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L1 Penalty and Sparsity in Logistic Regression#

Comparison of the sparsity (percentage of zero coefficients) of solutions when L1, L2 and Elastic-Net penalty are used for different values of alpha. We can see that small values of alpha give more freedom to the model. Conversely, larger values of alpha constrain the model more. In the L1 penalty case, this leads to sparser solutions. As expected, the Elastic-Net penalty sparsity is between that of L1 and L2.

We classify 8x8 images of digits into two classes: 0-4 against 5-9. The visualization shows coefficients of the models for varying alpha.

L1 penalty, Elastic-Net l1_ratio = 0.5, L2 penalty

alpha=1.00
Sparsity with L1 penalty:                4.69%
Sparsity with Elastic-Net penalty:       4.69%
Sparsity with L2 penalty:                4.69%
Score with L1 penalty:                   0.90
Score with Elastic-Net penalty:          0.90
Score with L2 penalty:                   0.90
alpha=10.00
Sparsity with L1 penalty:                31.25%
Sparsity with Elastic-Net penalty:       14.06%
Sparsity with L2 penalty:                4.69%
Score with L1 penalty:                   0.90
Score with Elastic-Net penalty:          0.90
Score with L2 penalty:                   0.90
alpha=100.00
Sparsity with L1 penalty:                84.38%
Sparsity with Elastic-Net penalty:       68.75%
Sparsity with L2 penalty:                4.69%
Score with L1 penalty:                   0.86
Score with Elastic-Net penalty:          0.88
Score with L2 penalty:                   0.89

# Authors: The scikit-learn developers
# SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

from sklearn import datasets
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler

X, y = datasets.load_digits(return_X_y=True)

X = StandardScaler().fit_transform(X)

# classify small against large digits
y = (y > 4).astype(int)

l1_ratio = 0.5  # L1 weight in the Elastic-Net regularization

fig, axes = plt.subplots(3, 3)

# Set regularization parameter
params = dict(tol=0.01, solver="saga")
for i, (alpha, axes_row) in enumerate(zip((1, 1e1, 1e2), axes)):
    # Increase tolerance for short training time
    clf_l1_LR = LogisticRegression(alpha=alpha, l1_ratio=1, **params)
    clf_l2_LR = LogisticRegression(alpha=alpha, l1_ratio=0, **params)
    clf_en_LR = LogisticRegression(alpha=alpha, l1_ratio=l1_ratio, **params)
    clf_l1_LR.fit(X, y)
    clf_l2_LR.fit(X, y)
    clf_en_LR.fit(X, y)

    coef_l1_LR = clf_l1_LR.coef_.ravel()
    coef_l2_LR = clf_l2_LR.coef_.ravel()
    coef_en_LR = clf_en_LR.coef_.ravel()

    # coef_l1_LR contains zeros due to the
    # L1 sparsity inducing norm

    sparsity_l1_LR = np.mean(coef_l1_LR == 0) * 100
    sparsity_l2_LR = np.mean(coef_l2_LR == 0) * 100
    sparsity_en_LR = np.mean(coef_en_LR == 0) * 100

    print(f"alpha={alpha:.2f}")
    print(f"{'Sparsity with L1 penalty:':<40} {sparsity_l1_LR:.2f}%")
    print(f"{'Sparsity with Elastic-Net penalty:':<40} {sparsity_en_LR:.2f}%")
    print(f"{'Sparsity with L2 penalty:':<40} {sparsity_l2_LR:.2f}%")
    print(f"{'Score with L1 penalty:':<40} {clf_l1_LR.score(X, y):.2f}")
    print(f"{'Score with Elastic-Net penalty:':<40} {clf_en_LR.score(X, y):.2f}")
    print(f"{'Score with L2 penalty:':<40} {clf_l2_LR.score(X, y):.2f}")

    if i == 0:
        axes_row[0].set_title("L1 penalty")
        axes_row[1].set_title("Elastic-Net\nl1_ratio = %s" % l1_ratio)
        axes_row[2].set_title("L2 penalty")

    for ax, coefs in zip(axes_row, [coef_l1_LR, coef_en_LR, coef_l2_LR]):
        ax.imshow(
            np.abs(coefs.reshape(8, 8)),
            interpolation="nearest",
            cmap="binary",
            vmax=1,
            vmin=0,
        )
        ax.set_xticks(())
        ax.set_yticks(())

    axes_row[0].set_ylabel(f"alpha = {alpha}")

plt.show()