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What Is This Squirrel Doing?

From a collar's acceleration and temperature readings, is the squirrel feeding, travelling, grooming or resting? Tags record for months, and nobody can watch that much video.

Use caseBiologyPredictionModel evaluation

The table

Readings from tags worn by wild red squirrels, with three-axis acceleration, temperature and window statistics, labelled with the behaviour seen on video. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Red Squirrel Acceleration and Behaviour Data, 24,300 rows by 25 columns, licensed CC0. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.62. At 24,300 rows and 24 features the table is larger than the model limits allow, so the walkthrough evaluates and fits on a seeded sample of 4,000 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="red squirrel acceleration", 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 4,000 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(4000, 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 behaviour per windowMonths of tag data labelled automatically.
Time budgetsHow long each squirrel spends feeding or travelling.
Fewer hours of videoLabel a sample, predict the rest.

Try it

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