I am a new in Machine Learning area & I am (trying to) implementing anomaly detection algorithms, one algorithm is Autoencoder implemented with help of keras from tensorflow library and the second one is IsolationForest implemented with help of sklearn library and I want to compare these algorithms with help of roc_auc_score ( function from Python), but I am not sure if I am doing it correct.
In documentation of roc_auc_score function I can see, that for input it should be like:
sklearn.metrics.roc_auc_score(y_true, y_score, average=’macro’, sample_weight=None, max_fpr=None
y_true :
True binary labels or binary label indicators.
y_score :
Target scores, can either be probability estimates of the positive class, confidence values, or non-thresholded measure of decisions (as returned by “decision_function” on some classifiers). For binary y_true, y_score is supposed to be the score of the class with greater label.
For AE I am computing roc_auc_score like this:
model.fit(...) # model from https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/keras/Sequential
pred = model.predict(x_test) # predict function from https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/keras/Sequential#predict
metric = np.mean(np.power(x_test - pred, 2), axis=1) #MSE
print(roc_auc_score(y_test, metric) # where y_test is true binary labels 0/1
For IsolationForest I am computing roc_auc_score like this:
model.fit(...) # model from https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.ensemble.IsolationForest.html
metric = -(model.score_samples(x_test)) # https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.ensemble.IsolationForest.html#sklearn.ensemble.IsolationForest.score_samples
print(roc_auc_score(y_test, metric) #where y_test is true binary labels 0/1
I am just curious if returned roc_auc_score from both implementations of AE and IsolationForest are comparable (I mean, if I am computing them in the correct way)? Especially in AE model, where I am putting MSE into the roc_auc_score (if not, what should be the input as y_score to this function?)
Comparing AE and IsolationForest in the context of anomaly dection using sklearn.metrics.roc_auc_score based on scores coming from AE MSE loss and IF decision_function() respectively is okay. Varying range of the y_score when switching classifier isn't an issue, since this range is taken into account for each classifier when computing the AUC.
To understand that AUC isn't range dependent, remember that you travel along the decision function values to obtain the ROC points. Rescaling the decision function values will only change the decision function thresholds accordingly, defining similar points of the ROC since the new thresholds will lead each to the same TPR and FPR as they did before the rescaling.
Couldn't find a convincing code line in sklearn.metrics.roc_auc_score's implementation, but you can easily observe this comparison in published code associated with a research paper. For example, in the Deep One-Class Classification paper's code (I'm not an author, I know the paper's code because I'm reproducing their results), AE MSE loss and IF decision_function() are the roc_auc_score inputs (whose outputs the paper is comparing):
AE roc_auc_score computation
Found in this script on github.
from sklearn.metrics import roc_auc_score
(...)
scores = torch.sum((outputs - inputs) ** 2, dim=tuple(range(1, outputs.dim())))
(...)
auc = roc_auc_score(labels, scores)
IsolationForest roc_auc_score computation
Found in this script on github.
from sklearn.metrics import roc_auc_score
(...)
scores = (-1.0) * self.isoForest.decision_function(X.astype(np.float32)) # compute anomaly score
y_pred = (self.isoForest.predict(X.astype(np.float32)) == -1) * 1 # get prediction
(...)
auc = roc_auc_score(y, scores.flatten())
Note: The two scripts come from two different repositories but are actually the source of a single paper's results. The authors only chose to create an extra repository for their PyTorch implementation of an AD method requiring a neural network.
I cant find proper description of metrics outputs.
For example if I use
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
then I get loss and accuracy tr_loss, tr_acc = model.train_on_batch(X, Y)
if I compile with metrics=['categorical_accuracy'] then I get 2 numbers as well,
but what are they ?
EDIT: I did this: print(model.metrics_names) and got: ['loss', 'categorical_accuracy']
The accuracy metric is actually a placeholder and keras chooses the appropriate accuracy metric for you, between binary_accuracy if you use binary_crossentropy loss, and categorical_accuracy if you use categorical_crossentropy loss.
So in this specific case, both metrics (accuracy and categorical_accuracy) are literally the same, and model.evaluate return loss and accuracy.
Could you please post the two numbers you mentioned?
I guess they are loss (categorical_crossentropy in your case) and metrics you added. (accuracy or categorical_accuracy as configured in your case).
I use a CatBoostClassifier and my classes are highly imbalanced. I applied a scale_pos_weight parameter to account for that. While training with an evaluation dataset (test) CatBoost shows a high precision on test. However, when I make predictions on test using a predict method, I only get a low precision score (calculated using the sklearn.metrics).
I think this might be related to class weights that I applied. However, I don't quite understand how a precision score is affected by this.
params = frozendict({
'task_type': 'CPU',
'loss_function': 'Logloss',
'eval_metric': 'F1',
'custom_metric': ['F1', 'Precision', 'Recall'],
'iterations': 100,
'random_seed': 20190128,
'scale_pos_weight': 56.88657244809081,
'learning_rate': 0.5412829495147387,
'depth': 7,
'l2_leaf_reg': 9.526905230698302
})
from catboost import CatBoostClassifier
model = cb.CatBoostClassifier(**params)
model.fit(
X_train, y_train,
cat_features=np.where(X_train.dtypes == np.object)[0],
eval_set=(X_test, y_test),
verbose=False,
plot=True
)
model.get_best_score()
{'learn': {'Recall': 0.9243007537531925,
'Logloss': 0.15892360013680026,
'F1': 0.9416723809244181,
'Precision': 0.9640191600545249},
'validation_0': {'Recall': 0.914252301192093,
'Logloss': 0.1714387314107052,
'F1': 0.9357892623978286,
'Precision': 0.9642642597943112}}
y_test_pred = model.predict(data=X_test)
from sklearn.metrics import balanced_accuracy_score, recall_score, precision_score, f1_score
print('Balanced accuracy: {:.2f}'.format(balanced_accuracy_score(y_test, y_test_pred)))
print('Precision: {:.2f}'.format(precision_score(y_test, y_test_pred)))
print('Recall: {:.2f}'.format(recall_score(y_test, y_test_pred)))
print('F1: {:.2f}'.format(f1_score(y_test, y_test_pred)))
Balanced accuracy: 0.94
Precision: 0.29
Recall: 0.91
F1: 0.44
I expected to get the same precision as CatBoost show while training, however, it's not so. What am I doing wrong?
Default use_weights is set to True , which means adding weights to the evaluation metrics, e.g. Precision:use_weights=True,
To let your own precision calculator the same as his, change to Precision: use_weights=False
Also, get_best_score gives the highest score over the iterations, you need to specify which iteration to be used in prediction. You can set use_best_model=True in model.fit to automatically choose the iteration.
The predict function uses a standard threshold of 0.5 to convert the probabilities of the prediction into a binary value. When you are dealing with a imbalanced problem, the threshold of 0.5 is not always the best value, that's why on the test set you are achieving a poor precision.
In order to find a better threshold, catboost has some methods that help you to do so, like get_roc_curve, get_fpr_curve, get_fnr_curve. These 3 methods can help you to visualize the true positive, false positive and false negative rates by changing the prediction threhsold.
Besides these visualization methods, catboost has a method called select_threshold which gives you the best threshold by that optimizes one of the curves.
You can check this on their documentation.
In addition to setting the use_bet_model=True, ensure that the class balance in both datasets is the same, or use balanced accuracy metrics to account for different class balance.
If you've done both of these, and you still see much worse accuracy metrics on a test set versus the train set, it is a sign of overfitting. I'd recommend you take advantage of the CatBoost's overfitting detector. The most common first method is to set early_stopping_rounds to an integer like 10, which will stop training once an improvement in the selected loss function isn't achieved after that number of training rounds (see early_stopping_rounds documentation).
I am training a neural network for multilabel classification, with a large number of classes (1000). Which means more than one output can be active for every input. On an average, I have two classes active per output frame. On training with a cross entropy loss the neural network resorts to outputting only zeros, because it gets the least loss with this output since 99.8% of my labels are zeros. Any suggestions on how I can push the network to give more weight to the positive classes?
Tensorflow has a loss function weighted_cross_entropy_with_logits, which can be used to give more weight to the 1's. So it should be applicable to a sparse multi-label classification setting like yours.
From the documentation:
This is like sigmoid_cross_entropy_with_logits() except that pos_weight, allows one to trade off recall and precision by up- or down-weighting the cost of a positive error relative to a negative error.
The argument pos_weight is used as a multiplier for the positive targets
If you use the tensorflow backend in Keras, you can use the loss function like this (Keras 2.1.1):
import tensorflow as tf
import keras.backend.tensorflow_backend as tfb
POS_WEIGHT = 10 # multiplier for positive targets, needs to be tuned
def weighted_binary_crossentropy(target, output):
"""
Weighted binary crossentropy between an output tensor
and a target tensor. POS_WEIGHT is used as a multiplier
for the positive targets.
Combination of the following functions:
* keras.losses.binary_crossentropy
* keras.backend.tensorflow_backend.binary_crossentropy
* tf.nn.weighted_cross_entropy_with_logits
"""
# transform back to logits
_epsilon = tfb._to_tensor(tfb.epsilon(), output.dtype.base_dtype)
output = tf.clip_by_value(output, _epsilon, 1 - _epsilon)
output = tf.log(output / (1 - output))
# compute weighted loss
loss = tf.nn.weighted_cross_entropy_with_logits(targets=target,
logits=output,
pos_weight=POS_WEIGHT)
return tf.reduce_mean(loss, axis=-1)
Then in your model:
model.compile(loss=weighted_binary_crossentropy, ...)
I have not found many resources yet which report well working values for the pos_weight in relation to the number of classes, average active classes, etc.
Many thanks to tobigue for the great solution.
The tensorflow and keras apis have changed since that answer. So the updated version of weighted_binary_crossentropy is below for Tensorflow 2.7.0.
import tensorflow as tf
POS_WEIGHT = 10
def weighted_binary_crossentropy(target, output):
"""
Weighted binary crossentropy between an output tensor
and a target tensor. POS_WEIGHT is used as a multiplier
for the positive targets.
Combination of the following functions:
* keras.losses.binary_crossentropy
* keras.backend.tensorflow_backend.binary_crossentropy
* tf.nn.weighted_cross_entropy_with_logits
"""
# transform back to logits
_epsilon = tf.convert_to_tensor(tf.keras.backend.epsilon(), output.dtype.base_dtype)
output = tf.clip_by_value(output, _epsilon, 1 - _epsilon)
output = tf.math.log(output / (1 - output))
loss = tf.nn.weighted_cross_entropy_with_logits(labels=target, logits=output, pos_weight=POS_WEIGHT)
return tf.reduce_mean(loss, axis=-1)
I'm trying to train a CNN to categorize text by topic. When I use binary cross-entropy I get ~80% accuracy, with categorical cross-entropy I get ~50% accuracy.
I don't understand why this is. It's a multiclass problem, doesn't that mean that I have to use categorical cross-entropy and that the results with binary cross-entropy are meaningless?
model.add(embedding_layer)
model.add(Dropout(0.25))
# convolution layers
model.add(Conv1D(nb_filter=32,
filter_length=4,
border_mode='valid',
activation='relu'))
model.add(MaxPooling1D(pool_length=2))
# dense layers
model.add(Flatten())
model.add(Dense(256))
model.add(Dropout(0.25))
model.add(Activation('relu'))
# output layer
model.add(Dense(len(class_id_index)))
model.add(Activation('softmax'))
Then I compile it either it like this using categorical_crossentropy as the loss function:
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
or
model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
Intuitively it makes sense why I'd want to use categorical cross-entropy, I don't understand why I get good results with binary, and poor results with categorical.
The reason for this apparent performance discrepancy between categorical & binary cross entropy is what user xtof54 has already reported in his answer below, i.e.:
the accuracy computed with the Keras method evaluate is just plain
wrong when using binary_crossentropy with more than 2 labels
I would like to elaborate more on this, demonstrate the actual underlying issue, explain it, and offer a remedy.
This behavior is not a bug; the underlying reason is a rather subtle & undocumented issue at how Keras actually guesses which accuracy to use, depending on the loss function you have selected, when you include simply metrics=['accuracy'] in your model compilation. In other words, while your first compilation option
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
is valid, your second one:
model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
will not produce what you expect, but the reason is not the use of binary cross entropy (which, at least in principle, is an absolutely valid loss function).
Why is that? If you check the metrics source code, Keras does not define a single accuracy metric, but several different ones, among them binary_accuracy and categorical_accuracy. What happens under the hood is that, since you have selected binary cross entropy as your loss function and have not specified a particular accuracy metric, Keras (wrongly...) infers that you are interested in the binary_accuracy, and this is what it returns - while in fact you are interested in the categorical_accuracy.
Let's verify that this is the case, using the MNIST CNN example in Keras, with the following modification:
model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy']) # WRONG way
model.fit(x_train, y_train,
batch_size=batch_size,
epochs=2, # only 2 epochs, for demonstration purposes
verbose=1,
validation_data=(x_test, y_test))
# Keras reported accuracy:
score = model.evaluate(x_test, y_test, verbose=0)
score[1]
# 0.9975801164627075
# Actual accuracy calculated manually:
import numpy as np
y_pred = model.predict(x_test)
acc = sum([np.argmax(y_test[i])==np.argmax(y_pred[i]) for i in range(10000)])/10000
acc
# 0.98780000000000001
score[1]==acc
# False
To remedy this, i.e. to use indeed binary cross entropy as your loss function (as I said, nothing wrong with this, at least in principle) while still getting the categorical accuracy required by the problem at hand, you should ask explicitly for categorical_accuracy in the model compilation as follows:
from keras.metrics import categorical_accuracy
model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=[categorical_accuracy])
In the MNIST example, after training, scoring, and predicting the test set as I show above, the two metrics now are the same, as they should be:
# Keras reported accuracy:
score = model.evaluate(x_test, y_test, verbose=0)
score[1]
# 0.98580000000000001
# Actual accuracy calculated manually:
y_pred = model.predict(x_test)
acc = sum([np.argmax(y_test[i])==np.argmax(y_pred[i]) for i in range(10000)])/10000
acc
# 0.98580000000000001
score[1]==acc
# True
System setup:
Python version 3.5.3
Tensorflow version 1.2.1
Keras version 2.0.4
UPDATE: After my post, I discovered that this issue had already been identified in this answer.
It all depends on the type of classification problem you are dealing with. There are three main categories
binary classification (two target classes),
multi-class classification (more than two exclusive targets),
multi-label classification (more than two non exclusive targets), in which multiple target classes can be on at the same time.
In the first case, binary cross-entropy should be used and targets should be encoded as one-hot vectors.
In the second case, categorical cross-entropy should be used and targets should be encoded as one-hot vectors.
In the last case, binary cross-entropy should be used and targets should be encoded as one-hot vectors. Each output neuron (or unit) is considered as a separate random binary variable, and the loss for the entire vector of outputs is the product of the loss of single binary variables. Therefore it is the product of binary cross-entropy for each single output unit.
The binary cross-entropy is defined as
and categorical cross-entropy is defined as
where c is the index running over the number of classes C.
I came across an "inverted" issue — I was getting good results with categorical_crossentropy (with 2 classes) and poor with binary_crossentropy. It seems that problem was with wrong activation function. The correct settings were:
for binary_crossentropy: sigmoid activation, scalar target
for categorical_crossentropy: softmax activation, one-hot encoded target
It's really interesting case. Actually in your setup the following statement is true:
binary_crossentropy = len(class_id_index) * categorical_crossentropy
This means that up to a constant multiplication factor your losses are equivalent. The weird behaviour that you are observing during a training phase might be an example of a following phenomenon:
At the beginning the most frequent class is dominating the loss - so network is learning to predict mostly this class for every example.
After it learnt the most frequent pattern it starts discriminating among less frequent classes. But when you are using adam - the learning rate has a much smaller value than it had at the beginning of training (it's because of the nature of this optimizer). It makes training slower and prevents your network from e.g. leaving a poor local minimum less possible.
That's why this constant factor might help in case of binary_crossentropy. After many epochs - the learning rate value is greater than in categorical_crossentropy case. I usually restart training (and learning phase) a few times when I notice such behaviour or/and adjusting a class weights using the following pattern:
class_weight = 1 / class_frequency
This makes loss from a less frequent classes balancing the influence of a dominant class loss at the beginning of a training and in a further part of an optimization process.
EDIT:
Actually - I checked that even though in case of maths:
binary_crossentropy = len(class_id_index) * categorical_crossentropy
should hold - in case of keras it's not true, because keras is automatically normalizing all outputs to sum up to 1. This is the actual reason behind this weird behaviour as in case of multiclassification such normalization harms a training.
After commenting #Marcin answer, I have more carefully checked one of my students code where I found the same weird behavior, even after only 2 epochs ! (So #Marcin's explanation was not very likely in my case).
And I found that the answer is actually very simple: the accuracy computed with the Keras method evaluate is just plain wrong when using binary_crossentropy with more than 2 labels. You can check that by recomputing the accuracy yourself (first call the Keras method "predict" and then compute the number of correct answers returned by predict): you get the true accuracy, which is much lower than the Keras "evaluate" one.
a simple example under a multi-class setting to illustrate
suppose you have 4 classes (onehot encoded) and below is just one prediction
true_label = [0,1,0,0]
predicted_label = [0,0,1,0]
when using categorical_crossentropy, the accuracy is just 0 , it only cares about if you get the concerned class right.
however when using binary_crossentropy, the accuracy is calculated for all classes, it would be 50% for this prediction. and the final result will be the mean of the individual accuracies for both cases.
it is recommended to use categorical_crossentropy for multi-class(classes are mutually exclusive) problem but binary_crossentropy for multi-label problem.
As it is a multi-class problem, you have to use the categorical_crossentropy, the binary cross entropy will produce bogus results, most likely will only evaluate the first two classes only.
50% for a multi-class problem can be quite good, depending on the number of classes. If you have n classes, then 100/n is the minimum performance you can get by outputting a random class.
You are passing a target array of shape (x-dim, y-dim) while using as loss categorical_crossentropy. categorical_crossentropy expects targets to be binary matrices (1s and 0s) of shape (samples, classes). If your targets are integer classes, you can convert them to the expected format via:
from keras.utils import to_categorical
y_binary = to_categorical(y_int)
Alternatively, you can use the loss function sparse_categorical_crossentropy instead, which does expect integer targets.
model.compile(loss='sparse_categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
when using the categorical_crossentropy loss, your targets should be in categorical format (e.g. if you have 10 classes, the target for each sample should be a 10-dimensional vector that is all-zeros except for a 1 at the index corresponding to the class of the sample).
Take a look at the equation you can find that binary cross entropy not only punish those label = 1, predicted =0, but also label = 0, predicted = 1.
However categorical cross entropy only punish those label = 1 but predicted = 1.That's why we make assumption that there is only ONE label positive.
The main point is answered satisfactorily with the brilliant piece of sleuthing by desernaut. However there are occasions when BCE (binary cross entropy) could throw different results than CCE (categorical cross entropy) and may be the preferred choice. While the thumb rules shared above (which loss to select) work fine for 99% of the cases, I would like to add a few new dimensions to this discussion.
The OP had a softmax activation and this throws a probability distribution as the predicted value. It is a multi-class problem. The preferred loss is categorical CE. Essentially this boils down to -ln(p) where 'p' is the predicted probability of the lone positive class in the sample. This means that the negative predictions dont have a role to play in calculating CE. This is by intention.
On a rare occasion, it may be needed to make the -ve voices count. This can be done by treating the above sample as a series of binary predictions. So if expected is [1 0 0 0 0] and predicted is [0.1 0.5 0.1 0.1 0.2], this is further broken down into:
expected = [1,0], [0,1], [0,1], [0,1], [0,1]
predicted = [0.1, 0.9], [.5, .5], [.1, .9], [.1, .9], [.2, .8]
Now we proceed to compute 5 different cross entropies - one for each of the above 5 expected/predicted combo and sum them up. Then:
CE = -[ ln(.1) + ln(0.5) + ln(0.9) + ln(0.9) + ln(0.8)]
The CE has a different scale but continues to be a measure of the difference between the expected and predicted values. The only difference is that in this scheme, the -ve values are also penalized/rewarded along with the +ve values. In case your problem is such that you are going to use the output probabilities (both +ve and -ves) instead of using the max() to predict just the 1 +ve label, then you may want to consider this version of CE.
How about a multi-label situation where expected = [1 0 0 0 1]? Conventional approach is to use one sigmoid per output neuron instead of an overall softmax. This ensures that the output probabilities are independent of each other. So we get something like:
expected = [1 0 0 0 1]
predicted is = [0.1 0.5 0.1 0.1 0.9]
By definition, CE measures the difference between 2 probability distributions. But the above two lists are not probability distributions. Probability distributions should always add up to 1. So conventional solution is to use same loss approach as before - break the expected and predicted values into 5 individual probability distributions, proceed to calculate 5 cross entropies and sum them up. Then:
CE = -[ ln(.1) + ln(0.5) + ln(0.9) + ln(0.9) + ln(0.9)] = 3.3
The challenge happens when the number of classes may be very high - say a 1000 and there may be only couple of them present in each sample. So the expected is something like: [1,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0.....990 zeroes]. The predicted could be something like: [.8, .1, .1, .1, .1, .1, .8, .1, .1, .1.....990 0.1's]
In this case the CE =
- [ ln(.8) + ln(.8) for the 2 +ve classes and 998 * ln(0.9) for the 998 -ve classes]
= 0.44 (for the +ve classes) + 105 (for the negative classes)
You can see how the -ve classes are beginning to create a nuisance value when calculating the loss. The voice of the +ve samples (which may be all that we care about) is getting drowned out. What do we do? We can't use categorical CE (the version where only +ve samples are considered in calculation). This is because, we are forced to break up the probability distributions into multiple binary probability distributions because otherwise it would not be a probability distribution in the first place. Once we break it into multiple binary probability distributions, we have no choice but to use binary CE and this of course gives weightage to -ve classes.
One option is to drown the voice of the -ve classes by a multiplier. So we multiply all -ve losses by a value gamma where gamma < 1. Say in above case, gamma can be .0001. Now the loss comes to:
= 0.44 (for the +ve classes) + 0.105 (for the negative classes)
The nuisance value has come down. 2 years back Facebook did that and much more in a paper they came up with where they also multiplied the -ve losses by p to the power of x. 'p' is the probability of the output being a +ve and x is a constant>1. This penalized -ve losses even further especially the ones where the model is pretty confident (where 1-p is close to 1). This combined effect of punishing negative class losses combined with harsher punishment for the easily classified cases (which accounted for majority of the -ve cases) worked beautifully for Facebook and they called it focal loss.
So in response to OP's question of whether binary CE makes any sense at all in his case, the answer is - it depends. In 99% of the cases the conventional thumb rules work but there could be occasions when these rules could be bent or even broken to suit the problem at hand.
For a more in-depth treatment, you can refer to: https://towardsdatascience.com/cross-entropy-classification-losses-no-math-few-stories-lots-of-intuition-d56f8c7f06b0
The binary_crossentropy(y_target, y_predict) doesn't need to apply to binary classification problem.
In the source code of binary_crossentropy(), the nn.sigmoid_cross_entropy_with_logits(labels=target, logits=output) of tensorflow was actually used.
And, in the documentation, it says that:
Measures the probability error in discrete classification tasks in which each class is independent and not mutually exclusive. For instance, one could perform multilabel classification where a picture can contain both an elephant and a dog at the same time.