When steps are created in a recipe, they can be applied to data (i.e. baked) at two distinct times:
prep
and then applied to the training set using bake
before proceeding to the next step.bake
can be used with any data set to apply the preprocessing to those data.There are times where we would like to circumvent baking on a new data set (i.e., #2 above). For example:
As an example of the second case, consider the problem of a severe class imbalance. Suppose that there are two classes to be predicted and the event of interest occurs in only 5% of the time. Many models will quickly optimize accuracy by overfitting to the majority class by predicting everything to be a non-event. One method to compensate for this is to down-sample the training set so that the class frequencies are about equal. Although somewhat counter-intuitive, this can often lead to better models.
The important consideration is that this preprocessing is only applied to the training set so that it can impact the model fit. The test set should be unaffected by this operation. If the recipe is used to create the design matrix for the model, down-sampling would remove rows. This would be a bad idea for the test set since these data should represent what the population of samples looks like “in the wild.”. Based on this, a recipe that included down-sample should skip this step when data are baked for the test set.
As of version recipes 0.1.2, each step has an optional logical argument called skip
. In almost every case, the default is TRUE
. When using this option:
prep
skip = TRUE
are not applied to the data when bake
is calledRecall that there are two ways of getting the results for the training set with recipes
. First, bake
can be used as usual. Second, juice
is a shortcut that will use the already processed data that is contained in the recipe when prep(recipe, retain = TRUE)
is used. juice
is much faster and would be the way to get the training set with all of the steps applied to the data. For this reason, you should almost always used retain = TRUE
if any steps are skipped (and a warning is produced otherwise).
Skipping is a necessary feature but can be dangerous if used carelessly.
As an example, skipping an operation whose variables are used later might be an issue:
library(recipes)
car_recipe <- recipe(mpg ~ ., data = mtcars) %>%
step_log(disp, skip = TRUE) %>%
step_center(all_predictors()) %>%
prep(training = mtcars, retain = TRUE)
# These *should* produce the same results (as they do for `hp`)
juice(car_recipe) %>% head() %>% select(disp, hp)
#> # A tibble: 6 x 2
#> disp hp
#> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 -0.210 -36.7
#> 2 -0.210 -36.7
#> 3 -0.603 -53.7
#> 4 0.268 -36.7
#> 5 0.601 28.3
#> 6 0.131 -41.7
bake(car_recipe, newdata = mtcars) %>% head() %>% select(disp, hp)
#> # A tibble: 6 x 2
#> disp hp
#> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 155. -36.7
#> 2 155. -36.7
#> 3 103. -53.7
#> 4 253. -36.7
#> 5 355. 28.3
#> 6 220. -41.7
This should emphasize that juice
should be used to get the training set values whenever a step is skipped.