration.
  • Compute the AUC again using the updated churnProb vector.