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Which Forest Grows on This Patch of Land?

From elevation, slope, distance to water and roads, wilderness area and soil type, which type of forest covers this 30-metre patch of Colorado? Mapping cover from maps alone saves sending crews to remote ground.

Use caseBiologyPredictionModel evaluation

The table

30-metre cells in Colorado's Roosevelt National Forest with cartographic measurements and the forest cover type recorded for each. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Forest Cover Type Prediction from Cartographic Variables (Covertype), 110,393 rows by 55 columns, licensed Public. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.42. At 110,393 rows and 54 features the table is larger than the model limits allow, so the walkthrough evaluates and fits on a seeded sample of 2,000 rows. TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium compete.

Walkthrough

  1. Load it from the catalogue

    Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.

    import pandas as pd
    from welt import Client
    
    with Client() as client:
        item = client.research_datasets(q="forest cover type covertype", limit=1)["items"][0]
        info = client.research_dataset(item["id"])
        data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"])
    
    target = info["targets"][0]
    target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target
    print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)
  2. Pick the rows

    Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end. The models learn from a seeded sample of 2,000 of the rest, the most this table's width allows.

    known = data.dropna(subset=[target])
    new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1)
    table = known.drop(new_rows.index).sample(2000, random_state=7)
  3. Compare the models and predict

    The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. ROC AUC runs from 0.5, a coin toss, to 1, a perfect ranking, and a lower Brier score means the probabilities can be trusted more. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.

    with Client() as client:
        evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="classification", seed=7,
                                     models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"])
        model = evaluation.fit()
    
    print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "roc_auc_mean", "brier_mean"]])
    features = new_rows.drop(columns=target)
    print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features),
                        "probability": model.predict_proba(features).max(axis=1)}))

What you get

A cover type per cellWith a probability for each type.
Maps without fieldworkPredict cover for cells nobody has visited.
A classic benchmarkOne of the most used tables in machine learning.

Try it

Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "forest cover type covertype", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".