2 Basics

This chapter will teach you the essential building blocks, R6 classes, and operations of mlr3 for machine learning. A typical machine learning workflow looks like this:

The data, which mlr3 encapsulates in tasks, is split into non-overlapping training and test sets. We are interested in models that generalize to new data rather than just memorizing the training data, and separate test data allows to objectively evaluate models with respect to that. The training data is given to a machine learning algorithm, which we call a learner in mlr3. The learner uses the training data to build a model of the relationship of the input features to the output target values. This model is then used to produce predictions on the test data, which are compared to the ground truth values to assess the quality of the model. mlr3 offers a number of different measures to quantify how well a model performs based on the difference between predicted and actual values. Usually this measure is a numeric score.

The process of splitting up data into training and test sets, building a model, and evaluating it may be repeated several times, resampling different training and test sets from the original data each time. Multiple resampling iterations allow us to get a better, more generalizable performance estimate for a particular type of model as it is tested under different conditions and less likely to get lucky or unlucky because of a particular way the data was resampled.

In many cases, this simple workflow is not sufficient to deal with real-world data, which may require normalization, imputation of missing values, or feature selection. We will cover more complex workflows that allow to do this and even more later in the book.

This chapter covers the following subtopics:

Tasks

Tasks encapsulate the data with meta-information, such as the name of the prediction target column. We cover how to:

access predefined tasks,
specify a task type,
create a task,
work with a task’s API,
assign roles to rows and columns of a task,
implement task mutators, and
retrieve the data that is stored in a task.

Learners

Learners encapsulate machine learning algorithms to train models and make predictions for a task. They are provided by R and other packages. We cover how to:

access the set of classification and regression learners that come with mlr3 and retrieve a specific learner,
access the set of hyperparameter values of a learner and modify them.

How to modify and extend learners is covered in a supplemental advanced technical section.

Train and predict

The section on the train and predict methods illustrates how to use tasks and learners to train a model and make predictions on a new data set. In particular, we cover how to:

set up tasks and learners properly,
set up train and test splits for a task,
train the learner on the training set to produce a model,
generate predictions on the test set, and
assess the performance of the model by comparing predicted and actual values.

Resampling

A resampling is a method to create training and test splits. We cover how to

access and select resampling strategies,
instantiate the split into training and test sets by applying the resampling, and
execute the resampling to obtain results.

Additional information on resampling can be found in the section about nested resampling and in the chapter on model optimization.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is used to compare the performance of different models, for example models trained with different learners, on different tasks, or with different resampling methods. We cover how to

create a benchmarking design,
execute a design and aggregate results, and
convert benchmarking objects to resample objects.

Binary classification

Binary classification is a special case of classification where the target variable to predict has only two possible values. In this case, additional considerations apply; in particular:

ROC curves and the threshold where to predict one class versus the other, and
threshold tuning (WIP).

Before we get into the details of how to use mlr3 for machine learning, we give a brief introduction to R6 as it is a relatively new part of R. mlr3 heavily relies on R6 and all basic building blocks it provides are R6 classes: