Data: When I have N rows of data like this: (x,y,z) where logically f(x,y)=z, that is z is dependent on x and y, like in my case (setting1, setting2 ,signal) . Different x's and y's can lead to the same z, but the z's wouldn't mean the same thing.
There are 30 unique setting1, 30 setting2 and 1 signal for each (setting1, setting2)-pairing, hence 900 signal values.
Data set: These [900,3] data points are considered 1 data set. I have many samples of these data sets.
I want to make a classification based on these data sets, but I need to flatten the data (make them all into one row). If I flatten it, I will duplicate all the setting values (setting1 and setting2) 30 times, i.e. I will have a row with 3x900 columns.
Question:
Is it correct to keep all the duplicate setting1,setting2 values in the data set? Or should I remove them and only include the unique values a single time?, i.e. have a row with 30 + 30 + 900 columns. I'm worried, that the logical dependency of the signal to the settings will be lost this way. Is this relevant? Or shouldn't I bother including the settings at all (e.g. due to correlations)?
If I understand correctly, you are training NN on a sample where each observation is [900,3].
You are flatning it and getting an input layer of 3*900.
Some of those values are a result of a function on others.
It is important which function, as if it is a liniar function, NN might not work:
From here:
"If inputs are linearly dependent then you are in effect introducing
the same variable as multiple inputs. By doing so you've introduced a
new problem for the network, finding the dependency so that the
duplicated inputs are treated as a single input and a single new
dimension in the data. For some dependencies, finding appropriate
weights for the duplicate inputs is not possible."
Also, if you add dependent variables you risk the NN being biased towards said variables.
E.g. If you are running LMS on [x1,x2,x3,average(x1,x2)] to predict y, you basically assign a higher weight to the x1 and x2 variables.
Unless you have a reason to believe that those weights should be higher, don't include their function.
I was not able to find any link to support, but my intuition is that you might want to decrease your input layer in addition to omitting the dependent values:
From professor A. Ng's ML Course I remember that the input should be the minimum amount of values that are 'reasonable' to make the prediction.
Reasonable is vague, but I understand it so: If you try to predict the price of a house include footage, area quality, distance from major hub, do not include average sun spot activity during the open home day even though you got that data.
I would remove the duplicates, I would also look for any other data that can be omitted, maybe run PCA over the full set of Nx[3,900].
Related
I'm still a little unsure of whether questions like these belong on stackoverflow. Is this website only for questions with explicit code? The "How to Format" just tells me it should be a programming question, which it is. I will remove my question if the community thinks otherwise.
I have created a neural network and am predicting reasonable values for most of my data (the task is multi-variate time series forecasting).
I scale my data before inputting it using scikit-learn's MinMaxScaler(0,1) or MinMaxScaler(-1,1) (the two primary scalings I am using).
The model learns, predicts, and I inverse the scaling using MinMaxScaler()'s inverse_transform method to visually see how close my predictions were to the actual values. However, I notice that the inverse_scaled values for a particular part of the vector I predicted have now become very noisy. Here is what I mean (inverse_scaled prediction):
Left end: noisy; right end: not-so noisy.
I initially thought that perhaps my network didn't learn that part of the vector well, so is just outputting ~random values. BUT, I notice that the predicted values before the inverse scaling seem to match the actual values very well, but that these values are typically near 0 or -1 (lower limit of the feature scale) because of the fact that these values have a very large spread (unscaled mean= 1E-1, max= 1E+1 [not an outlier]). Example (scaled prediction):
So, when inverse transforming these values (again, often near -1 or 0), the transformed values exhibit loud noise, as shown in the images.
Questions:
1.) Should I be using a different scaler/scaling differently, perhaps one that exponentially/nonlinearly scales? MinMaxScaler() scales each column. Simply dropping the high-magnitude data isn't an option since they are real, meaningful data. 2.) What other solutions can help this?
Please let me know if you'd like anything else clarified.
Let's say I want to calculate which courses a final year student will take and which grades they will receive from the said courses. We have data of previous students'courses and grades for each year (not just the final year) to train with. We also have data of the grades and courses of the previous years for students we want to estimate the results for. I want to use a recurrent neural network with long-short term memory to solve this problem. (I know this problem can be solved by regression, but I want the neural network specifically to see if this problem can be properly solved using one)
The way I want to set up the output (label) space is by having a feature for each of the possible courses a student can take, and having a result between 0 and 1 in each of those entries to describe whether if a student will attend the class (if not, the entry for that course would be 0) and if so, what would their mark be (ie if the student attends class A and gets 57%, then the label for class A will have 0.57 in it)
Am I setting the output space properly?
If yes, what optimization and activation functions I should use?
If no, how can I re-shape my output space to get good predictions?
If I understood you correctly, you want that the network is given the history of a student, and then outputs one entry for each course. This entry is supposed to simultaneously signify whether the student will take the course (0 for not taking the course, 1 for taking the course), and also give the expected grade? Then the interpretation of the output for a single course would be like this:
0.0 -> won't take the course
0.1 -> will take the course and get 10% of points
0.5 -> will take the course and get half of points
1.0 -> will take the course and get full points
If this is indeed your plan, I would definitely advise to rethink it.
Some obviously realistic cases do not fit into this pattern. For example, how would you represent an (A+)-student is "unlikely" to take a course? Should the network output 0.9999, because (s)he is very likely to get the maximum amount of points if (s)he takes the course, OR should the network output 0.0001, because the student is very unlikely to take the course?
Instead, you should output two values between [0,1] for each student and each course.
First value in [0, 1] gives the probability that the student will participate in the course
Second value in [0, 1] gives the expected relative number of points.
As loss, I'd propose something like binary cross-entropy on the first value, and simple square error on the second, and then combine all the losses using some L^p metric of your choice (e.g. simply add everything up for p=1, square and add for p=2).
Few examples:
(0.01, 1.0) : very unlikely to participate, would probably get 100%
(0.5, 0.8): 50%-50% whether participates or not, would get 80% of points
(0.999, 0.15): will participate, but probably pretty much fail
The quantity that you wanted to output seemed to be something like the product of these two, which is a bit difficult to interpret.
There is more than one way to solve this problem. Andrey's answer gives a one good approach.
I would like to suggest simplifying the problem by bucketing grades into categories and adding an additional category for "did not take", for both input and output.
This turns the task into a classification problem only, and solves the issue of trying to differentiate between receiving a low grade and not taking the course in your output.
For example your training set might have m students, n possible classes, and six possible results: ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'F', 'did_not_take'].
And you might choose the following architecture:
Input -> Dense Layer -> RELU -> Dense Layer -> RELU -> Dense Layer -> Softmax
Your input shape is (m, n, 6) and your output shape could be (m, n*6), where you apply softmax for every group of 6 outputs (corresponding to one class) and sum into a single loss value. This is an example of multiclass, multilabel classification.
I would start by trying 2n neurons in each hidden layer.
If you really want a continuous output for grades, however, then I recommend using separate classification and regression networks. This way you don't have to combine classification and regression loss into one number, which can get messy with scaling issues.
You can keep the grade buckets for input data only, so the two networks take the same input data, but for the grade regression network your last layer can be n sigmoid units with log loss. These will output numbers between 0 and 1, corresponding the predicted grade for each class.
If you want to go even further, consider using an architecture that considers the order in which students took previous classes. For example if a student took French I the previous year, it is more likely he/she will take French II this year than if he/she took French Freshman year and did not continue with French after that.
This my sound as very naive question. I checked on google and many YouTube videos for beginners and pretty much, all explain data weighting as something the most obvious. I still do not understand why data is being weighted.
Let's assume I have four features:
a b c d
1 2 1 4
If I pass each value to Sigmond function, I'll receive -1 >< 1 value already.
I really don't understand why data needs or it is recommended to be weighted first. If you could explain to me this in very simple manner, I would appreciate it a lot.
I think you are not talking about weighing data but features.
A feature is a column in your table and as data I would understand rows.
The confusion comes now from the fact that weighing rows is also sometimes sensible, e.g., if you want to punish misclassification of positive class more.
Why do we need to weigh features?
I assume you are talking about a modle like
prediction = sigmoid(sum_i weight_i * feature_i) > base
Let's assume you want to predict whether a person is overweight based on Bodyweight, height, and age.
In R we can generate a sample dataset as
height = rnorm(100,1.80,0.1) #normal distributed mean 1.8,variance 0.1
weight = rnorm(100,70,10)
age = runif(100,0,100)
ow = weight / (height**2)>25 #overweight if BMI > 25
data = data.frame(height,weight,age,bc,ow)
if we now plot the data you can see that at least my sample of the data can be separated with a straight line in weight/height. However, age does not provide any value. If we weight it prior to the sum/sigmoid you can put all factors into relation.
Furthermore, as you can see from the following plot the weight/height have a very different domain. Hence, they need to be put into relation, such that the line in the following plot has the right slope, as the value of weight have are one order of magnitude larger
Any binary one-hot encoding is aware of only values seen in training, so features not encountered during fitting will be silently ignored. For real time, where you have millions of records in a second, and features have very high cardinality, you need to keep your hasher/mapper updated with the data.
How can we do an incremental update to the hasher (rather calculating the entire fit() every time we incounter a new feature-value pair)? What is the suggested approach here the tackle this?
It depends on the learning algorithm that you are using. If you are using a method that has been designated for sparse data sets (FTRL, FFM, linear SVM) one possible approach is the following (note that it will introduce collisions in the features and a lot of constant columns).
First allocate for each element of your sample a (as large as possible) vector V, of length D.
For each categorical variable, evaluate hash(var_name + "_" + var_value) % D. This gives you an integer i, and you can store V[i] = 1.
Therefore, V never grows larger as new features appear. However, as soon as the number of features is large enough, some features will collide (i.e. be written at the same place) and this may result in an increased error rate...
Edit. You can write your own vectorizer to avoid collisions. First call L the current number of features. Prepare the same vector V of length 2L (this 2 will allow you to avoid collisions as new features arrive - at least for some time, depending of the arrival rate of new features).
Starting with an emty dictionary<input_type,int>, associate to each feature an integer. If have already seen the feature, return the int corresponding to the feature. If not, create a new entry with an integer corresponding to the new index. I think (but I am not sure) this is what LabelEncoder does for you.
How can algorithms which partition a space in to halves, such as Suport Vector Machines, be generalised to label data with labels from sets such as the integers?
For example, a support vector machine operates by constructing a hyperplane and then things 'above' the hyperplane take one label, and things below it take the other label.
How does this get generalised so that the labels are, for example, integers, or some other arbitrarily large set?
One option is the 'one-vs-all' approach, in which you create one classifier for each set you want to partition into, and select the set with the highest probability.
For example, say you want to classify objects with a label from {1,2,3}. Then you can create three binary classifiers:
C1 = 1 or (not 1)
C2 = 2 or (not 2)
C3 = 3 or (not 3)
If you run these classifiers on a new piece of data X, then they might return:
C1(X) = 31.6% chance of being in 1
C2(X) = 63.3% chance of being in 2
C3(X) = 89.3% chance of being in 3
Based on these outputs, you could classify X as most likely being from class 3. (The probabilities don't add up to 1 - that's because the classifiers don't know about each other).
If your output labels are ordered (with some kind of meaningful, rather than arbitrary ordering). For example, in finance you want to classify stocks into {BUY, SELL, HOLD}. Although you can't legitimately perform a regression on these (the data is ordinal rather than ratio data) you can assign the values of -1, 0 and 1 to SELL, HOLD and BUY and then pretend that you have ratio data. Sometimes this can give good results even though it's not theoretically justified.
Another approach is the Cramer-Singer method ("On the algorithmic implementation of multiclass kernel-based vector machines").
Svmlight implements it here: http://svmlight.joachims.org/svm_multiclass.html.
Classification into an infinite set (such as the set of integers) is called ordinal regression. Usually this is done by mapping a range of continuous values onto an element of the set. (see http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/zoubin/papers/chu05a.pdf, Figure 1a)