Reluctant generalized additive modeling

12/04/2019

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by   J. Kenneth Tay, et al.

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Sparse generalized additive models (GAMs) are an extension of sparse generalized linear models which allow a model's prediction to vary non-linearly with an input variable. This enables the data analyst build more accurate models, especially when the linearity assumption is known to be a poor approximation of reality. Motivated by reluctant interaction modeling (Yu et al. 2019), we propose a multi-stage algorithm, called reluctant generalized additive modeling (RGAM), that can fit sparse generalized additive models at scale. It is guided by the principle that, if all else is equal, one should prefer a linear feature over a non-linear feature. Unlike existing methods for sparse GAMs, RGAM can be extended easily to binary, count and survival data. We demonstrate the method's effectiveness on real and simulated examples.