I am following a machine learning course on Coursera and I am doing the following exercise using Octave (MatLab should be the same).
The exercise is related to the calculation of the cost function for a gradient descent algoritm.
In the course slide I have that this is the cost function that I have to implement using Octave:
This is the formula from the course slide:
So J is a function of some THETA variables represented by the THETA matrix (in the previous second equation).
This is the correct MatLab\Octave implementation for the J(THETA) computation:
function J = computeCost(X, y, theta)
%COMPUTECOST Compute cost for linear regression
% J = COMPUTECOST(X, y, theta) computes the cost of using theta as the
% parameter for linear regression to fit the data points in X and y
% Initialize some useful values
m = length(y); % number of training examples
% You need to return the following variables correctly
J = 0;
% ====================== YOUR CODE HERE ======================
% Instructions: Compute the cost of a particular choice of theta
% You should set J to the cost.
J = (1/(2*m))*sum(((X*theta) - y).^2)
% =========================================================================
end
where:
X is a 2 column matrix of m rows having all the elements of the first column set to the value 1:
X =
1.0000 6.1101
1.0000 5.5277
1.0000 8.5186
...... ......
...... ......
...... ......
y is a vector of m elements (as X):
y =
17.59200
9.13020
13.66200
........
........
........
Finnally theta is a 2 columns vector having 0 asvalues like this:
theta = zeros(2, 1); % initialize fitting parameters
theta
theta =
0
0
Ok, coming back to my working solution:
J = (1/(2*m))*sum(((X*theta) - y).^2)
specifically to this matrix multiplication (multiplication between the matrix X and the vector theta): I know that it is a valid matrix multiplication because the number of column of X (2 columns) is equal to the number of rows of theta (2 rows) so it is a perfectly valid matrix multiplication.
My doubt that is driving me crazy (probably it is a trivial doubt) is related to the previous course slide context:
As you can see in the second equation used to calculated the current h_theta(x) value it is using the transposed theta vector and not the theta vector as done in the code.
Why ?!?!
I suspect that it depends only on how was created the theta vector. It was build in this way:
theta = zeros(2, 1); % initialize fitting parameters
that is generating a 2 line 1 column vector instead of a classic one line 2 column vector. So maybe I have not to transpose it. But I am absolutely not sure about this assertion.
Is my intuition correct or what am I missing?
Your intuition is correct. Effectively it does not matter whether you perform the multiplication as theta.' * X or as X.' * theta, since this either generates a horizontal vector or a vertical vector of the hypothesis representing all observations, and what you're expected to do next is subtract the y vector from the hypothesis vector at each observation, and sum the results. So as long as y has the same orientation as your hypothesis and you subtract at each equivalent point, then the scalar end-result of the summation will be the same.
Often enough, you'll see the X.' * theta version preferred over theta.' * X purely for convenience, to avoid transposing over and over again just to be consistent with the mathematical notation. But this is fine, since the underlying math doesn't really change, only the order of equivalent operations.
I agree it's confusing though, both because it makes it harder to follow the formula when the code effectively looks like it's doing something else, and also since it messes with the usual convention that a vertical vector represents 'coordinates', and a horizontal vector represents observations. In such cases, especially in languages like matlab / octave where the orientation of a vector isn't explicitly defined in the variable's type, it is doubly important to document what you expect the inputs to represent, and preferably there should have been assert statements in the code confirming the input has been passed in the correct orientation. Clearly here they felt it wasn't necessary because this code is acting under controlled conditions in a predefined exercise environment anyway, but it would have been good practice to do so from a software engineering point of view.
Related
I am implementing logistic regression using batch gradient descent. There are two classes into which the input samples are to be classified. The classes are 1 and 0. While training the data, I am using the following sigmoid function:
t = 1 ./ (1 + exp(-z));
where
z = x*theta
And I am using the following cost function to calculate cost, to determine when to stop training.
function cost = computeCost(x, y, theta)
htheta = sigmoid(x*theta);
cost = sum(-y .* log(htheta) - (1-y) .* log(1-htheta));
end
I am getting the cost at each step to be NaN as the values of htheta are either 1 or zero in most cases. What should I do to determine the cost value at each iteration?
This is the gradient descent code for logistic regression:
function [theta,cost_history] = batchGD(x,y,theta,alpha)
cost_history = zeros(1000,1);
for iter=1:1000
htheta = sigmoid(x*theta);
new_theta = zeros(size(theta,1),1);
for feature=1:size(theta,1)
new_theta(feature) = theta(feature) - alpha * sum((htheta - y) .*x(:,feature))
end
theta = new_theta;
cost_history(iter) = computeCost(x,y,theta);
end
end
There are two possible reasons why this may be happening to you.
The data is not normalized
This is because when you apply the sigmoid / logit function to your hypothesis, the output probabilities are almost all approximately 0s or all 1s and with your cost function, log(1 - 1) or log(0) will produce -Inf. The accumulation of all of these individual terms in your cost function will eventually lead to NaN.
Specifically, if y = 0 for a training example and if the output of your hypothesis is log(x) where x is a very small number which is close to 0, examining the first part of the cost function would give us 0*log(x) and will in fact produce NaN. Similarly, if y = 1 for a training example and if the output of your hypothesis is also log(x) where x is a very small number, this again would give us 0*log(x) and will produce NaN. Simply put, the output of your hypothesis is either very close to 0 or very close to 1.
This is most likely due to the fact that the dynamic range of each feature is widely different and so a part of your hypothesis, specifically the weighted sum of x*theta for each training example you have will give you either very large negative or positive values, and if you apply the sigmoid function to these values, you'll get very close to 0 or 1.
One way to combat this is to normalize the data in your matrix before performing training using gradient descent. A typical approach is to normalize with zero-mean and unit variance. Given an input feature x_k where k = 1, 2, ... n where you have n features, the new normalized feature x_k^{new} can be found by:
m_k is the mean of the feature k and s_k is the standard deviation of the feature k. This is also known as standardizing data. You can read up on more details about this on another answer I gave here: How does this code for standardizing data work?
Because you are using the linear algebra approach to gradient descent, I'm assuming you have prepended your data matrix with a column of all ones. Knowing this, we can normalize your data like so:
mX = mean(x,1);
mX(1) = 0;
sX = std(x,[],1);
sX(1) = 1;
xnew = bsxfun(#rdivide, bsxfun(#minus, x, mX), sX);
The mean and standard deviations of each feature are stored in mX and sX respectively. You can learn how this code works by reading the post I linked to you above. I won't repeat that stuff here because that isn't the scope of this post. To ensure proper normalization, I've made the mean and standard deviation of the first column to be 0 and 1 respectively. xnew contains the new normalized data matrix. Use xnew with your gradient descent algorithm instead. Now once you find the parameters, to perform any predictions you must normalize any new test instances with the mean and standard deviation from the training set. Because the parameters learned are with respect to the statistics of the training set, you must also apply the same transformations to any test data you want to submit to the prediction model.
Assuming you have new data points stored in a matrix called xx, you would do normalize then perform the predictions:
xxnew = bsxfun(#rdivide, bsxfun(#minus, xx, mX), sX);
Now that you have this, you can perform your predictions:
pred = sigmoid(xxnew*theta) >= 0.5;
You can change the threshold of 0.5 to be whatever you believe is best that determines whether examples belong in the positive or negative class.
The learning rate is too large
As you mentioned in the comments, once you normalize the data the costs appear to be finite but then suddenly go to NaN after a few iterations. Normalization can only get you so far. If your learning rate or alpha is too large, each iteration will overshoot in the direction towards the minimum and would thus make the cost at each iteration oscillate or even diverge which is what is appearing to be happening. In your case, the cost is diverging or increasing at each iteration to the point where it is so large that it can't be represented using floating point precision.
As such, one other option is to decrease your learning rate alpha until you see that the cost function is decreasing at each iteration. A popular method to determine what the best learning rate would be is to perform gradient descent on a range of logarithmically spaced values of alpha and seeing what the final cost function value is and choosing the learning rate that resulted in the smallest cost.
Using the two facts above together should allow gradient descent to converge quite nicely, assuming that the cost function is convex. In this case for logistic regression, it most certainly is.
Let's assume you have an observation where:
the true value is y_i = 1
your model is quite extreme and says that P(y_i = 1) = 1
Then your cost function will get a value of NaN because you're adding 0 * log(0), which is undefined. Hence:
Your formula for the cost function has a problem (there is a subtle 0, infinity issue)!
As #rayryeng pointed out, 0 * log(0) produces a NaN because 0 * Inf isn't kosher. This is actually a huge problem: if your algorithm believes it can predict a value perfectly, it incorrectly assigns a cost of NaN.
Instead of:
cost = sum(-y .* log(htheta) - (1-y) .* log(1-htheta));
You can avoid multiplying 0 by infinity by instead writing your cost function in Matlab as:
y_logical = y == 1;
cost = sum(-log(htheta(y_logical))) + sum( - log(1 - htheta(~y_logical)));
The idea is if y_i is 1, we add -log(htheta_i) to the cost, but if y_i is 0, we add -log(1 - htheta_i) to the cost. This is mathematically equivalent to -y_i * log(htheta_i) - (1 - y_i) * log(1- htheta_i) but without running into numerical problems that essentially stem from htheta_i being equal to 0 or 1 within the limits of double precision floating point.
It happened to me because an indetermination of the type:
0*log(0)
This can happen when one of the predicted values Y equals either 0 or 1.
In my case the solution was to add an if statement to the python code as follows:
y * np.log (Y) + (1-y) * np.log (1-Y) if ( Y != 1 and Y != 0 ) else 0
This way, when the actual value (y) and the predicted one (Y) are equal, no cost needs to be computed, which is the expected behavior.
(Notice that when a given Y is converging to 0 the left addend is canceled (because of y=0) and the right addend tends toward 0. The same happens when Y converges to 1, but with the opposite addend.)
(There is also a very rare scenario, which you probably won't need to worry about, where y=0 and Y=1 or viceversa, but if your dataset is standarized and the weights are properly initialized it won't be an issue.)
I am implementing logistic regression using batch gradient descent. There are two classes into which the input samples are to be classified. The classes are 1 and 0. While training the data, I am using the following sigmoid function:
t = 1 ./ (1 + exp(-z));
where
z = x*theta
And I am using the following cost function to calculate cost, to determine when to stop training.
function cost = computeCost(x, y, theta)
htheta = sigmoid(x*theta);
cost = sum(-y .* log(htheta) - (1-y) .* log(1-htheta));
end
I am getting the cost at each step to be NaN as the values of htheta are either 1 or zero in most cases. What should I do to determine the cost value at each iteration?
This is the gradient descent code for logistic regression:
function [theta,cost_history] = batchGD(x,y,theta,alpha)
cost_history = zeros(1000,1);
for iter=1:1000
htheta = sigmoid(x*theta);
new_theta = zeros(size(theta,1),1);
for feature=1:size(theta,1)
new_theta(feature) = theta(feature) - alpha * sum((htheta - y) .*x(:,feature))
end
theta = new_theta;
cost_history(iter) = computeCost(x,y,theta);
end
end
There are two possible reasons why this may be happening to you.
The data is not normalized
This is because when you apply the sigmoid / logit function to your hypothesis, the output probabilities are almost all approximately 0s or all 1s and with your cost function, log(1 - 1) or log(0) will produce -Inf. The accumulation of all of these individual terms in your cost function will eventually lead to NaN.
Specifically, if y = 0 for a training example and if the output of your hypothesis is log(x) where x is a very small number which is close to 0, examining the first part of the cost function would give us 0*log(x) and will in fact produce NaN. Similarly, if y = 1 for a training example and if the output of your hypothesis is also log(x) where x is a very small number, this again would give us 0*log(x) and will produce NaN. Simply put, the output of your hypothesis is either very close to 0 or very close to 1.
This is most likely due to the fact that the dynamic range of each feature is widely different and so a part of your hypothesis, specifically the weighted sum of x*theta for each training example you have will give you either very large negative or positive values, and if you apply the sigmoid function to these values, you'll get very close to 0 or 1.
One way to combat this is to normalize the data in your matrix before performing training using gradient descent. A typical approach is to normalize with zero-mean and unit variance. Given an input feature x_k where k = 1, 2, ... n where you have n features, the new normalized feature x_k^{new} can be found by:
m_k is the mean of the feature k and s_k is the standard deviation of the feature k. This is also known as standardizing data. You can read up on more details about this on another answer I gave here: How does this code for standardizing data work?
Because you are using the linear algebra approach to gradient descent, I'm assuming you have prepended your data matrix with a column of all ones. Knowing this, we can normalize your data like so:
mX = mean(x,1);
mX(1) = 0;
sX = std(x,[],1);
sX(1) = 1;
xnew = bsxfun(#rdivide, bsxfun(#minus, x, mX), sX);
The mean and standard deviations of each feature are stored in mX and sX respectively. You can learn how this code works by reading the post I linked to you above. I won't repeat that stuff here because that isn't the scope of this post. To ensure proper normalization, I've made the mean and standard deviation of the first column to be 0 and 1 respectively. xnew contains the new normalized data matrix. Use xnew with your gradient descent algorithm instead. Now once you find the parameters, to perform any predictions you must normalize any new test instances with the mean and standard deviation from the training set. Because the parameters learned are with respect to the statistics of the training set, you must also apply the same transformations to any test data you want to submit to the prediction model.
Assuming you have new data points stored in a matrix called xx, you would do normalize then perform the predictions:
xxnew = bsxfun(#rdivide, bsxfun(#minus, xx, mX), sX);
Now that you have this, you can perform your predictions:
pred = sigmoid(xxnew*theta) >= 0.5;
You can change the threshold of 0.5 to be whatever you believe is best that determines whether examples belong in the positive or negative class.
The learning rate is too large
As you mentioned in the comments, once you normalize the data the costs appear to be finite but then suddenly go to NaN after a few iterations. Normalization can only get you so far. If your learning rate or alpha is too large, each iteration will overshoot in the direction towards the minimum and would thus make the cost at each iteration oscillate or even diverge which is what is appearing to be happening. In your case, the cost is diverging or increasing at each iteration to the point where it is so large that it can't be represented using floating point precision.
As such, one other option is to decrease your learning rate alpha until you see that the cost function is decreasing at each iteration. A popular method to determine what the best learning rate would be is to perform gradient descent on a range of logarithmically spaced values of alpha and seeing what the final cost function value is and choosing the learning rate that resulted in the smallest cost.
Using the two facts above together should allow gradient descent to converge quite nicely, assuming that the cost function is convex. In this case for logistic regression, it most certainly is.
Let's assume you have an observation where:
the true value is y_i = 1
your model is quite extreme and says that P(y_i = 1) = 1
Then your cost function will get a value of NaN because you're adding 0 * log(0), which is undefined. Hence:
Your formula for the cost function has a problem (there is a subtle 0, infinity issue)!
As #rayryeng pointed out, 0 * log(0) produces a NaN because 0 * Inf isn't kosher. This is actually a huge problem: if your algorithm believes it can predict a value perfectly, it incorrectly assigns a cost of NaN.
Instead of:
cost = sum(-y .* log(htheta) - (1-y) .* log(1-htheta));
You can avoid multiplying 0 by infinity by instead writing your cost function in Matlab as:
y_logical = y == 1;
cost = sum(-log(htheta(y_logical))) + sum( - log(1 - htheta(~y_logical)));
The idea is if y_i is 1, we add -log(htheta_i) to the cost, but if y_i is 0, we add -log(1 - htheta_i) to the cost. This is mathematically equivalent to -y_i * log(htheta_i) - (1 - y_i) * log(1- htheta_i) but without running into numerical problems that essentially stem from htheta_i being equal to 0 or 1 within the limits of double precision floating point.
It happened to me because an indetermination of the type:
0*log(0)
This can happen when one of the predicted values Y equals either 0 or 1.
In my case the solution was to add an if statement to the python code as follows:
y * np.log (Y) + (1-y) * np.log (1-Y) if ( Y != 1 and Y != 0 ) else 0
This way, when the actual value (y) and the predicted one (Y) are equal, no cost needs to be computed, which is the expected behavior.
(Notice that when a given Y is converging to 0 the left addend is canceled (because of y=0) and the right addend tends toward 0. The same happens when Y converges to 1, but with the opposite addend.)
(There is also a very rare scenario, which you probably won't need to worry about, where y=0 and Y=1 or viceversa, but if your dataset is standarized and the weights are properly initialized it won't be an issue.)
I'm new to programming in Matlab. I'm trying to figure out how to calculate the following function:
I know my code is off, I just wanted to start with some form of the function. I have attempted to write out the sum of the function in the program below.
function [g] = square_wave(n)
g = symsum(((sin((2k-1)*t))/(2k-1)), 1,n);
end
Any help would be much appreciated.
Update:
My code as of now:
function [yout] = square_wave(n)
syms n;
f = n^4;
df = diff(f);
syms t k;
f = 1; %//Define frequency here
funcSum = (sin(2*pi*(2*k - 1)*f*t) / (2*k - 1));
funcOut = symsum(func, v, start, finish);
xsquare = (4/pi) * symsum(funcSum, k, 1, Inf);
tVector = 0 : 0.01 : 4*pi; %// Choose a step size of 0.01
yout = subs(xsquare, t, tVector);
end
Note: This answer was partly inspired by a previous post I wrote here: How to have square wave in Matlab symbolic equation - However, it isn't quite the same, which is why I'm providing an answer here.
Alright, so it looks like you got the first bit of the question right. However, when you're multiplying things together, you need to use the * operator... and so 2k - 1 should be 2*k - 1. Ignoring this, you are symsuming correctly given that square wave equation. The input into this function is only one parameter only - n. What you see in the above equation is a Fourier Series representation of a square wave. A bastardized version of this theory is that you can represent a periodic function as an infinite summation of sinusoidal functions with each function weighted by a certain amount. What you see in the equation is in fact the Fourier Series of a square wave.
n controls the total number of sinusoids to add into the equation. The more sinusoids you have, the more the function is going to look like a square wave. In the question, they want you to play around with the value of n. If n becomes very large, it should start approaching what looks like to be a square wave.
The symsum will represent this Fourier Series as a function with respect to t. What you need to do now is you need to substitute values of t into this expression to get the output amplitude for each value t. They define that for you already where it's a vector from 0 to 4*pi with 1001 points in between.
Define this vector, then you'll need to use subs to substitute the time values into the symsum expression and when you're done, cast them back to double so that you actually get a numeric vector.
As such, your function should simply be this:
function [g] = square_wave(n)
syms t k; %// Define t and k
f = sin((2*k-1)*t)/(2*k-1); %// Define function
F = symsum(f, k, 1, n); %// Define Fourier Series
tVector = linspace(0, 4*pi, 1001); %// Define time points
g = double(subs(F, t, tVector)); %// Get numeric output
end
The first line defines t and k to be symbolic because t and k are symbolic in the expression. Next, I'll define f to be the term inside the summation with respect to t and k. The line after that defines the actual sum itself. We use f and sum with respect to k as that is what the summation calls for and we sum from 1 up to n. Last but not least, we define a time vector from 0 to 4*pi with 1001 points in between and we use subs to substitute the value of t in the Fourier Series with all values in this vector. The result should be a 1001 vector which I then cast to double to get a numerical result and we get your desired output.
To show you that this works, we can try this with n = 20. Do this in the command prompt now:
>> g = square_wave(20);
>> t = linspace(0, 4*pi, 1001);
>> plot(t, g);
We get:
Therefore, if you make n go higher... so 200 as they suggest, you'll see that the wave will eventually look like what you expect from a square wave.
If you don't have the Symbolic Math Toolbox, which symsum, syms and subs relies on, we can do it completely numerically. What you'll have to do is define a meshgrid of points for pairs of t and n, substitute each pair into the sequence equation for the Fourier Series and sum up all of the results.
As such, you'd do something like this:
function [g] = square_wave(n)
tVector = linspace(0, 4*pi, 1001); %// Define time points
[t,k] = meshgrid(tVector, 1:n); %// Define meshgrid
f = sin((2*k-1).*t)./(2*k-1); %// Define Fourier Series
g = sum(f, 1); %// Sum up for each time point
end
The first line of code defines our time points from 0 to 4*pi. The next line of code defines a meshgrid of points. How this works is that for t, each column defines a unique time point, so the first column is 200 zeroes, up to the last column which is a column of 200 4*pi values. Similarly for k, each row denotes a unique n value so the first row is 1001 1s, followed by 1001 2s, up to 1001 1s. The implications with this is now each column of t and k denotes the right (t,n) pairs to compute the output of the Fourier series for each time that is unique to that column.
As such, you'd simply use the sequence equation and do element-wise multiplication and division, then sum along each individual column to finally get the square wave output. With the above code, you will get the same result as above, and it'll be much faster than symsum because we're doing it numerically now and not doing it symbolically which has a lot more computational overhead.
Here's what we get when n = 200:
This code with n=200 ran in milliseconds whereas the symsum equivalent took almost 2 minutes on my machine - Mac OS X 10.10.3 Yosemite, 16 GB RAM, Intel Core i7 2.3 GHz.
I have a problem when calculate discrete Fourier transform in MATLAB, apparently get the right result but when plot the amplitude of the frequencies obtained you can see values very close to zero which should be exactly zero. I use my own implementation:
function [y] = Discrete_Fourier_Transform(x)
N=length(x);
y=zeros(1,N);
for k = 1:N
for n = 1:N
y(k) = y(k) + x(n)*exp( -1j*2*pi*(n-1)*(k-1)/N );
end;
end;
end
I know it's better to use fft of MATLAB, but I need to use my own implementation as it is for college.
The code I used to generate the square wave:
x = [ones(1,8), -ones(1,8)];
for i=1:63
x = [x, ones(1,8), -ones(1,8)];
end
MATLAB version: R2013a(8.1.0.604) 64 bits
I have tried everything that has happened to me but I do not have much experience using MATLAB and I have not found information relevant to this issue in forums. I hope someone can help me.
Thanks in advance.
This will be a numerical problem. The values are in the range of 1e-15, while the DFT of your signal has values in the range of 1e+02. Most likely this won't lead to any errors when doing further processing. You can calculate the total squared error between your DFT and the MATLAB fft function by
y = fft(x);
yh = Discrete_Fourier_Transform(x);
sum(abs(yh - y).^2)
ans =
3.1327e-20
which is basically zero. I would therefore conclude: your DFT function works just fine.
Just one small remark: You can easily vectorize the DFT.
n = 0:1:N-1;
k = 0:1:N-1;
y = exp(-1j*2*pi/N * n'*k) * x(:);
With n'*k you create a matrix with all combinations of n and k. You then take the exp(...) of each of those matrix elements. With x(:) you make sure x is a column vector, so you can do the matrix multiplication (...)*x which automatically sums over all k's. Actually, I just notice, this is exactly the well-known matrix form of the DFT.
I have a problem with numerical derivative of a vector that is x: Nx1 with respect to another vector t (time) that is the same size of x.
I do the following (x is chosen to be sine function as an example):
t=t0:ts:tf;
x=sin(t);
xd=diff(x)/ts;
but the answer xd is (N-1)x1 and I figured out that it does not compute derivative corresponding to the first element of x.
is there any other way to compute this derivative?
You are looking for the numerical gradient I assume.
t0 = 0;
ts = pi/10;
tf = 2*pi;
t = t0:ts:tf;
x = sin(t);
dx = gradient(x)/ts
The purpose of this function is a different one (vector fields), but it offers what diff doesn't: input and output vector of equal length.
gradient calculates the central difference between data points. For an
array, matrix, or vector with N values in each row, the ith value is
defined by
The gradient at the end points, where i=1 and i=N, is calculated with
a single-sided difference between the endpoint value and the next
adjacent value within the row. If two or more outputs are specified,
gradient also calculates central differences along other dimensions.
Unlike the diff function, gradient returns an array with the same
number of elements as the input.
I know I'm a little late to the game here, but you can also get an approximation of the numerical derivative by taking the derivatives of the polynomial (cubic) splines that runs through your data:
function dy = splineDerivative(x,y)
% the spline has continuous first and second derivatives
pp = spline(x,y); % could also use pp = pchip(x,y);
[breaks,coefs,K,r,d] = unmkpp(pp);
% pre-allocate the coefficient vector
dCoeff = zeroes(K,r-1);
% Columns are ordered from highest to lowest power. Both spline and pchip
% return 4xn matrices, ordered from 3rd to zeroth power. (Thanks to the
% anonymous person who suggested this edit).
dCoeff(:, 1) = 3 * coefs(:, 1); % d(ax^3)/dx = 3ax^2;
dCoeff(:, 2) = 2 * coefs(:, 2); % d(ax^2)/dx = 2ax;
dCoeff(:, 3) = 1 * coefs(:, 3); % d(ax^1)/dx = a;
dpp = mkpp(breaks,dCoeff,d);
dy = ppval(dpp,x);
The spline polynomial is always guaranteed to have continuous first and second derivatives at each point. I haven not tested and compared this against using pchip instead of spline, but that might be another option as it too has continuous first derivatives (but not second derivatives) at every point.
The advantage of this is that there is no requirement that the step size be even.
There are some options to work-around your issue.
First: you can make your domain larger. Instead of N, use N+1 gridpoints.
Second: depending on the end-point of interest, you can use
Forward difference: F(x + dx) - F(x)
Backward difference: F(x) - F(x - dx)