I'm implementing simple gradient descent in octave but its not working. Here is the data I'm using:
X = [1 2 3
1 4 5
1 6 7]
y = [10
11
12]
theta = [0
0
0]
alpha = 0.001 and itr = 50
This is my gradient descent implementation:
function theta = Gradient(X,y,theta,alpha,itr)
m= length(y)
for i = 1:itr,
th1 = theta(1) - alpha * (1/m) * sum((X * theta - y) .* X(:, 1));
th2 = theta(2) - alpha * (1/m) * sum((X * theta - y) .* X(:, 2));
th3 = theta(3) - alpha * (1/m) * sum((X * theta - y) .* X(:, 3));
theta(1) = th1;
theta(2) = th2;
theta(3) = th3;
end
Questions are:
It produces some values of theta which I use in theta * [1 2 3] and expect an output near about 10 (from y). Is that the correct way to test the hypothesis? [h(x) = theta' * x]
How can I determine how many times should it iterate? If I give it 1500 iterations, theta gets extremely small (in e).
If I use double digit numbers in X, theta gets too small again. Even with < 5 iterations.
I've been struggling with these things for a long time now. Unable to resolve it myself.
Sorry for bad formatting.
Your Batch gradient descent implementation seems perfectly fine to me. Can you be more specific on what is the error you are facing. Having said that, for your question Is that the correct way to test the hypothesis? [h(x) = theta' * x].
Based on the dimensions of your test set here, you should test it as h(x) = X*theta.
For your second question, the number of iterations depends on the data set provided. To decide on the optimized number of iterations, you need to plot your cost function with the number of iterations. And as iterations increase, values of cost function should decrease. By this you can decide upon how many iterations you need. You might also consider, increasing the value of alpha in steps of 0.001, 0.003, 0.01, 0.03, 0.1 ... to consider best possible alpha value.
For your third question, I guess you are directly trying to model the data which you have in this question. This data is very small, it just contains 3 training examples. You might be trying to implement linear regression algorithm. For that, you need to that proper training set which contains sufficient data to train your model. Then you can test your model with your test data.
Refer to Andrew Ng course of Machine Learning in www.coursera.org. You will find more information in that course.
Related
I'm writing a k-means algorithm. At each step, I want to compute the distance of my n points to k centroids, without a for loop, and for d dimensions.
The problem is I have a hard time splitting on my number of dimensions with the Matlab functions I know. Here is my current code, with x being my n 2D-points and y my k centroids (also 2D-points of course), and with the points distributed along dimension 1, and the spatial coordinates along the dimension 2:
dist = #(a,b) (a - b).^2;
dx = bsxfun(dist, x(:,1), y(:,1)'); % x is (n,1) and y is (1,k)
dy = bsxfun(dist, x(:,2), y(:,2)'); % so the result is (n,k)
dists = dx + dy; % contains the square distance of each points to the k centroids
[_,l] = min(dists, [], 2); % we then argmin on the 2nd dimension
How to vectorize furthermore ?
First edit 3 days later, searching on my own
Since asking this question I made progress on my own towards vectorizing this piece of code.
The code above runs in approximately 0.7 ms on my example.
I first used repmat to make it easy to do broadcasting:
dists = permute(permute(repmat(x,1,1,k), [3,2,1]) - y, [3,2,1]).^2;
dists = sum(dists, 2);
[~,l] = min(dists, [], 3);
As expected it is slightly slower since we replicate the matrix, it runs at 0.85 ms.
From this example it was pretty easy to use bsxfun for the whole thing, but it turned out to be extremely slow, running in 150 ms so more than 150 times slower than the repmat version:
dist = #(a, b) (a - b).^2;
dists = permute(bsxfun(dist, permute(x, [3, 2, 1]), y), [3, 2, 1]);
dists = sum(dists, 2);
[~,l] = min(dists, [], 3);
Why is it so slow ? Isn't vectorizing always an improvement on speed, since it uses vector instructions on the CPU ? I mean of course simple for loops could be optimized to use it aswell, but how can vectorizing make the code slower ? Did I do it wrong ?
Using a for loop
For the sake of completeness, here's the for loop version of my code, surprisingly the fastest running in 0.4 ms, not sure why..
for i=1:k
dists(:,i) = sum((x - y(i,:)).^2, 2);
endfor
[~,l] = min(dists, [], 2);
Note: This answer was written when the question was also tagged MATLAB. Links to Octave documentation added after the MATLAB tag was removed.
You can use the pdist2MATLAB/Octave function to calculate pairwise distances between two sets of observations.
This way, you offload the bother of vectorization to the people who wrote MATLAB/Octave (and they have done a pretty good job of it)
X = rand(10,3);
Y = rand(5,3);
D = pdist2(X, Y);
D is now a 10x5 matrix where the i, jth element is the distance between the ith X and jth Y point.
You can pass it the kind of distance you want as the third argument -- e.g. 'euclidean', 'minkowski', etc, or you could pass a function handle to your custom function like so:
dist = #(a,b) (a - b).^2;
D = pdist2(X, Y, dist);
As saastn mentions, pdist2(..., 'smallest', k) makes things easier in k-means. This returns just the smallest k values from each column of pdist2's result. Octave doesn't have this functionality, but it's easily replicated using sort()MATLAB/Octave.
D_smallest = sort(D);
D_smallest = D_smallest(1:k, :);
I know xgboost need first gradient and second gradient, but anybody else has used "mae" as obj function?
A little bit of theory first, sorry! You asked for the grad and hessian for MAE, however, the MAE is not continuously twice differentiable so trying to calculate the first and second derivatives becomes tricky. Below we can see the "kink" at x=0 which prevents the MAE from being continuously differentiable.
Moreover, the second derivative is zero at all the points where it is well behaved. In XGBoost, the second derivative is used as a denominator in the leaf weights, and when zero, creates serious math-errors.
Given these complexities, our best bet is to try to approximate the MAE using some other, nicely behaved function. Let's take a look.
We can see above that there are several functions that approximate the absolute value. Clearly, for very small values, the Squared Error (MSE) is a fairly good approximation of the MAE. However, I assume that this is not sufficient for your use case.
Huber Loss is a well documented loss function. However, it is not smooth so we cannot guarantee smooth derivatives. We can approximate it using the Psuedo-Huber function. It can be implemented in python XGBoost as follows,
import xgboost as xgb
dtrain = xgb.DMatrix(x_train, label=y_train)
dtest = xgb.DMatrix(x_test, label=y_test)
param = {'max_depth': 5}
num_round = 10
def huber_approx_obj(preds, dtrain):
d = preds - dtrain.get_labels() #remove .get_labels() for sklearn
h = 1 #h is delta in the graphic
scale = 1 + (d / h) ** 2
scale_sqrt = np.sqrt(scale)
grad = d / scale_sqrt
hess = 1 / scale / scale_sqrt
return grad, hess
bst = xgb.train(param, dtrain, num_round, obj=huber_approx_obj)
Other function can be used by replacing the obj=huber_approx_obj.
Fair Loss is not well documented at all but it seems to work rather well. The fair loss function is:
It can be implemented as such,
def fair_obj(preds, dtrain):
"""y = c * abs(x) - c**2 * np.log(abs(x)/c + 1)"""
x = preds - dtrain.get_labels()
c = 1
den = abs(x) + c
grad = c*x / den
hess = c*c / den ** 2
return grad, hess
This code is taken and adapted from the second place solution in the Kaggle Allstate Challenge.
Log-Cosh Loss function.
def log_cosh_obj(preds, dtrain):
x = preds - dtrain.get_labels()
grad = np.tanh(x)
hess = 1 / np.cosh(x)**2
return grad, hess
Finally, you can create your own custom loss functions using the above functions as templates.
Warning: Due to API changes newer versions of XGBoost may require loss functions for the form:
def custom_objective(y_true, y_pred):
...
return grad, hess
For the Huber loss above, I think the gradient is missing a negative sign upfront. Should be as
grad = - d / scale_sqrt
I am running the huber/fair metric from above on ~normally distributed Y, but for some reason with alpha <0 (and all the time for fair) the result prediction will equal to zero...
I have implemented a very simple linear regression with gradient descent algorithm in JavaScript, but after consulting multiple sources and trying several things, I cannot get it to converge.
The data is absolutely linear, it's just the numbers 0 to 30 as inputs with x*3 as their correct outputs to learn.
This is the logic behind the gradient descent:
train(input, output) {
const predictedOutput = this.predict(input);
const delta = output - predictedOutput;
this.m += this.learningRate * delta * input;
this.b += this.learningRate * delta;
}
predict(x) {
return x * this.m + this.b;
}
I took the formulas from different places, including:
Exercises from Udacity's Deep Learning Foundations Nanodegree
Andrew Ng's course on Gradient Descent for Linear Regression (also here)
Stanford's CS229 Lecture Notes
this other PDF slides I found from Carnegie Mellon
I have already tried:
normalizing input and output values to the [-1, 1] range
normalizing input and output values to the [0, 1] range
normalizing input and output values to have mean = 0 and stddev = 1
reducing the learning rate (1e-7 is as low as I went)
having a linear data set with no bias at all (y = x * 3)
having a linear data set with non-zero bias (y = x * 3 + 2)
initializing the weights with random non-zero values between -1 and 1
Still, the weights (this.b and this.m) do not approach any of the data values, and they diverge into infinity.
I'm obviously doing something wrong, but I cannot figure out what it is.
Update: Here's a little bit more context that may help figure out what my problem is exactly:
I'm trying to model a simple approximation to a linear function, with online learning by a linear regression pseudo-neuron. With that, my parameters are:
weights: [this.m, this.b]
inputs: [x, 1]
activation function: identity function z(x) = x
As such, my net will be expressed by y = this.m * x + this.b * 1, simulating the data-driven function that I want to approximate (y = 3 * x).
What I want is for my network to "learn" the parameters this.m = 3 and this.b = 0, but it seems I get stuck at a local minima.
My error function is the mean-squared error:
error(allInputs, allOutputs) {
let error = 0;
for (let i = 0; i < allInputs.length; i++) {
const x = allInputs[i];
const y = allOutputs[i];
const predictedOutput = this.predict(x);
const delta = y - predictedOutput;
error += delta * delta;
}
return error / allInputs.length;
}
My logic for updating my weights will be (according to the sources I've checked so far) wi -= alpha * dError/dwi
For the sake of simplicity, I'll call my weights this.m and this.b, so we can relate it back to my JavaScript code. I'll also call y^ the predicted value.
From here:
error = y - y^
= y - this.m * x + this.b
dError/dm = -x
dError/db = 1
And so, applying that to the weight correction logic:
this.m += alpha * x
this.b -= alpha * 1
But this doesn't seem correct at all.
I finally found what's wrong, and I'm answering my own question in hopes it will help beginners in this area too.
First, as Sascha said, I had some theoretical misunderstandings. It may be correct that your adjustment includes the input value verbatim, but as he said, it should already be part of the gradient. This all depends on your choice of the error function.
Your error function will be the measure of what you use to measure how off you were from the real value, and that measurement needs to be consistent. I was using mean-squared-error as a measurement tool (as you can see in my error method), but I was using a pure-absolute error (y^ - y) inside of the training method to measure the error. Your gradient will depend on the choice of this error function. So choose only one and stick with it.
Second, simplify your assumptions in order to test what's wrong. In this case, I had a very good idea what the function to approximate was (y = x * 3) so I manually set the weights (this.b and this.m) to the right values and I still saw the error diverge. This means that weight initialization was not the problem in this case.
After searching some more, my error was somewhere else: the function that was feeding data into the network was mistakenly passing a 3 hardcoded value into the predicted output (it was using a wrong index in an array), so the oscillation I saw was because of the network trying to approximate to y = 0 * x + 3 (this.b = 3 and this.m = 0), but because of the small learning rate and the error in the error function derivative, this.b wasn't going to get near to the right value, making this.m making wild jumps to adjust to it.
Finally, keep track of the error measurement as your network trains, so you can have some insight into what's going on. This helps a lot to identify a difference between simple overfitting, big learning rates and plain simple mistakes.
I've gone through few courses of Professor Andrew for machine Learning and viewed the transcript for Logistic Regression using Newton's method. However when implementing the logistic regression using gradient descent I face certain issue.
The graph generated is not convex.
My code goes as follows:
I am using the vectorized implementation of the equation.
%1. The below code would load the data present in your desktop to the octave memory
x=load('ex4x.dat');
y=load('ex4y.dat');
%2. Now we want to add a column x0 with all the rows as value 1 into the matrix.
%First take the length
m=length(y);
x=[ones(m,1),x];
alpha=0.1;
max_iter=100;
g=inline('1.0 ./ (1.0 + exp(-z))');
theta = zeros(size(x(1,:)))'; % the theta has to be a 3*1 matrix so that it can multiply by x that is m*3 matrix
j=zeros(max_iter,1); % j is a zero matrix that is used to store the theta cost function j(theta)
for num_iter=1:max_iter
% Now we calculate the hx or hypothetis, It is calculated here inside no. of iteration because the hupothesis has to be calculated for new theta for every iteration
z=x*theta;
h=g(z); % Here the effect of inline function we used earlier will reflect
j(num_iter)=(1/m)*(-y'* log(h) - (1 - y)'*log(1-h)) ; % This formula is the vectorized form of the cost function J(theta) This calculates the cost function
j
grad=(1/m) * x' * (h-y); % This formula is the gradient descent formula that calculates the theta value.
theta=theta - alpha .* grad; % Actual Calculation for theta
theta
end
The code per say doesn't give any error but does not produce proper convex graph.
I shall be glad if any body could point out the mistake or share insight on what's causing the problem.
thanks
2 things you need to look into:
Machine Learning involves learning patterns from data. If your files ex4x.dat and ex4y.dat are randomly generated, it won't have patterns that you can learn.
You have used variables like g, h, i, j which make debugging difficult. Since it's a very small program, it might be a better idea to rewrite it.
Here's my code that gives the convex plot
clc; clear; close all;
load q1x.dat;
load q1y.dat;
X = [ones(size(q1x, 1),1) q1x];
Y = q1y;
m = size(X,1);
n = size(X,2)-1;
%initialize
theta = zeros(n+1,1);
thetaold = ones(n+1,1);
while ( ((theta-thetaold)'*(theta-thetaold)) > 0.0000001 )
%calculate dellltheta
dellltheta = zeros(n+1,1);
for j=1:n+1,
for i=1:m,
dellltheta(j,1) = dellltheta(j,1) + [Y(i,1) - (1/(1 + exp(-theta'*X(i,:)')))]*X(i,j);
end;
end;
%calculate hessian
H = zeros(n+1, n+1);
for j=1:n+1,
for k=1:n+1,
for i=1:m,
H(j,k) = H(j,k) -[1/(1 + exp(-theta'*X(i,:)'))]*[1-(1/(1 + exp(-theta'*X(i,:)')))]*[X(i,j)]*[X(i,k)];
end;
end;
end;
thetaold = theta;
theta = theta - inv(H)*dellltheta;
(theta-thetaold)'*(theta-thetaold)
end
I get the following values of error after iterations:
2.8553
0.6596
0.1532
0.0057
5.9152e-06
6.1469e-12
Which when plotted looks like:
according to wikipedia, with the delta rule we adjust the weight by:
dw = alpha * (ti-yi)*g'(hj)xi
when alpha = learning constant, ti - true answer, yi - perceptron's guess,g' = the derivative of the activation function g with respect to the weighted sum of the perceptron's inputs, xi - input.
The part that I don't understand in this formula is the multiplication by the derivative g'. let g = sign(x) (the sign of the weighted sum). so g' is always 0, and dw = 0. However, in code examples I saw in the internet, the writers just omitted the g' and used the formula:
dw = alpha * (ti-yi)*(hj)xi
I will be glad to read a proper explanation!
thank you in advance.
You're correct that if you use a step function for your activation function g, the gradient is always zero (except at 0), so the delta rule (aka gradient descent) just does nothing (dw = 0). This is why a step-function perceptron doesn't work well with gradient descent. :)
For a linear perceptron, you'd have g'(x) = 1, for dw = alpha * (t_i - y_i) * x_i.
You've seen code that uses dw = alpha * (t_i - y_i) * h_j * x_i. We can reverse-engineer what's going on here, because apparently g'(h_j) = h_j, which means remembering our calculus that we must have g(x) = e^x + constant. So apparently the code sample you found uses an exponential activation function.
This must mean that the neuron outputs are constrained to be on (0, infinity) (or I guess (a, infinity) for any finite a, for g(x) = e^x + a). I haven't run into this before, but I see some references online. Logistic or tanh activations are more common for bounded outputs (either classification or regression with known bounds).