Y intercept not changing in linear regression gradient descent - machine-learning

I'm currently learning about gradient descent so I wrote a piece of code that uses gradient descent with linear regression. The line I get however is not the best line. I calculated the error of both linear regression with gradient descent and least squares errors regression. No matter what data I use the least squares errors always gives me a much lower error. I decided to look at the slope and y intercepts both are coming up with. The y intercept on the one using gradient descent is always very close to zero,as if it isn't properly changing. I find this pretty strange and I have no idea what is going on. Am I somehow implementing gradient descent incorrectly?
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
datax=[]
datay=[]
def gradient(b_current,m_current,learningRate):
bgradient=0
mgradient=0
N=float(len(datax))
for i in range(0,len(datax)):
bgradient+= (-2/N)*(datay[i]-((m_current*datax[i])+b_current))
mgradient+= (-2/N)*datax[i]*(datay[i]-((m_current*datax[i])+b_current))
newb=b_current-(bgradient*learningRate)
newm=m_current-(mgradient*learningRate)
return newm,newb
def basic_linear_regression(x, y):
# Basic computations to save a little time.
length = len(x)
sum_x = sum(x)
sum_y = sum(y)
# sigma x^2, and sigma xy respectively.
sum_x_squared = sum(map(lambda a: a * a, x))
sum_of_products = sum([x[i] * y[i] for i in range(length)])
# Magic formulae!
a = (sum_of_products - (sum_x * sum_y) / length) / (sum_x_squared - ((sum_x ** 2) / length))
b = (sum_y - a * sum_x) / length
return a, b
def error(m,b,datax,datay):
error=0
for i in range(0,len(datax)):
error+=(datay[i]-(m*datax[i]+b))
return error/len(datax)
def run():
m=0
b=0
iterations=1000
learningRate=.00001
for i in range(0,iterations):
m,b=gradient(b,m,learningRate)
print(m,b)
c,d=basic_linear_regression(datax,datay)
print(c,d)
gradientdescent=error(m,b,datax,datay)
leastsquarederrors=error(c,d,datax,datay)
print(gradientdescent)
print(leastsquarederrors)
plt.scatter(datax,datay)
plt.plot([0,300],[b,300*m+b])
plt.axis('equal')
plt.show()
run()

I have seen learning rate is sometimes taken in the range of 0.01. This could probably be the reason why you would need more than 1000 iterations since your learning rate is 0.00001, unless your dataset is small. Lesser the learning rate more the iterations required to converge.
Another thing I noticed is that you are fixing the number of iterations. You can never tell if your cost function is going to be at/near global minimum at 1000th iteration. Especially with such a low learning rate, what if you need more than 1000 iterations? To deal with this - try using a while loop and inside this loop, add a calculation of the difference in cost function(delta J) and keep looping till (delta J < Threshold) where Threshold is generally kept very low(in the range of 0.01 or 0.001). Then take the cost function once you break out of the while loop and compare it with that obtained from the OLS method.

Related

In backpropogation, what does it mean when the error of a neural network converges to 0.5?

I've been trying to learn the math behind neural networks and have implemented (in Octave) a version of the following equations which include bias terms.
Back-propagation equations matrix form:
Visual representation of the problem and Network:
clear; clc; close all;
#Initialize weights and bias from input to hidden layer
W1 = rand(3,4)
b1 = ones(3,1)
#Initialize weights from hidden to output
W2 = rand(2,3)
b2 = ones(2,1)
#define sigmoid function
s = #(z) 1./(1 + exp(-z));
ds = #(z) s(z).*(1-s(z));
data = csvread("data.txt");
for j = 1 : 100
for i = 1 : length(data)
x0 = data(i,2:5)';
#Find the truth
if data(i,6) == 1 ;
t = [1;0] ;
else
t = [0;1];
end
#Forward propagate
x1 = s(W1*x0 + b1);
x2 = s(W2*x1 + b2);
iter = (j-1)*length(data) + i;
E((j-1)*length(data) + i) = norm(x2-t)^2;
E(length(E))
#Back propagate
delta2 = (x2-t).*ds(W2*x1+b2);
delta1 = W2'*delta2.*ds(W1*x0+b1);
dedw2 = delta2*x1';
dedw1 = delta1*x0';
alpha = 0.001*(40000-iter)/40000;
W2 = W2 - alpha*dedw2;
W1 = W1 - alpha*dedw1;
b2 = b2 - alpha*delta2;
b1 = b1 - alpha*delta1;
end
end
plot(E)
title('Gradient Descent')
xlabel('Iteration')
ylabel('Error')
When I run this, I converge on weights that give an constant error of 0.5 rather than 0.0. The error plot looks something like this depending on the initial samples of W1 and W2:
The resulting weights W1 and W2 yield output ~[0.5,0.5] for the whole set rather than [1,0](isStairs = true) or [0,1](isStairs = False)
Other information:
If I loop over a single data point instead of the entire learning set, it does converge to zero error for that particular case. (like 20 iterations or so), so I assume my derivatives are correct?
For the model to converge the learning rate has to be insanely small. Not sure what this means.
Is this neural network valid to solve the described problem? If so, what does it mean to converge to an error of 0.5?
The NN learns from data. If there is only one example, it will learn this example by heard and you have zero error. But if you have more examples, they will likely not lie on a nice curve, but are noisy instead. So it is harder to learn the data by heard for the network (it also depends on the number of free parameters that the NN has but you get the idea)... However, you don't want the NN to learn everything in detail. You want it to learn the overall trend (so not the noise). But this also means, that your error won't converge to zero as there is noise, which your NN should not learn... So don't worry if you have a (small) error at the end.
But what about the learning rate? Well, imagine you have 10 examples. Eight of them describe a perfect line but two exhibit noise. One sightly to the right (lets say +1) and the other slightly to the left (-1). If the NN estimates one of those points and updates to minimize the error drawn from it. The update will jump from + to - or vice versa. Depending on your learning rate, this jumping may eventually converge to the middle (which is the correct function) or may go on forever... This is essentially what the learning rate does: it determines how much impact an estimation error has on the update/learning of the network. So a good idea is to choose a larger learning rate the the beginning (where the network has a really bad performance due to its random initialization) and decrease the rate when it already learned something. You can achieve the same thing with a small learning rate but you will need longer time for it;)

ML Classification - Decision Boundary Algorithm

Given a classification problem in Machine Learning the hypothesis is described as below.
hθ(x)=g(θ'x)
z = θ'x
g(z) = 1 / (1+e^−z)
In order to get our discrete 0 or 1 classification, we can translate the output of the hypothesis function as follows:
hθ(x)≥0.5→y=1
hθ(x)<0.5→y=0
The way our logistic function g behaves is that when its input is greater than or equal to zero, its output is greater than or equal to 0.5:
g(z)≥0.5
whenz≥0
Remember.
z=0,e0=1⇒g(z)=1/2
z→∞,e−∞→0⇒g(z)=1
z→−∞,e∞→∞⇒g(z)=0
So if our input to g is θTX, then that means:
hθ(x)=g(θTx)≥0.5
whenθTx≥0
From these statements we can now say:
θ'x≥0⇒y=1
θ'x<0⇒y=0
If The decision boundary is the line that separates the area where y = 0 and where y = 1 and is created by our hypothesis function:
What part of this relates to the Decision Boundary? Or where does the Decision Boundary algorithm come from?
This is basic logistic regression with a threshold. So your theta' * x is just the vector notation of your weight vector multiplied by your input. If you put that into the logistic function which outputs a value between 0 and 1 exclusively, you'll threshold that value at 0.5. So if it's equal and above this, you'll treat it as a positive sample and as a negative one otherwise.
The classification algorithm is just that simple. The training is a bit more complicated and the goal of it is the find a weight vector theta which satisfies the condition to correctly classify all your labeled data...or at least as much as possible. The way to do this is to minimize a cost function which measures the difference between the output of your function and the expected label. You can do this using gradient descent. I guess, Andrew Ng is teaching this.
Edit: Your classification algorithm is g(theta'x)>=0.5 and g(theta'x)<0.5, so a basic step function.
Courtesy of other posters on a different tech forum.
Solving for theta'*x >= 0 and theta'*x<0 gives the decision boundary. The RHS of the inequality ( i.e. 0) comes from the sigmoid function.
Theta gives you the hypothesis that best fits the training set.
From theta, you can compute the decision boundary - it is the locus of points where (X * theta) = 0, or equivalently where g(X * theta) = 0.5.

Gradient from non-trainable weights function

I'm trying to implement a self-written loss function. My pipeline is as follows
x -> {constant computation} = x_feature -> machine learning training -> y_feature -> {constant computation} = y_produced
These "constant computations" are necessary to bring out the differences between the desired o/p and produced o/p.
So if I take the L2 norm of the y_produced and y_original, how should I incorporate this loss in the original loss.
Please Note that y_produced has a different dimension than y_feature.
As long as you are using differentiable operations there is no difference between "constant transformations" and "learnable ones". There is no such distinction, look even at the linear layer of a neural net
f(x) = sigmoid( W * x + b )
is it constant or learnable? W and b are trained, but "sigmoid" is not, yet gradient flows the same way, no matter if something is a variable or not. In particular gradient wrt. to x is the same for
g(x) = sigmoid( A * x + c )
where A and c are constants.
The only problem you will encounter is using non-differentiable operations, such as: argmax, sorting, indexing, sampling etc. these operations do not have a well defined gradient thus you cannot directly use first order optimisers with them. As long as you stick with the differentiable ones - the problem described does not really exist - there is no difference between "constant transromations" and any other transformations - no matter change of the size etc.

Wouldn't setting the first derivative of Cost function J to 0 gives the exact Theta values that minimize the cost?

I am currently doing Andrew NG's ML course. From my calculus knowledge, the first derivative test of a function gives critical points if there are any. And considering the convex nature of Linear / Logistic Regression cost function, it is a given that there will be a global / local optima. If that is the case, rather than going a long route of taking a miniscule baby step at a time to reach the global minimum, why don't we use the first derivative test to get the values of Theta that minimize the cost function J in a single attempt , and have a happy ending?
That being said, I do know that there is a Gradient Descent alternative called Normal Equation that does just that in one successful step unlike the former.
On a second thought, I am thinking if it is mainly because of multiple unknown variables involved in the equation (which is why the Partial Derivative comes into play?) .
Let's take an example:
Gradient simple regression cost function:
Δ[RSS(w) = [(y-Hw)T(y-Hw)]
y : output
H : feature vector
w : weights
RSS: residual sum of squares
Equating this to 0 for getting the closed form solution will give:
w = (H T H)-1 HT y
Now assuming there are D features, the time complexity for calculating transpose of matrix is around O(D3). If there are a million features, it is computationally impossible to do within reasonable amount of time.
We use these gradient descent methods since they give solutions with reasonably acceptable solutions within much less time.

Understanding softmax classifier

I am trying to understand a simple implementation of Softmax classifier from this link - CS231n - Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition. Here they implemented a simple softmax classifier. In the example of Softmax Classifier on the link, there are random 300 points on a 2D space and a label associated with them. The softmax classifier will learn which point belong to which class.
Here is the full code of the softmax classifier. Or you can see the link I have provided.
# initialize parameters randomly
W = 0.01 * np.random.randn(D,K)
b = np.zeros((1,K))
# some hyperparameters
step_size = 1e-0
reg = 1e-3 # regularization strength
# gradient descent loop
num_examples = X.shape[0]
for i in xrange(200):
# evaluate class scores, [N x K]
scores = np.dot(X, W) + b
# compute the class probabilities
exp_scores = np.exp(scores)
probs = exp_scores / np.sum(exp_scores, axis=1, keepdims=True) # [N x K]
# compute the loss: average cross-entropy loss and regularization
corect_logprobs = -np.log(probs[range(num_examples),y])
data_loss = np.sum(corect_logprobs)/num_examples
reg_loss = 0.5*reg*np.sum(W*W)
loss = data_loss + reg_loss
if i % 10 == 0:
print "iteration %d: loss %f" % (i, loss)
# compute the gradient on scores
dscores = probs
dscores[range(num_examples),y] -= 1
dscores /= num_examples
# backpropate the gradient to the parameters (W,b)
dW = np.dot(X.T, dscores)
db = np.sum(dscores, axis=0, keepdims=True)
dW += reg*W # regularization gradient
# perform a parameter update
W += -step_size * dW
b += -step_size * db
I cant understand how they computed the gradient here. I assume that they computed the gradient here -
dW = np.dot(X.T, dscores)
db = np.sum(dscores, axis=0, keepdims=True)
dW += reg*W # regularization gradient
But How? I mean Why gradient of dW is np.dot(X.T, dscores)? And Why the gradient of db is np.sum(dscores, axis=0, keepdims=True)?? So how they computed the gradient on weight and bias? Also why they computed the regularization gradient?
I am just starting to learn about convolutional neural networks and deep learning. And I heard that CS231n - Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition is a good starting place for that. I did not know where to place deep learning related post. So, i placed them on stackoverflow. If there is any place to post questions related to deep learning please let me know.
The gradients start being computed here:
# compute the gradient on scores
dscores = probs
dscores[range(num_examples),y] -= 1
dscores /= num_examples
First, this sets dscores equal to the probabilities computed by the softmax function. Then, it subtracts 1 from the probabilities computed for the correct classes in the second line, and then it divides by the number of training samples in the third line.
Why does it subtract 1? Because you want the probabilities of the correct labels to be 1, ideally. So it subtracts what it should predict from what it actually predicts: if it predicts something close to 1, the subtraction will be a large negative number (close to zero), so the gradient will be small, because you're close to a solution. Otherwise, it will be a small negative number (far from zero), so the gradient will be bigger, and you'll take larger steps towards the solution.
Your activation function is simply w*x + b. Its derivative with respect to w is x, which is why dW is the dot product between x and the gradient of the scores / output layer.
The derivative of w*x + b with respect to b is 1, which is why you simply sum dscores when backpropagating.
Gradient Descent
Backpropagation is to reduce the cost J of the entire system (softmax classifier here) and it is a problem to optimize the weight parameter W to minimize the cost. Providing the cost function J = f(W) is convex, the gradient descent W = W - α * f'(W) will result in the Wmin which minimizes J. The hyperparameter α is called learning rate which we need to optimize too, but not in this answer.
Y should be read as J in the diagram. Imagine you are on the surface of a place whose shape is defined as J = f(W) and you need to reach the point Wmin. There is no gravity so you do not know which way is toward the bottom but you know the function and your coordinate. How do you know which way you should go? You can find the direction from the derivative f'(W) and move to a new coordinate by W = W - α * f'(W). By repeating this, you can get closer and closer to the point Wmin.
Back propagation at Affin Layer
At the node where multiply or dot operation happens (affin), the function is J = f(W) = X * W. Suppose there are m number of fixed two dimensional coordinates represented as X. How can we find the hyper-plane which minimizes J = f(W) = X * W and its vector W?
We can get closer to the optimal W by repeating the gradient descent W += -α * X if α is appropriate.
Chain Rule
When there are layers after the Affine layer such as the softmax layer and the log loss layer in the softmax classifier, we can calculate the gradient with the chain rule. In the diagram, replace sigmoid with softmax.
As stated in Computing the Analytic Gradient with Backpropagation in the cs321 page, the gradient contribution from the softmax layer and the log loss layer is the dscore part. See the Note section below too.
By applying the gradient to that of the affine layer via the chain rule, the code is derived where α is replaced with step_size. In reality, the step_size needs to be learned as well.
dW = np.dot(X.T, dscores)
W += -step_size * dW
The bias gradient can be derived by applying the chain rule towards the bias b with the gradients (dscore) from the post layers.
db = np.sum(dscores, axis=0, keepdims=True)
Regularization
As stated in Regularization of the cs231 page, the cost function (objective) is adjusted by adding the regularization, which is reg_loss in the code. It is to reduce the over-fitting. The intuition is, in my understanding, if specific feature(s) cause overfitting, we can reduce it by inflating the cost with their weight parameters W, because the gradient descent will work to reduce the cost contributions from the weights. Since we do not know which ones, use all W. The reason of 0.5 * W*W is because it gives simple derivative W.
reg_loss = 0.5*reg*np.sum(W*W)
The gradient contribution reg*W is from the derivative of reg_loss. The reg is a hyper parameter to be learned in the real training.
reg_loss/dw -> 0.5 * reg * 2 * W
It is added to the gradient from the layers after the affin.
dW += reg*W # regularization gradient
The process to get the derivative from the cost including the regularization is omitted in the cs231 page referenced in the post, probably because it is a common practice to just put the gradient of the regularization, but confusing for those who are learning. See Coursera Machine Learning Week 3 Cost Function by Andrew Ng for the regularization.
Note
The bias parameter b is substituted with X0 as the bias can be omitted by shifting to the base.

Resources