Contents:
---------
1. Using one of the graphical user interfaces in Weka
2. The Weka data format (ARFF)
3. Using Weka from the command line
- Classifiers
- Association rules
- Filters
4. Database access
5. The Experiment package
6. Tutorial
7. Source code
8. Credits
9. Submission of code and bug reports
10. Copyright
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1. Using one of the graphical user interfaces in Weka:
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This assumes that the Weka archive that you have downloaded has been
extracted into a directory containing this README and that you haven't
used an automatic installer (e.g. the one provided for Windows).
Weka 3.4 requires Java 1.4 or higher. Depending on your platform you
may be able to just double-click on the weka.jar icon to run the
graphical user interfaces for Weka. Otherwise, from a command-line
(assuming you are in the directory containing weka.jar), type
java -jar weka.jar
or if you are using Windows use
javaw -jar weka.jar
This will start a small graphical user interface (GUIChooser) from
which you can select the SimpleCLI interface or the more sophisticated
Explorer, Experimenter, and Knowledge Flow interfaces. SimpleCLI just
acts like a simple command shell. The Explorer is currently the main
interface for data analysis using Weka. The Experimenter can be used
to compare the performance of different learning algorithms across
various datasets. The Knowledge Flow provides a component-based
alternative to the Explorer interface.
Example datasets that can be used with Weka are in the sub-directory
called "data", which should be located in the same directory as this
README file.
The Weka user interfaces provide extensive built-in help facilities
(tool tips, etc.). Documentation for the Explorer can be found in
ExplorerGuide.pdf (also in the same directory as this
README). However, this guide is unfortunately not quite up to date
(it's based on Weka 3.3.4).
You can also start the GUIChooser from within weka.jar:
java -classpath weka.jar:$CLASSPATH weka.gui.GUIChooser
or if you are using Windows use
javaw -classpath weka.jar;$CLASSPATH weka.gui.GUIChooser
NOTE FOR PEOPLE WHO WRITE LEARNING SCHEMES WITH WEKA: In case you want
to use your own learning scheme from within one of the graphical user
interfaces (GUIs): one of the components of the GUIs is a generic
object editor that requires a configuration file called
"GenericObjectEditor.props". There is an example file in
weka/gui. This file will be used unless it is overidden by one in your
home directory or the current directory (in that order). It simply
specifies for each superclass which subclasses to offer as
choices. For example, which Classifiers are available/wanted to be
used when an object requires a property of type Classifier.
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2. The Weka data format (ARFF):
-------------------------------
Datasets for WEKA should be formatted according to the ARFF
format. (However, there are several converters included in WEKA that
can convert other file formats to ARFF. The Weka Explorer will use
these automatically if it doesn't recognize a given file as an ARFF
file.) Examples of ARFF files can be found in the "data" subdirectory.
What follows is a short description of the file format. A more
complete description is available from the Weka web page.
A dataset has to start with a declaration of its name:
@relation name
followed by a list of all the attributes in the dataset (including
the class attribute). These declarations have the form
@attribute attribute_name specification
If an attribute is nominal, specification contains a list of the
possible attribute values in curly brackets:
@attribute nominal_attribute {first_value, second_value, third_value}
If an attribute is numeric, specification is replaced by the keyword
numeric: (Integer values are treated as real numbers in WEKA.)
@attribute numeric_attribute numeric
In addition to these two types of attributes, there also exists a
string attribute type. This attribute provides the possibility to
store a comment or ID field for each of the instances in a dataset:
@attribute string_attribute string
After the attribute declarations, the actual data is introduced by a
@data
tag, which is followed by a list of all the instances. The instances
are listed in comma-separated format, with a question mark
representing a missing value.
Comments are lines starting with % and are ignored by Weka.
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3. Using Weka from the command line:
------------------------------------
If you want to use Weka from your standard command-line interface
(e.g. bash under Linux):
a) Set WEKAHOME to be the directory which contains this README.
b) Add $WEKAHOME/weka.jar to your CLASSPATH environment variable.
c) Bookmark $WEKAHOME/doc/packages.html in your web browser.
Alternatively you can try using the SimpleCLI user interface available
from the GUI chooser discussed above.
In the following, the names of files assume use of a unix command-line
with environment variables. For other command-lines (including
SimpleCLI) you should substitute the name of the directory where
weka.jar lives for $WEKAHOME. If your platform uses something other
character than / as the path separator, also make the appropriate
substitutions.
===========
Classifiers
===========
Try:
java weka.classifiers.trees.J48 -t $WEKAHOME/data/iris.arff
This prints out a decision tree classifier for the iris dataset
and ten-fold cross-validation estimates of its performance. If you
don't pass any options to the classifier, WEKA will list all the
available options. Try:
java weka.classifiers.trees.J48
The options are divided into "general" options that apply to most
classification schemes in WEKA, and scheme-specific options that only
apply to the current scheme---in this case J48. WEKA has a common
interface to all classification methods. Any class that implements a
classifier can be used in the same way as J48 is used above. WEKA
knows that a class implements a classifier if it extends the
Classifier class in weka.classifiers. Almost all classes in
weka.classifiers fall into this category. Try, for example:
java weka.classifiers.bayes.NaiveBayes -t $WEKAHOME/data/labor.arff
Here is a list of some of the classifiers currently implemented in
weka.classifiers:
a) Classifiers for categorical prediction:
weka.classifiers.lazy.IBk: k-nearest neighbour learner
weka.classifiers.trees.J48: C4.5 decision trees
weka.classifiers.rules.PART: rule learner
weka.classifiers.bayes.NaiveBayes: naive Bayes with/without kernels
weka.classifiers.rules.OneR: Holte's OneR
weka.classifiers.functions.SMO: support vector machines
weka.classifiers.functions.Logistic: logistic regression
weka.classifiers.meta.AdaBoostM1: AdaBoost
weka.classifiers.meta.LogitBoost: logit boost
weka.classifiers.trees.DecisionStump: decision stumps (for boosting)
etc.
b) Classifiers for numeric prediction:
weka.classifiers.functions.LinearRegression: linear regression
weka.classifiers.trees.M5P: model trees
weka.classifiers.rules.M5Rules: model rules
weka.classifiers.lazy.IBk: k-nearest neighbour learner
weka.classifiers.lazy.LWR: locally weighted regression
=================
Association rules
=================
Next to classification schemes, there is some other useful stuff in
WEKA. Association rules, for example, can be extracted using the
Apriori algorithm. Try
java weka.associations.Apriori -t $WEKAHOME/data/weather.nominal.arff
=======
Filters
=======
There are also a number of tools that allow you to manipulate a
dataset. These tools are called filters in WEKA and can be found
in weka.filters.
weka.filters.unsupervised.attribute.Discretize: discretizes numeric data
weka.filters.unsupervised.attribute.Remove: deletes/selects attributes
etc.
Try:
java weka.filters.supervised.attribute.Discretize -i
$WEKAHOME/data/iris.arff -c last
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4. Database access:
-------------------
In terms of database connectivity, you should be able to use any
database with a Java JDBC driver. When using classes that access a
database (e.g. the Explorer), you will probably want to create a
properties file that specifies which JDBC drivers to use, and where to
find the database. This file should reside in your home directory or
the current directory and be called "DatabaseUtils.props". An example
is provided in weka/experiment (you need to expand wek.jar to be able
to look a this file). This file is used unless it is overidden by one
in your home directory or the current directory (in that order).
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5. The Experiment package:
--------------------------
There is support for running experiments that involve evaluating
classifiers on repeated randomizations of datasets, over multiple
datasets (you can do much more than this, besides). The classes for
this reside in the weka.experiment package. The basic architecture is
that a ResultProducer (which generates results on some randomization
of a dataset) sends results to a ResultListener (which is responsible
for stating whether it already has the result, and otherwise storing
results).
Example ResultListeners include:
weka.experiment.CSVResultListener: outputs results as
comma-separated-value files.
weka.experiment.InstancesResultListener: converts results into a set
of Instances.
weka.experiment.DatabaseResultListener: sends results to a database
via JDBC.
Example ResultProducers include:
weka.experiment.RandomSplitResultProducer: train/test on a % split
weka.experiment.CrossValidationResultProducer: n-fold cross-validation
weka.experiment.AveragingResultProducer: averages results from another
ResultPoducer
weka.experiment.DatabaseResultProducer: acts as a cache for results,
storing them in a database.
The RandomSplitResultProducer and CrossValidatioResultProducer make
use of a SplitEvaluator to obtain actual results for a particular
split, provided are ClassifierSplitEvaluator (for nominal
classification) and RegressionSplitEvaluator (for numeric
classification). Each of these uses a Classifier for actual results
generation.
So, you might have a DatabaseResultListener, that is sent results from
an AveragingResultProducer, which produces averages over the n results
produced for each run of an n-fold CrossValidationResultProducer,
which in turn is doing nominal classification through a
ClassifierSplitEvaluator, which uses OneR for prediction. Whew. But
you can combine these things together to do pretty much whatever you
want. You might want to write a LearningRateResultProducer that splits
a dataset into increasing numbers of training instances.
To run a simple experiment from the command line, try:
java weka.experiment.Experiment -r -T datasets/UCI/iris.arff \
-D weka.experiment.InstancesResultListener \
-P weka.experiment.RandomSplitResultProducer -- \
-W weka.experiment.ClassifierSplitEvaluator -- \
-W weka.classifiers.rules.OneR
(Try "java weka.experiment.Experiment -h" to find out what these
options mean)
If you have your results as a set of instances, you can perform paired
t-tests using weka.experiment.PairedTTester (use the -h option to find
out what options it needs).
However, all this is much easier if you use the Experimenter GUI.
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6. Tutorial:
------------
A tutorial on how to use WEKA is in $WEKAHOME/Tutorial.pdf. However,
not everything in WEKA is covered in the Tutorial, and the package
structure has changed quite a bit. For a complete list you have to
look at the online documentation $WEKAHOME/doc/packages.html. In
particular, Tutorial.pdf is a draft from the "Data Mining" book (see
our web page), and so only describes features in the stable 3.0
release.
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7. Source code:
---------------
The source code for WEKA is in $WEKAHOME/weka-src.jar. To expand it,
use the jar utility that's in every Java distribution.
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8. Credits:
-----------
Refer to the web page for a list of contributors:
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/
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9. Call for code and bug reports:
---------------------------------
If you have implemented a learning scheme, filter, application,
visualization tool, etc., using the WEKA classes, and you think it
should be included in WEKA, send us the code, and we can potentially
put it in the next WEKA distribution.
If you find any bugs, send a fix to mlcontrib@cs.waikato.ac.nz.
If that's too hard, just send a bug report to the wekalist mailing
list.
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10. Copyright:
--------------
WEKA is distributed under the GNU public license. Please read
the file COPYING.
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