Can the test set of non-image data be augmented? - machine-learning

I have learned the test set of image data can be augmented by a method called Test Time Augmentation
and I am wondering after I researched on it if the test set of structured or non-image data can be augmented too.
If it cannot, why does such a method can perform on image data only?
Thank you in advance

If you are referring to data augmentation in general, then yes you can apply it to non-image dataset.
Data augmentation means increasing the number of data points.
One of the example is generating synthetic samples for the minority class.
SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique) is an oversampling method can be applied to your data through imblearn package for python. It works by creating synthetic samples from the minor class instead of creating copies and you can apply it to any numerical data, not only images (actually I've never seen this method applied to images dataset).
You can go here and here for more detail.

Related

Evaluation of generative models like variational autoencoder

i hope everyone is doing well
I need some help with generative models.
So im working on a project where the main task is to build a binary classification model. In the dataset which contains 300000 sample and 100 feature, there is an imbalance between the 2 classes where majority class is too much bigger than the minory class.
To handle this problem, i'm using VAE (variational autoencoders) to solve this problem.
So i started training the VAE on the minority class and then use the decoder part of the VAE to generate new or fake samples that are similars to the minority class then concatenate this new data with training set in order to have a new balanced training set.
My question is : is there anyway to evalutate generative models like vae, like is there a way to know if the data generated is similar to the real one ??
I have read that there is some metrics to evaluate generated data like inception distance and Frechet inception distance but i saw that they have been only used on image data
I wanna know if i can use them too on my dataset ?
Thanks in advance
I believe your data is not image as you say there are 100 features. What I believe that you can check the similarity between the synthesised features and the original features (the ones belong to minority class), and keep only the ones with certain similarity. Cosine similarity index would be useful for this problem.
That would be also very nice to check a scatter plot of the synthesised features with the original ones to see if they are close to each other. tSNE would be useful at this point.

How to perform classification on training and test dataset in Weka

I am using Weka software to classify model. I have confusion using training and testing dataset partition. I divide 60% of the whole dataset as training dataset and save it to my hard disk and use 40% of data as test dataset and save this data to another file. The data that I am using is an imbalanced data. So I applied SMOTE in my training dataset. After that, in the classify tab of the Weka I selected Use training set option from Test options and used Random Forest classifier to do the classification on the training dataset. After getting the result I chose Supplied test set option from Test options and load my test dataset from hard disk and again ran the classifier.
I try to find out tutorial on how to load training set and test set in Weka but did not get it. I did the above process depend upon my understanding.
Therefore, I would like to know is that the right way to perform classification on training and test dataset?
Thank you.
There is no need to evaluate your classifier on the training set (this will be overly optimistic, since the classifier has already seen this data). Just use the Supplied test set option, then your classifier will get trained automatically on the currently loaded dataset before being evaluated on the specified test set.
Instead of manually splitting your data, you could also use the Percentage split test option, with 60% to be used for your training data.
When using filters, you should always wrap them (in this case SMOTE) and your classifier (in this case RandomForest) in the FilteredClassifier meta-classifier. That way, you will ensure that the training and test set data will get transformed correctly. This will also avoid the problem of leaking information into the test set when transforming the full dataset with a supervised filter and splitting the dataset into train/test afterwards. Finally, it also documents nicely what preprocessing is being done to your input data, all in a single command-line string.
If you need to apply more than one filter, use the MultiFilter to apply them sequentially.

Classification with Keras, unbalanced classes

I have a binary classification problem I'm trying to tackle in Keras. To start, I was following the usual MNIST example, using softmax as the activation function in my output layer.
However, in my problem, the 2 classes are highly unbalanced (1 appears ~10 times more often than the other). And what's even more critical, they are non-symmetrical in the way they may be mistaken.
Mistaking an A for a B is way less severe than mistaking a B for an A. Just like a caveman trying to classify animals into pets and predators: mistaking a pet for a predator is no big deal, but the other way round will be lethal.
So my question is: how would I model something like this with Keras?
thanks a lot
A non-exhaustive list of things you could do:
Generate a balanced data set using data augmentations. If the data are images, you can add image augmentations in a custom data generator that will output balanced amounts of data from each class per batch and save the results to a new data set. If the data are tabular, you can use a library like imbalanced-learn to perform over/under sampling.
As #Daniel said you can use class_weights during training (in the fit method) in a way that mistakes on important class are penalized more. See this tutorial: Classification on imbalanced data. The same idea can be implemented with a custom loss function with/without class_weights during training.

What is the use of train_on_batch() in keras?

How train_on_batch() is different from fit()? What are the cases when we should use train_on_batch()?
For this question, it's a simple answer from the primary author:
With fit_generator, you can use a generator for the validation data as
well. In general, I would recommend using fit_generator, but using
train_on_batch works fine too. These methods only exist for the sake of
convenience in different use cases, there is no "correct" method.
train_on_batch allows you to expressly update weights based on a collection of samples you provide, without regard to any fixed batch size. You would use this in cases when that is what you want: to train on an explicit collection of samples. You could use that approach to maintain your own iteration over multiple batches of a traditional training set but allowing fit or fit_generator to iterate batches for you is likely simpler.
One case when it might be nice to use train_on_batch is for updating a pre-trained model on a single new batch of samples. Suppose you've already trained and deployed a model, and sometime later you've received a new set of training samples previously never used. You could use train_on_batch to directly update the existing model only on those samples. Other methods can do this too, but it is rather explicit to use train_on_batch for this case.
Apart from special cases like this (either where you have some pedagogical reason to maintain your own cursor across different training batches, or else for some type of semi-online training update on a special batch), it is probably better to just always use fit (for data that fits in memory) or fit_generator (for streaming batches of data as a generator).
train_on_batch() gives you greater control of the state of the LSTM, for example, when using a stateful LSTM and controlling calls to model.reset_states() is needed. You may have multi-series data and need to reset the state after each series, which you can do with train_on_batch(), but if you used .fit() then the network would be trained on all the series of data without resetting the state. There's no right or wrong, it depends on what data you're using, and how you want the network to behave.
Train_on_batch will also see a performance increase over fit and fit generator if youre using large datasets and don't have easily serializable data (like high rank numpy arrays), to write to tfrecords.
In this case you can save the arrays as numpy files and load up smaller subsets of them (traina.npy, trainb.npy etc) in memory, when the whole set won't fit in memory. You can then use tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices and then using train_on_batch with your subdataset, then loading up another dataset and calling train on batch again, etc, now you've trained on your entire set and can control exactly how much and what of your dataset trains your model. You can then define your own epochs, batch sizes, etc with simple loops and functions to grab from your dataset.
Indeed #nbro answer helps, just to add few more scenarios, lets say you are training some seq to seq model or a large network with one or more encoders. We can create custom training loops using train_on_batch and use a part of our data to validate on the encoder directly without using callbacks. Writing callbacks for a complex validation process could be difficult. There are several cases where we wish to train on batch.
Regards,
Karthick
From Keras - Model training APIs:
fit: Trains the model for a fixed number of epochs (iterations on a dataset).
train_on_batch: Runs a single gradient update on a single batch of data.
We can use it in GAN when we update the discriminator and generator using a batch of our training data set at a time. I saw Jason Brownlee used train_on_batch in on his tutorials (How to Develop a 1D Generative Adversarial Network From Scratch in Keras)
Tip for quick search: Type Control+F and type in the search box the term that you want to search (train_on_batch, for example).

Data augmentation in test/validation set?

It is common practice to augment data (add samples programmatically, such as random crops, etc. in the case of a dataset consisting of images) on both training and test set, or just the training data set?
Only on training. Data augmentation is used to increase the size of the training set and to get more different images.
Technically, you could use data augmentation on the test set to see how the model behaves on such images, but usually, people don't do it.
Data augmentation is done only on training set as it helps the model become more generalize and robust. So there's no point of augmenting the test set.
This answer on stats.SE makes the case for applying crops on the validation / test sets so as to make that input similar the the input in the training set that the network was trained on.
Do it only on the training set. And, of course, make sure that the augmentation does not make the label wrong (e.g. when rotating 6 and 9 by about 180°).
The reason why we use a training and a test set in the first place is that we want to estimate the error our system will have in reality. So the data for the test set should be as close to real data as possible.
If you do it on the test set, you might have the problem that you introduce errors. For example, say you want to recognize digits and you augment by rotating. Then a 6 might look like a 9. But not all examples are that easy. Better be save than sorry.
I would argue that, in some cases, using data augmentation for the validation set can be helpful.
For example, I train a lot of CNNs for medical image segmentation. Many of the augmentation transforms that I use are meant to reduce the image quality so that the network is trained to be robust against such data. If the training set looks bad and the validation set looks nice, it will be hard to compare the losses during training and therefore assessing overfit will be complicated.
I would never use augmentation for the test set unless I'm using test-time augmentation to improve results or estimate aleatoric uncertainty.
In computer vision, you can use data augmentation during test time to obtain different views on the test image. You then have to aggregate the results obtained from each image for example by averaging them.
For example, given this symbol below, changing the point of view can lead to different interpretations :
Some image preprocessing software tools like Roboflow (https://roboflow.com/) apply data augmentation to test data as well. I'd say that if one is dealing with small and rare objects, say, cerebral microbleeds (which are tiny and difficult to spot on magnetic resonance images), augmenting one's test set could be useful. Then you can verify that your model has learned to detect these objects given different orientation and brightness conditions (given that your training data has been augmented in the same way).
The goal of data augmentation is to generalize the model and make it learn more orientation of the images, such that the during testing the model is able to apprehend the test data well. So, it is well practiced to use augmentation technique only for training sets.
The point of adding validation data is to build generalized model so it is nothing but to predict real-world data. inorder to predict real-world data, the validation set should contain real data. There is no problem with augmenting validation data but it won't increase the accuracy of the model.
Here are my two cents:
You train your model on the training data and the validation data: the former to optimize your parameters, and the latter to give you an appropriate stopping condition. The test data is to give you a real-world estimate of how well you can expect your model to perform.
For training, you can augment your training data to increase robustness to various factors including, but not limited to, sampling error, bias between data sources, shifts in global data distribution, positioning, and any other sort of variation you would like to account for.
The validation data should indicate to the training method when the model is most generalizable. By this logic, if you expect to see some variation in real-world data that can be simulated using data augmentation, then by all means, the validation dataset should be augmented.
The test data, on the other hand, should not be augmented, except potentially in special scenarios where data is very limited, and an estimate of real-world performance on test data has too much variance.
You can use augmentation data in training, validation and test sets.
The only thing to avoid is using the same data from the training set in validation or test sets.
For example, if you generate 3 augmented instances from an register of the training data, make sure that no one of these 3 augmented instances accidentally ends up in the validation or test sets.
It turns out that using data from the training set, even augmented data, to validate or test a model is a methodology mistake.

Resources