Negative validation set in tensorflow - machine-learning

I am training an anomaly detection model using autoencoders in tensorflow. I have got a list of data which are non-anomalous and we are tuning our autoencoder to that training data. After that, when we want to test a data, if it's anomalous or not, we pass it through the autoencoder and it the loss is above a certain threshold, we consider it anomalous.
Now, I have prepared a list of anomalous data(from domain knowledge). However even after much trial and error, my model is not performing well on the anomalous data,i.e, the reconstruction loss is not very significantly high.
My idea
I want to use that anomalous data while training that autoencoder, i.e, I want to use it as a validation set and check on each step how well the model performs on the anomalous data, i.e, how big the loss is. However, I am not able to find any resource on how can I do it. If I merely use validation_data in model.fit, it will try to minimize loss on the set, but we want to it to be higher(since it's an anomaly)!
My solutions
I tried exploring the metrics parameter in model.compile by making my own custom metric. However, I am not able to pass the model in the custom metric.
autoencoder.compile(optimizer='adam',
loss='mse',metrics=[bad_data_loss])
And the custom metric is
def bad_data_loss(y_true,y_pred):
#How to get autoencode(model) in here
Because from keras documentation, the metric takes y_true and y_pred only. I can't a way to get get model inside it.
Can anyone give me a hint to solving the above scenario? I have been trying many things but nothing is working.

Related

train, dev set and test set advices for implementation and hyperameter tuning

I have some doubts about the implementation and tuning of parameters and hyperparameters by using the classic train, validation and test set. So it would be of great help if somebody could clarify me these concepts and bring me some hints for its implementation in a language like Python.
For example, if I have a Neural Network, for what I know the parameter tuning (lets consider the number of hidden layers and neurons per layer), could be tuned with the training set. So when it comes to the validation set, which is approximately 20% of the dataset, I can tune my hyperparameters with the following algorithm:
Example: Tuning batch size and learning rate:
hyperListB=[]
hyperListL=[]
//let´s suppose both lists have the same dimensions
for i in range(0,hyperListB):
model=fit(train_set,hyperListB[i],hyperlistL[i]
values[].add(evaluate(model,validation_set) //add scores of each run
end for
for i in range(0,values):
plot_loss_functions(values)
select best set of hyperparameters
model=fit(test_set, selecter_hyperparameters)
evaluate(model)
would this sequence of steps be correct? I have searched thru different pages and did not find something that could help me with this. Please, bear in mind that I do not want to use cross-validation or other library-based techniques such as GridSearchCV.
Thanks
In a Train validation test split, the fit method on the train data.
Validation data is used for hyperparameter tuning. A set of hyperparameters is selected and the model is trained on the train set. Then this model will be evaluated on the validation set. This is repeated until all permutations of the different hyperparameters have been exhausted.
The best set of hyperparameters are the ones that gave the best result on the validation set. This method is called Grid search.
The test set is used to evaluate the model with the best hyperparameters selected. THis gives the final unbiased accuracy and loss.
The fit method will never be called on the validation or test set.
your example will look like:
hyperListB=[]
hyperListL=[]
//let´s suppose both lists have the same dimensions
for hyperB in hyperListB:
for hyperL in hyperListL:
model=fit(train_set,hyperB,hyperL)
values[].add(evaluate(model,validation_set) //add scores of each run
end for
end for
for i in range(0,values):
plot_loss_functions(values)
select best set of hyperparameters
evaluate(model,test_set)

How do neural networks learn functions instead of memorize them?

For a class project, I designed a neural network to approximate sin(x), but ended up with a NN that just memorized my function over the data points I gave it. My NN took in x-values with a batch size of 200. Each x-value was multiplied by 200 different weights, mapping to 200 different neurons in my first layer. My first hidden layer contained 200 neurons, each one a linear combination of the x-values in the batch. My second hidden layer also contained 200 neurons, and my loss function was computed between the 200 neurons in my second layer and the 200 values of sin(x) that the input mapped to.
The problem is, my NN perfectly "approximated" sin(x) with 0 loss, but I know it wouldn't generalize to other data points.
What did I do wrong in designing this neural network, and how can I avoid memorization and instead design my NN's to "learn" about the patterns in my data?
It is same with any machine learning algorithm. You have a dataset based on which you try to learn "the" function f(x), which actually generated the data. In real life datasets, it is impossible to get the original function from the data, and therefore we approximate it using something g(x).
The main goal of any machine learning algorithm is to predict unseen data as best as possible using the function g(x).
Given a dataset D you can always train a model, which will perfectly classify all the datapoints (you can use a hashmap to get 0 error on the train set), but which is overfitting or memorization.
To avoid such things, you yourself have to make sure that the model does not memorise and learns the function. There are a few things which can be done. I am trying to write them down in an informal way (with links).
Train, Validation, Test
If you have large enough dataset, use Train, Validation, Test splits. Split the dataset in three parts. Typically 60%, 20% and 20% for Training, Validation and Test, respectively. (These numbers can vary based on need, also in case of imbalanced data, check how to get stratified partitions which preserve the class ratios in every split). Next, forget about the Test partition, keep it somewhere safe, don't touch it. Your model, will be trained using the Training partition. Once you have trained the model, evaluate the performance of the model using the Validation set. Then select another set of hyper-parameter configuration for your model (eg. number of hidden layer, learaning algorithm, other parameters etc.) and then train the model again, and evaluate based on Validation set. Keep on doing this for several such models. Then select the model, which got you the best validation score.
The role of validation set here is to check what the model has learned. If the model has overfit, then the validation scores will be very bad, and therefore in the above process you will discard those overfit models. But keep in mind, although you did not use the Validation set to train the model, directly, but the Validation set was used indirectly to select the model.
Once you have selected a final model based on Validation set. Now take out your Test set, as if you just got new dataset from real life, which no one has ever seen. The prediction of the model on this Test set will be an indication how well your model has "learned" as it is now trying to predict datapoints which it has never seen (directly or indirectly).
It is key to not go back and tune your model based on the Test score. This is because once you do this, the Test set will start contributing to your mode.
Crossvalidation and bootstrap sampling
On the other hand, if your dataset is small. You can use bootstrap sampling, or k-fold cross-validation. These ideas are similar. For example, for k-fold cross-validation, if k=5, then you split the dataset in 5 parts (also be carefull about stratified sampling). Let's name the parts a,b,c,d,e. Use the partitions [a,b,c,d] to train and get the prediction scores on [e] only. Next, use the partitions [a,b,c,e] and use the prediction scores on [d] only, and continue 5 times, where each time, you keep one partition alone and train the model with the other 4. After this, take an average of these scores. This is indicative of that your model might perform if it sees new data. It is also a good practice to do this multiple times and perform an average. For example, for smaller datasets, perform a 10 time 10-folds cross-validation, which will give a pretty stable score (depending on the dataset) which will be indicative of the prediction performance.
Bootstrap sampling is similar, but you need to sample the same number of datapoints (depends) with replacement from the dataset and use this sample to train. This set will have some datapoints repeated (as it was a sample with replacement). Then use the missing datapoins from the training dataset to evaluate the model. Perform this multiple times and average the performance.
Others
Other ways are to incorporate regularisation techniques in the classifier cost function itself. For example in Support Vector Machines, the cost function enforces conditions such that the decision boundary maintains a "margin" or a gap between two class regions. In neural networks one can also do similar things (although it is not same as in SVM).
In neural network you can use early stopping to stop the training. What this does, is train on the Train dataset, but at each epoch, it evaluates the performance on the Validation dataset. If the model starts to overfit from a specific epoch, then the error for Training dataset will keep on decreasing, but the error of the Validation dataset will start increasing, indicating that your model is overfitting. Based on this one can stop training.
A large dataset from real world tends not to overfit too much (citation needed). Also, if you have too many parameters in your model (to many hidden units and layers), and if the model is unnecessarily complex, it will tend to overfit. A model with lesser pameter will never overfit (though can underfit, if parameters are too low).
In the case of you sin function task, the neural net has to overfit, as it is ... the sin function. These tests can really help debug and experiment with your code.
Another important note, if you try to do a Train, Validation, Test, or k-fold crossvalidation on the data generated by the sin function dataset, then splitting it in the "usual" way will not work as in this case we are dealing with a time-series, and for those cases, one can use techniques mentioned here
First of all, I think it's a great project to approximate sin(x). It would be great if you could share the snippet or some additional details so that we could pin point the exact problem.
However, I think that the problem is that you are overfitting the data hence you are not able to generalize well to other data points.
Few tricks that might work,
Get more training points
Go for regularization
Add a test set so that you know whether you are overfitting or not.
Keep in mind that 0 loss or 100% accuracy is mostly not good on training set.

Why not optimize hyperparameters on train dataset?

When developing a neural net one typically partitions training data into Train, Test, and Holdout datasets (many people call these Train, Validation, and Test respectively. Same things, different names). Many people advise selecting hyperparameters based on performance in the Test dataset. My question is: why? Why not maximize performance of hyperparameters in the Train dataset, and stop training the hyperparameters when we detect overfitting via a drop in performance in the Test dataset? Since Train is typically larger than Test, would this not produce better results compared to training hyperparameters on the Test dataset?
UPDATE July 6 2016
Terminology change, to match comment below. Datasets are now termed Train, Validation, and Test in this post. I do not use the Test dataset for training. I am using a GA to optimize hyperparameters. At each iteration of the outer GA training process, the GA chooses a new hyperparameter set, trains on the Train dataset, and evaluates on the Validation and Test datasets. The GA adjusts the hyperparameters to maximize accuracy in the Train dataset. Network training within an iteration stops when network overfitting is detected (in the Validation dataset), and the outer GA training process stops when overfitting of the hyperparameters is detected (again in Validation). The result is hyperparameters psuedo-optimized for the Train dataset. The question is: why do many sources (e.g. https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/JMLRdropout.pdf, Section B.1) recommend optimizing the hyperparameters on the Validation set, rather than the Train set? Quoting from Srivasta, Hinton, et al (link above): "Hyperparameters were tuned on the validation set such that the best validation error was produced..."
The reason is that developing a model always involves tuning its configuration: for example, choosing the number of layers or the size of the layers (called the hyper-parameters of the model, to distinguish them from the parameters, which are the network’s weights). You do this tuning by using as a feedback signal the performance of the model on the validation data. In essence, this tuning is a form of learning: a search for a good configuration in some parameter space. As a result, tuning the configuration of the model based on its performance on the validation set can quickly result in overfitting to the validation set, even though your model is never directly trained on it.
Central to this phenomenon is the notion of information leaks. Every time you tune a hyperparameter of your model based on the model’s performance on the validation set, some information about the validation data leaks into the model. If you do this only once, for one parameter, then very few bits of information will leak, and your validation set will remain reliable to evaluate the model. But if you repeat this many times—running one experiment, evaluating on the validation set, and modifying your model as a result—then you’ll leak an increasingly significant amount of information about the validation set into the model.
At the end of the day, you’ll end up with a model that performs artificially well on the validation data, because that’s what you optimized it for. You care about performance on completely new data, not the validation data, so you need to use a completely different, never-before-seen dataset to evaluate the model: the test dataset. Your model shouldn’t have had access to any information about the test set, even indirectly. If anything about the model has been tuned based on test set performance, then your measure of generalization will be flawed.
There are two things you are missing here. First, minor, is that test set is never used to do any training. This is a purpose of validation (test is just to asses your final, testing performance). The major missunderstanding is what it means "to use validation set to fit hyperparameters". This means exactly what you describe - to train a model with a given hyperparameters on the training set, and use validation to simply check if you are overfitting (you use it to estimate generalization) , but you do not really "train" on them, you simply check your scores on this subset (which, as you noticed - is way smaller).
You cannot "stop training hyperparamters" because this is not a continuous process, usually hyperparameters are just "possible sets of values", and you have to simply test lots of them, there is no valid way of defining a direct trainingn procedure between actual metric you are interested in (like accuracy) and hyperparameters (like size of the hidden layer in NN or even C parameter in SVM), as the functional link between these two is not differentiable, is highly non convex and in general "ugly" to optimize. If you can define a nice optimization procedure in terms of a hyperparameter than it is usually not called a hyperparameter but a parameter, the crucial distinction in this naming convention is what makes it hard to optimize directly - we call hyperparameter a parameter, than cannot be directly optimized against thus you need a "meta method" (like simply testing on validation set) to select it.
However, you can define a "nice" meta optimization protocol for hyperparameters, but this will still use validation set as an estimator, for example Bayesian optimization of hyperparameters does exactly this - it tries to fit a function saying how well is you model behaving in the space of hyperparameters, but in order to have any "training data" for this meta-method, you need validation set to estimate it for any given set of hyperparameters (input to your meta method)
simple answer: we do
In the case of a simple feedforward neural network you do have to select e.g. layer and unit count per layer, regularization (and non-continuous parameters like topology if not feedforward and loss function) in the beginning and you would optimize on those.
So, in summary you optimize:
ordinary parameters only during training but not during validation
hyperparameters during training and during validation
It is very important not to touch the many ordinary parameters (weights and biases) during validation. That's because there are thousands of degrees of freedom in them which means they can learn the data you train them on. But then the model doesn't generalize to new data as well (even when that new data originated from the same distribution). You usually only have very few degrees of freedom in the hyperparameters which usually control the rigidity of the model (regularization).
This holds true for other machine learning algorithms like decision trees, forests, etc as well.

Using Convolution Neural network as Binary classifiers

Given any image I want my classifier to tell if it is Sunflower or not. How can I go about creating the second class ? Keeping the set of all possible images - {Sunflower} in the second class is an overkill. Is there any research in this direction ? Currently my classifier uses a neural network in the final layer. I have based it upon the following tutorial :
https://github.com/torch/tutorials/tree/master/2_supervised
I am taking images with 254x254 as the input.
Would SVM help in the final layer ? Also I am open to using any other classifier/features that might help me in this.
The standard approach in ML is that:
1) Build model
2) Try to train on some data with positive\negative examples (start with 50\50 of pos\neg in training set)
3) Validate it on test set (again, try 50\50 of pos\neg examples in test set)
If results not fine:
a) Try different model?
b) Get more data
For case #b, when deciding which additional data you need the rule of thumb which works for me nicely would be:
1) If classifier gives lots of false positive (tells that this is a sunflower when it is actually not a sunflower at all) - get more negative examples
2) If classifier gives lots of false negative (tells that this is not a sunflower when it is actually a sunflower) - get more positive examples
Generally, start with some reasonable amount of data, check the results, if results on train set or test set are bad - get more data. Stop getting more data when you get the optimal results.
And another thing you need to consider, is if your results with current data and current classifier are not good you need to understand if the problem is high bias (well, bad results on train set and test set) or if it is a high variance problem (nice results on train set but bad results on test set). If you have high bias problem - more data or more powerful classifier will definitely help. If you have a high variance problem - more powerful classifier is not needed and you need to thing about the generalization - introduce regularization, remove couple of layers from your ANN maybe. Also possible way of fighting high variance is geting much, MUCH more data.
So to sum up, you need to use iterative approach and try to increase the amount of data step by step, until you get good results. There is no magic stick classifier and there is no simple answer on how much data you should use.
It is a good idea to use CNN as the feature extractor, peel off the original fully connected layer that was used for classification and add a new classifier. This is also known as the transfer learning technique that has being widely used in the Deep Learning research community. For your problem, using the one-class SVM as the added classifier is a good choice.
Specifically,
a good CNN feature extractor can be trained on a large dataset, e.g. ImageNet,
the one-class SVM can then be trained using your 'sunflower' dataset.
The essential part of solving your problem is the implementation of the one-class SVM, which is also known as anomaly detection or novelty detection. You may refer http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/outlier_detection.html for some insights about the method.

How to actually use a validation set when using support vector machines in sklearn

While working with SVMs, I am seeing that it is a good practice to perform a three way split on the original data set, something along the lines of, say, a 70/15/15 split.
This split would correspond to %70 for training, %15 for testing, and %15 for what is referred to as "validation."
I'm fairly clear on why this is a good practice, but I'm not sure about the nuts and bolts needed to actually perform this. Lots of online sources discuss the importance, but I can't seem to find a definite (or at least algorithmic) description of the process. For example, sklearn discusses it here but stops before giving any solid tools.
Here's my idea:
Train the algorithm, using training set
Find error rate, using testing set
?? tweak parameters
Get error rate again, using validation set
If anyone could point me in the direction of a good resource, I'd be grateful.
The role of the validation set in all supervised learning algorithms is to find the optimium for the parameters of the algorithm (if there are any).
After splitting your data into traing/validation/test data, the best practise to train an algorithm is like that:
choose initial learning parameters
train the algorithm using the training set and the parameters
get the (validation) accuracy using the validation set (cross-validation test)
change parameters and continue with 2 until found parameters leading to best validation accuracy
get the (test) accuracy using the test set which represents the actual expected accuracy of your trained algorithm on new unseen data.
There are some advanced approaches for performing the cross-validation test. Some libraries like libsvm have them included: the k-fold cross validation.
In k-fold cross validation you split your train data randomly into k same-sized portions. You train using k-1 portions and cross validate with the remaining portion. You do this k-times with different subsets and finally using the average.
Wikipedia is a good source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_learning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_%28statistics%29

Resources