Shift in time series prediction - machine-learning

I was looking at many time-series predictions at google image (such as these ones) and I noticed a regular shift in predicted vs actual values. A naive thing that comes to mind is to shift back the predicted curve to have better results. Is this ok to do?
for example, please look at the following figure,

Related

which power of the feature should i train with? regression

I have a explanatory variable x and a response variable y. I am trying to find which power of the feature i should train with. You can ignore the colors for my question. the scatter data is from the sensor and the line plot is the theoretical curve from the lab, which you can also ignore for my question.
For this answer I understand you want to obtain some polynomial curve going through the croissant shaped zone where points are dense.
Also I assume that the independent variable is on the horizontal axis, while the dependent is on the vertical one. Otherwise as you can see from the blue line, there is no functional that could give you this.
Now to select the degree of polynomial you can use stepwise regression.
This is about running the regression with more or less features one at a time (i.e decrease or increase the degree of polynomial in this case), and calculating a score such as AIC, BIC, or even adjusted R2 to assess if it's worth it or not to add or remove this feature.

Regarding to backward of convolution layer in Deep learning

I understood the way to compute the forward part in Deep learning. Now, I want to understand the backward part. Let's take X(2,2) as an example. The backward at the position X(2,2) can compute as the figure bellow
My question is that where is dE/dY (such as dE/dY(1,1),dE/dY(1,2)...) in the formula? How to compute it at the first iteration?
SHORT ANSWER
Those terms are in the final expansion at the bottom of the slide; they contribute to the summation for dE/dX(2,2). In your first back-propagation, you start at the end and work backwards (hence the name) -- and the Y values are the ground-truth labels. So much for computing them. :-)
LONG ANSWER
I'll keep this in more abstract, natural-language terms. I'm hopeful that the alternate explanation will help you see the large picture as well as sorting out the math.
You start the training with assigned weights that may or may not be at all related to the ground truth (labels). You move blindly forward, making predictions at each layer based on naive faith in those weights. The Y(i,j) values are the resulting meta-pixels from that faith.
Then you hit the labels at the end. You work backward, adjusting each weight. Note that, at the last layer, the Y values are the ground-truth labels.
At each layer, you mathematically deal with two factors:
How far off was this prediction?
How heavily did this parameter contribute to that prediction?
You adjust the X-to-Y weight by "off * weight * learning_rate".
When you complete that for layer N, you back up to layer N-1 and repeat.
PROGRESSION
Whether you initialize your weights with fixed or random values (I generally recommend the latter), you'll notice that there's really not much progress in the early iterations. Since this is slow adjustment from guess-work weights, it takes several iterations to get a glimmer of useful learning into the last layers. The first layers are still cluelessly thrashing at this point. The loss function will bounce around close to its initial values for a while. For instance, with GoogLeNet's image recognition, this flailing lasts for about 30 epochs.
Then, finally, you get some valid learning in the latter layers, the patterns stabilize enough that some consistency percolates back to the early layers. At this point, you'll see the loss function drop to a "directed experimentation" level. From there, the progression depends a lot on the paradigm and texture of the problem: some have a sharp drop, then a gradual convergence; others have a more gradual drop, almost an exponential decay to convergence; more complex topologies have additional sharp drops as middle or early phases "get their footing".

Convergence and regularization in linear regression classifier

I am trying to implement a binary classifier using logistic regression for data drawn from 2 point sets (classes y (-1, 1)). As seen below, we can use the parameter a to prevent overfitting.
Now I am not sure, how to choose the "good" value for a.
Another thing I am not sure about is how to choose a "good" convergence criterion for this sort of problem.
Value of 'a'
Choosing "good" things is a sort of meta-regression: pick any value for a that seems reasonable. Run the regression. Try again with a values larger and smaller by a factor of 3. If either works better than the original, try another factor of 3 in that direction -- but round it from 9x to 10x for readability.
You get the idea ... play with it until you get in the right range. Unless you're really trying to optimize the result, you probably won't need to narrow it down much closer than that factor of 3.
Data Set Partition
ML folks have spent a lot of words analysing the best split. The optimal split depends very much on your data space. As a global heuristic, use half or a bit more for training; of the rest, no more than half should be used for testing, the rest for validation. For instance, 50:20:30 is a viable approximation for train:test:validate.
Again, you get to play with this somewhat ... except that any true test of the error rate would be entirely new data.
Convergence
This depends very much on the characteristics of your empirical error space near the best solution, as well as near local regions of low gradient.
The first consideration is to choose an error function that is likely to be convex and have no flattish regions. The second is to get some feeling for the magnitude of the gradient in the region of a desired solution (normalizing your data will help with this); use this to help choose the convergence radius; you might want to play with that 3x scaling here, too. The final one is to play with the learning rate, so that it's scaled to the normalized data.
Does any of this help?

svm conceptual query

I have some basic conceptual queries on SVM - it will be great if any one can guide me on this. I have been studying books and lectures for a while but have not been able to get answers for these queries correctly
Suppose I have m featured data points - m > 2. How will I know if the data points are linearly separable or not?. If I have understood correctly, linearly separable data points - will not need any special kernel for finding the hyper plane as there is no need to increase the dimension.
Say, I am not sure whether the data is linearly separable or not. I try to get a hyper plane with linear kernel, once with slackness and once without slackness on the lagrange multipliers. What difference will I see on the error rates on training and test data for these two hyper planes. If I understood correctly, if the data is not linearly separable, and if I am not using slackness then there cannot be any optimal plane. If that is the case, should the svm algorithm give me different hyper planes on different runs. Now when I introduce slackness - should I always get the same hyper plane, every run ? And how exactly can I find out from the lagrange multipliers of a hyper plane, whether the data was linearly separable or not.
Now say from 2 I came to know somehow that the data was not linearly separable at m dimensions. So I will try to increase the dimensions and see if it is separable at a higher dimension. How do I know how high I will need to go ? I know the calculations do not go into that space - but is there any way to find out from 2 what should be the best kernel for 3 (i.e I want to find a linearly separating hyper plane).
What is the best way to visualize hyper planes and data points in Matlab where the feature dimensions can be as big as 60 - and the hyperplane is at > 100 dimensions (i,e data points in few hundreds and using Gaussian Kernels the feature vector changes to > 100 dimensions).
I will really appreciate if someone clears these doubts
Regards
I'm going to try to focus on your questions (1), (2) and (3). In practice the most important concern is not if the problem becomes linearly separable but how well the classifier performs on unseen data (i.e. how well it classifies). It seems you want to find a good kernel for which data is linearly separable, and you will always be able to do this (consider putting at each training point an extremely narrow gaussian RBF), but what you really want is good performance on unseen data. That being said:
If the problem is not linearly separable and not using slacks the optimization will fail. It depends on the implementation and the specific optimization algorithm how it fails, does it not converge?, does it not find a descent direction? does it run into numerical difficulties? Even if you wanted to determine cases with slacks, you can still run into numerical difficulties that would make and that alone would make your algorithm of linear separability unreliable
How high do you need to go? Well that is a fundamental question. It is called the problem of data representation. For straight forward solutions people use held out data (people don't care about linear separability they care about good performance on held out data) and do parameter search (for example an RBF kernel can is strictly more expressive than a linear kernel) under the correct gammas. So the problem becomes finding a good gamma for your data. See for example this paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.141.880
I don't think there is a trivial connection between the values of the lagrangian multipliers and linear separability. You can try an high alphas whose value is C, but I'm not sure you'll be able to say much.

Machine learning algorithm for this task?

Trying to write some code that deals with this task:
As an starting point, I have around 20 "profiles" (imagine a landscape profile), i.e. one-dimensional arrays of around 1000 real values.
Each profile has a real-valued desired outcome, the "effective height".
The effective height is some sort of average but height, width and position of peaks play a particular role.
My aim is to generalize from the input data so as to calculate the effective height for further profiles.
Is there a machine learning algorithm or principle that could help?
Principle 1: Extract the most import features, instead of feeding it everything
As you said, "The effective height is some sort of average but height, width and position of peaks play a particular role." So that you have a strong priori assumption that these measures are the most important for learning. If I were you, I would calculate these measures at first, and use them as the input for learning, instead of the raw data.
Principle 2: While choosing a learning algorithm, the first thing to care about would be the the linear separability
Suppose the height is a function of those measures, then you have to think about that to what extent the function is linear. For example if the function is almost linear, then a very simple Perceptron would be perfect. Otherwise if it's far from linear, you might want to pick up a multiple-layer neural network. If it's far far far from linear....please turn to principle 1, and check out if you are extracting the right features.
Principle 3: More data help
As you said, you have around 20 "profiles" for training. In general speaking, that's not enough. Almost all of the machine learning algorithms were designed for somehow big data. Even they claimed that their algorithm is good at learning small sample, but usually not as small as 20. Get more data!
Maybe multivariate linear regression suffices?
I would probably use a combination of what you said about which features play the most important role, and then train a regression on that. Basically, you need at least one coefficient corresponding to each feature, and you need substantially more data points than coefficients. So, I would pick something like the heights and width of the two biggest peaks. You've now reduced every profile to just 4 numbers. Now do this trick: divide the data into 5 groups of 4. Pick the first 4 groups. Reduce all those profiles to 4 numbers, and then use the desired outcomes to come up with a regression. Once you have trained the regression, try your technique on the last 4 points and see how well it works. Repeat this procedure 5 times, each time leaving out a different set of data. This is called cross-validation, and it's very handy.
Obviously getting more data would help.

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