pandas - Knn give more weight to specific feature in distance

Question

I'm using the Kobe Bryant Dataset. I wish to predict the shot_made_flag with KnnRegressor.

I've used game_date to extract year and month features:

# covert season to years
kobe_data_encoded['season'] = kobe_data_encoded['season'].apply(lambda x: int(re.compile('(d+)-').findall(x)[0]))

# add year and month using game_date
kobe_data_encoded['year'] = kobe_data_encoded['game_date'].apply(lambda x: int(re.compile('(d{4})').findall(x)[0]))
kobe_data_encoded['month'] = kobe_data_encoded['game_date'].apply(lambda x: int(re.compile('-(d+)-').findall(x)[0]))
kobe_data_encoded = kobe_data_encoded.drop(columns=['game_date'])

and I wish to use season, year, month features to give them more weight in the distance function so events with closer date to the current event will be closer neighbors but still maintain reasonable distances to potential other datapoints, so for example I don't wish an event withing the same day would be the closest neighbor just because of the date features but it'll take into account the other features such as shot_range etc..
To give it more weight I've tried to use metric argument with custom distance function but the arguments of the function are just numpy array without column information of pandas so I'm not sure what I can do and how to implement what I'm trying to do.

EDIT:

Using larger weights for date features to find the optimal k with cv of 10 running on k from [1, 100]:

from IPython.display import display
from sklearn.neighbors import KNeighborsClassifier
from sklearn.model_selection import StratifiedKFold
from sklearn.model_selection import cross_val_score

# scaling
min_max_scaler = preprocessing.MinMaxScaler()
scaled_features_df = kobe_data_encoded.copy()
column_names = ['loc_x', 'loc_y', 'minutes_remaining', 'period',
                'seconds_remaining', 'shot_distance', 'shot_type', 'shot_zone_range']
scaled_features = min_max_scaler.fit_transform(scaled_features_df[column_names])
scaled_features_df[column_names] = scaled_features

not_classified_df = scaled_features_df[scaled_features_df['shot_made_flag'].isnull()]
classified_df = scaled_features_df[scaled_features_df['shot_made_flag'].notnull()]
X = classified_df.drop(columns=['shot_made_flag'])
y = classified_df['shot_made_flag']
cv = StratifiedKFold(n_splits=10, shuffle=True)

neighbors = [x for x in range(1, 100)]
cv_scores = []

weight = np.ones((X.shape[1],))
weight[[X.columns.get_loc("season"),
 X.columns.get_loc("year"),
 X.columns.get_loc("month")
]] = 5
weight = weight/weight.sum()  #Normalize weights

def my_distance(x, y):
    dist = ((x-y)**2)
    return np.dot(dist, weight)

for k in neighbors:
    print('k: ', k)
    knn = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors=k, metric=my_distance)
    cv_scores.append(np.mean(cross_val_score(knn, X, y, cv=cv, scoring='roc_auc')))

#optimal K
optimal_k_index = cv_scores.index(min(cv_scores))
optimal_k = neighbors[optimal_k_index]
print('best k: ', optimal_k)
plt.plot(neighbors, cv_scores)
plt.xlabel('Number of Neighbors K')
plt.ylabel('ROC AUC')
plt.show()

Runs really slow, any idea on how to make it faster? The idea of the weighted features is to find neighbors more close to the data point date to avoid data leakage and cv for finding optimal k.

Answer 1

First, you have to prepare a numpy 1D weight array, specifying weight for each feature. You could do something like:

weight = np.ones((M,))  # M is no of features
weight[[1,7,10]] = 2    # Increase weight of 1st,7th and 10th features
weight = weight/weight.sum()  #Normalize weights

You can use kobe_data_encoded.columns to find indexes of season, year, month features in your dataframe to replace 2nd line above.

Now define a distance function, which by guideline have to take two 1D numpy array.

def my_dist(x,y):
    global weight     #1D array, same shape as x or y
    dist = ((x-y)**2) #1D array, same shape as x or y
    return np.dot(dist,weight)  # a scalar float

And initialize KNeighborsRegressor as:

knn = KNeighborsRegressor(metric=my_dist)

EDIT: To make things efficient, you can precompute distance matrix, and reuse it in KNN. This should bring in significant speedup by reducing calls to my_dist, since this non-vectorized custom python distance function is quite slow. So now -

dist = np.zeros((len(X),len(X)))  #Computing NXN distance matrix
for i in range(len(X)):           # You can halve this by using the fact that dist[i,j] = dist[j,i]
    for j in range(len(X)):
        dist[i,j] = my_dist(X[i],X[j])

for k in neighbors:
    print('k: ', k)
    knn = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors=k, metric='precomputed') #Note: metric='precomputed' 
    cv_scores.append(np.mean(cross_val_score(knn, dist, y, cv=cv, scoring='roc_auc'))) #Note: passing dist instead of X

I couldn't test it, so let me know if something isn't alright.