Comparison of kernel ridge regression and SVR

Both kernel ridge regression (KRR) and SVR learn a non-linear function by employing the kernel trick, i.e., they learn a linear function in the space induced by the respective kernel which corresponds to a non-linear function in the original space. They differ in the loss functions (ridge versus epsilon-insensitive loss). In contrast to SVR, fitting a KRR can be done in closed-form and is typically faster for medium-sized datasets. On the other hand, the learned model is non-sparse and thus slower than SVR at prediction-time.

This example illustrates both methods on an artificial dataset, which consists of a sinusoidal target function and strong noise added to every fifth datapoint.

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

Generate sample data

import numpy as np

rng = np.random.RandomState(42)

X = 5 * rng.rand(10000, 1)
y = np.sin(X).ravel()

# Add noise to targets
y[::5] += 3 * (0.5 - rng.rand(X.shape[0] // 5))

X_plot = np.linspace(0, 5, 100000)[:, None]

Construct the kernel-based regression models

from sklearn.kernel_ridge import KernelRidge
from sklearn.model_selection import GridSearchCV
from sklearn.svm import SVR

train_size = 100

svr = GridSearchCV(
    SVR(kernel="rbf", gamma=0.1),
    param_grid={"C": [1e0, 1e1, 1e2, 1e3], "gamma": np.logspace(-2, 2, 5)},
)

kr = GridSearchCV(
    KernelRidge(kernel="rbf", gamma=0.1),
    param_grid={"alpha": [1e0, 0.1, 1e-2, 1e-3], "gamma": np.logspace(-2, 2, 5)},
)

Compare times of SVR and Kernel Ridge Regression

import time

t0 = time.time()
svr.fit(X[:train_size], y[:train_size])
svr_fit = time.time() - t0
print(f"Best SVR with params: {svr.best_params_} and R2 score: {svr.best_score_:.3f}")
print("SVR complexity and bandwidth selected and model fitted in %.3f s" % svr_fit)

t0 = time.time()
kr.fit(X[:train_size], y[:train_size])
kr_fit = time.time() - t0
print(f"Best KRR with params: {kr.best_params_} and R2 score: {kr.best_score_:.3f}")
print("KRR complexity and bandwidth selected and model fitted in %.3f s" % kr_fit)

sv_ratio = svr.best_estimator_.support_.shape[0] / train_size
print("Support vector ratio: %.3f" % sv_ratio)

t0 = time.time()
y_svr = svr.predict(X_plot)
svr_predict = time.time() - t0
print("SVR prediction for %d inputs in %.3f s" % (X_plot.shape[0], svr_predict))

t0 = time.time()
y_kr = kr.predict(X_plot)
kr_predict = time.time() - t0
print("KRR prediction for %d inputs in %.3f s" % (X_plot.shape[0], kr_predict))

Best SVR with params: {'C': 1.0, 'gamma': np.float64(0.1)} and R2 score: 0.737
SVR complexity and bandwidth selected and model fitted in 0.514 s
Best KRR with params: {'alpha': 0.1, 'gamma': np.float64(0.1)} and R2 score: 0.723
KRR complexity and bandwidth selected and model fitted in 0.184 s
Support vector ratio: 0.340
SVR prediction for 100000 inputs in 0.116 s
KRR prediction for 100000 inputs in 0.617 s

Look at the results

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

sv_ind = svr.best_estimator_.support_
plt.scatter(
    X[sv_ind],
    y[sv_ind],
    c="r",
    s=50,
    label="SVR support vectors",
    zorder=2,
    edgecolors=(0, 0, 0),
)
plt.scatter(X[:100], y[:100], c="k", label="data", zorder=1, edgecolors=(0, 0, 0))
plt.plot(
    X_plot,
    y_svr,
    c="r",
    label="SVR (fit: %.3fs, predict: %.3fs)" % (svr_fit, svr_predict),
)
plt.plot(
    X_plot, y_kr, c="g", label="KRR (fit: %.3fs, predict: %.3fs)" % (kr_fit, kr_predict)
)
plt.xlabel("data")
plt.ylabel("target")
plt.title("SVR versus Kernel Ridge")
_ = plt.legend()