Recursive feature elimination with cross-validation

A recursive feature elimination example with automatic tuning of the number of features selected with cross-validation.

Script output:

Optimal number of features : 3

Python source code: plot_rfe_with_cross_validation.py

print(__doc__)

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn.svm import SVC
from sklearn.cross_validation import StratifiedKFold
from sklearn.feature_selection import RFECV
from sklearn.datasets import make_classification

# Build a classification task using 3 informative features
X, y = make_classification(n_samples=1000, n_features=25, n_informative=3,
                           n_redundant=2, n_repeated=0, n_classes=8,
                           n_clusters_per_class=1, random_state=0)

# Create the RFE object and compute a cross-validated score.
svc = SVC(kernel="linear")
# The "accuracy" scoring is proportional to the number of correct
# classifications
rfecv = RFECV(estimator=svc, step=1, cv=StratifiedKFold(y, 2),
              scoring='accuracy')
rfecv.fit(X, y)

print("Optimal number of features : %d" % rfecv.n_features_)

# Plot number of features VS. cross-validation scores
plt.figure()
plt.xlabel("Number of features selected")
plt.ylabel("Cross validation score (nb of correct classifications)")
plt.plot(range(1, len(rfecv.grid_scores_) + 1), rfecv.grid_scores_)
plt.show()

Total running time of the example: 3.63 seconds ( 0 minutes 3.63 seconds)