Converting LinearSVC's decision function to probabilities (Scikit learn python )

Question

I use linear SVM from scikit learn (LinearSVC) for binary classification problem. I understand that LinearSVC can give me the predicted labels, and the decision scores but I wanted probability estimates (confidence in the label). I want to continue using LinearSVC because of speed (as compared to sklearn.svm.SVC with linear kernel) Is it reasonable to use a logistic function to convert the decision scores to probabilities?

import sklearn.svm as suppmach
# Fit model:
svmmodel=suppmach.LinearSVC(penalty='l1',C=1)
predicted_test= svmmodel.predict(x_test)
predicted_test_scores= svmmodel.decision_function(x_test) 

I want to check if it makes sense to obtain Probability estimates simply as [1 / (1 + exp(-x)) ] where x is the decision score.

Alternately, are there other options wrt classifiers that I can use to do this efficiently?

Thanks.

Answer 1

scikit-learn provides CalibratedClassifierCV which can be used to solve this problem: it allows to add probability output to LinearSVC or any other classifier which implements decision_function method:

 svm = LinearSVC()
 clf = CalibratedClassifierCV(svm) 
 clf.fit(X_train, y_train)
 y_proba = clf.predict_proba(X_test)

User guide has a nice section on that. By default CalibratedClassifierCV+LinearSVC will get you Platt scaling, but it also provides other options (isotonic regression method), and it is not limited to SVM classifiers.