Leave-one-out cross-validation and error correction

Cross-validation is often used in machine learning to judge how well a model is fit. Instead of using the entire data set to fit the model, it will use one part of the data set to fit a model and then test the model on the remaining data. This gives an idea of how well the model will generalize to indpendent data.

Leave-one-out predictions using Gaussian processes

Leave-one-out prediction uses an entire model fit to all the data except a single point, and then makes a prediction at that point which can be compared to the actual value. It seems like this may be very expensive to do, but it is actually an inexpensive computation for a Gaussian process model, as long as the same parameters are used from the full model. This will bias the predictions to better results than if parameters were re-estimated.

Normally each prediction point requires solving a matrix equation. To predict the output, y, at point x, given input data in matrix X2 and output y2, we use the equation  = μ̂ + R(xX2)R(X2)−1(y2 − μ1n)) For leave-one-out predictions, the matrix X2 will have all the design points except for the one we are predicting at, and thus will be different for each one. However, we will have the correlation matrix R for the full data set from estimating the parameters, and there is a shortcut to find the inverse of a matrix leaving out a single row and column.

There is significant speed-up by using a multiplication instead of a matrix solve. The code chunk below shows that solving with a square matrix with 200 rows is over 30 times slower than a matrix multiplication.

n <- 200
m1 <- matrix(runif(n*n),ncol=n)
b1 <- runif(n)
if (requireNamespace("microbenchmark", quietly = TRUE)) {
  microbenchmark::microbenchmark(solve(m1, b1), m1 %*% b1)
}
## Unit: microseconds
##           expr     min       lq     mean  median      uq      max neval
##  solve(m1, b1) 644.483 754.9845 770.9106 758.612 768.911 1673.245   100
##      m1 %*% b1  20.518  21.1840  23.2137  21.615  22.172  129.592   100

Getting the inverse of a submatrix

Suppose we have a matrix K and know its inverse K−1. Suppose that K has block structure $$ K = \begin{bmatrix} A~B \\ C~D \end{bmatrix}$$ Now we want to find out how to find A−1 using K−1 instead of doing the full inverse. We can write K−1 in block structure $$K^{-1} = \begin{bmatrix} E~F \\ G~H \end{bmatrix}$$

Now we use the fact that KK−1 = I $$ \begin{bmatrix} I~0 \\ 0~I \end{bmatrix} = \begin{bmatrix} A~B \\ C~D \end{bmatrix}\begin{bmatrix} E~F \\ G~H \end{bmatrix} $$

This gives the equations AE + BG = I AF + BH = 0 CE + DG = 0 CF + DH = I

Solving the first equation gives that A = (I − BG)E−1 or A−1 = E(I − BG)−1

Leave-one-out covariance matrix inverse for Gaussian processes

For Gaussian processes we can consider the block matrix for the covariance (or correlation) matrix where a single row and its corresponding column is being removed. Let the first n − 1 rows and columns be the covariance of the points in design matrix X, while the last row and column are the covariance for the vector x with X and x. Then we can have

$$ K = \begin{bmatrix} C(X,X)~ C(X,\mathbf{x}) \\ C(\mathbf{x},X)~C(\mathbf{x},\mathbf{x}) \end{bmatrix}$$

Using the notation from the previous subsection we have A = C(X, X) and B = C(X, x), and E and G will be submatrices of the full K−1. B is a column vector, so I’ll write it as a vector b, and G is a row vector, so I’ll write it as a vector gT. So we have C(X, X)−1 = E(I − C(X, x)G)−1 So if we want to calculate A−1 = E(I − bgT)−1 we still have to invert I − BG, which is a large matrix. However this can be done efficiently since it is a rank one matrix using the Sherman-Morrison formula. $$ (I - \mathbf{b}\mathbf{g}^T)^{-1} = I^{-1} - \frac{I^{-1}\mathbf{b}\mathbf{g}^TI^{-1}}{1+\mathbf{g}^TI^{-1}\mathbf{b}} = I - \frac{\mathbf{b}\mathbf{g}^T}{1+\mathbf{g}^T\mathbf{b}} $$ Thus we have the shortcut for A−1 that is only multiplication $$ A^{-1} = E (I - \frac{\mathbf{b}\mathbf{g}^T}{1+\mathbf{g}^T\mathbf{b}})$$

To speed this up it should be calculated as

$$ A^{-1} = E - \frac{(E\mathbf{b})\mathbf{g}^T}{1+\mathbf{g}^T\mathbf{b}}$$ Below demonstrates that we get a speedup of almost twenty by using this shortcut.

set.seed(0)
corr <- function(x,y) {exp(sum(-30*(x-y)^2))}
n <- 200
d <- 2
X <- matrix(runif(n*d),ncol=2)
R <- outer(1:n,1:n, Vectorize(function(i,j) {corr(X[i,], X[j,])}))
Rinv <- solve(R)
A <- R[-n,-n]
Ainv <- solve(A)
E <- Rinv[-n, -n]
b <- R[n,-n]
g <- Rinv[n,-n]
Ainv_shortcut <- E + E %*% b %*% g / (1-sum(g*b))
summary(c(Ainv - Ainv_shortcut))
##     Min.  1st Qu.   Median     Mean  3rd Qu.     Max. 
## -30245.9     -0.1      0.0      0.0      0.1  43135.9
if (requireNamespace("microbenchmark", quietly = TRUE)) {
  microbenchmark::microbenchmark(solve(A), E + E %*% b %*% g / (1-sum(g*b)))
}
## Unit: microseconds
##                                expr     min       lq      mean   median
##                            solve(A) 914.578 936.3385 1188.4202 985.4555
##  E + E %*% b %*% g/(1 - sum(g * b)) 142.787 144.3145  189.9717 147.8365
##        uq      max neval
##  1395.751 3343.372   100
##   285.213  332.751   100

In terms of the covariance matrices already calculated, this is the following, where Mi is the matrix M with the ith row and column removed, and Mi, −i is the ith row of the matrix M with the value from the ith column removed.

$$ R(X_{-i})^{-1} = R(X)_{-i} - \frac{(R(X)_{-i}R(X)_{-i,i}) (R(X)^{-1})_{i,-i}^T }{1 + (R(X)^{-1})_{i,-i}^T R(X)_{-i,i}}$$

Leave-one-out prediction

Recall that the predicted mean at a new point is  = μ̂ + R(xX2)R(X2)−1(y2 − μ1n))

 = μ̂ + R(xiX−1)R(Xi)−1(yi − μ1n))