Can a neural network have fractional values in output nodes? - neural-network

I have learned that for detecting a handwritten digit, an ANN will have 10 nodes in the output layer where each of them will represent a digit and will carry a 1 if the corresponding digit agrees and a 0 otherwise.
I would like to know if I want outputs in fractions in each of the nodes in the output layer that sums up to 1, for example, detecting color composition of an image - 0.5 Blue, 0.2 Green and 0.3 Red. How is it possible with ANN?

You need to pass your layer outputs through a softmax operation, The softmax function outputs a probability any class being the true class and it sums to 1.

Related

How can a well trained ANN have a single set of weights that can represent multiple classes?

In multinomial classification, I'm using soft-max activation function for all non-linear units and ANN has 'k' number of output nodes for 'k' number of classes. Each of the 'k' output nodes present in output layer is connected to all the weights in preceding layer, kind of like the one shown below.
So, if the first output node intends to pull the weights in it's favor, it will change all the weights that precede this layer and the other output nodes will also pull which usually contradicts to the direction in which the first one was pulling. It seems more like a tug of war with single set of weights. So, do we need a separate set of weights(,which includes weights for every node of every layer) for each of the output classes or is there a different form of architecture present? Please, correct me if I'm wrong.
Each node has its set of weights. Implementations and formulas usually use matrix multiplications, which can make you forget the fact that, conceptually, each node has its own set of weights, but they do.
Each node returns a single value that gets sent to every node in the next layer. So a node on layer h receives num(h - 1) inputs, where num(h - 1) is the number of nodes in layer h - 1. Let these inputs be x1, x2, ..., xk. Then the neuron returns:
x1*w1 + x2*w2 + ... + xk*wk
Or a function of this. So each neuron maintains its own set of weights.
Let's consider the network in your image. Assume that we have some training instance for which the topmost neuron should output 1 and the others 0.
So our target is:
y = [1 0 0 0]
And our actual output is (ignoring the softmax for simplicity):
y^ = [0.88 0.12 0.04 0.5]
So it's already doing pretty well, but we must still do backpropagation to make it even better.
Now, our output delta is:
y^ - y = [-0.12 0.12 0.04 0.5]
You will update the weights of the topmost neuron using the delta -0.12, of the second neuron using 0.12 and so on.
Notice that each output neuron's weights get updated using these values: these weights will all increase or decrease in order to approach the correct values (0 or 1).
Now, notice that each output neuron's output depends on the outputs of hidden neurons. So you must also update those. Those will get updated using each output neuron's delta (see page 7 here for the update formulas). This is like applying the chain rule when taking derivatives.
You're right that, for a given hidden neuron, there is a "tug of war" going on, with each output neuron's errors pulling their own way. But this is normal, because the hidden layer must learn to satisfy all output neurons. This is a reason for initializing the weights randomly and for using multiple hidden neurons.
It is the output layer that adapts to give the final answers, which it can do since the weights of the output nodes are independent of each other. The hidden layer has to be influenced by all output nodes, and it must learn to accommodate them all.

How can I efficiently find the accuracy of a classifier

Even with a simple classifier like the nearest neighbour I cannot seem to judge its accuracy and thus cannot improve it.
For example with the code below:
IDX = knnsearch(train_image_feats, test_image_feats);
predicted_categories = cell([size(test_image_feats, 1), 1]);
for i=1:size(IDX,1)
predicted_categories{i}=train_labels(IDX(i));
end
Here train_image_feats is a 300 by 256 matrix where each row represents an image. Same is the structure of test_image_feats. train_labels is the label corresponding to each row of the training matrix.
The book I am following simply said that the above method achieves an accuracy of 19%.
How did the author come to this conclusion? Is there any way to judge the accuracy of my results be it with this classifier or other?
The author then uses another method of feature extraction and says it improved accuracy by 30%.
How can I find the accuracy? Be it graphically or just via a simple percentage.
Accuracy when doing machine learning and classification is usually calculated by comparing your predicted outputs from your classifier in comparison to the ground truth. When you're evaluating the classification accuracy of your classifier, you will have already created a predictive model using a training set with known inputs and outputs. At this point, you will have a test set with inputs and outputs that were not used to train the classifier. For the purposes of this post, let's call this the ground truth data set. This ground truth data set helps assess the accuracy of your classifier when you are providing inputs to this classifier that it has not seen before. You take your inputs from your test set, and run them through your classifier. You get outputs for each input and we call the collection of these outputs the predicted values.
For each predicted value, you compare to the associated ground truth value and see if it is the same. You add up all of the instances where the outputs match up between the predicted and the ground truth. Adding all of these values up, and dividing by the total number of points in your test set yields the fraction of instances where your model accurately predicted the result in comparison to the ground truth.
In MATLAB, this is really simple to calculate. Supposing that your categories for your model were enumerated from 1 to N where N is the total number of labels you are classifying with. Let groundTruth be your vector of labels that denote the ground truth while predictedLabels denote your labels that are generated from your classifier. The accuracy is simply calculated by:
accuracy = sum(groundTruth == predictedLabels) / numel(groundTruth);
accuracyPercentage = 100*accuracy;
The first line of code calculates what the accuracy of your model is as a fraction. The second line calculates this as a percentage, where you simply multiply the first line of code by 100. You can use either or when you want to assess accuracy. One is just normalized between [0,1] while the other is a percentage from 0% to 100%. What groundTruth == predictedLabels does is that it compares each element between groundTruth and predictedLabels. If the ith value in groundTruth matches with the ith value in predictedLabels, we output a 1. If not, we output a 0. This will be a vector of 0s and 1s and so we simply sum up all of the values that are 1, which is eloquently encapsulated in the sum operation. We then divide by the total number of points in our test set to obtain the final accuracy of the classifier.
With a toy example, supposing I had 4 labels, and my groundTruth and predictedLabels vectors were this:
groundTruth = [1 2 3 2 3 4 1 1 2 3 3 4 1 2 3];
predictedLabels = [1 2 2 4 4 4 1 2 3 3 4 1 2 3 3];
The accuracy using the above vectors gives us:
>> accuracy
accuracy =
0.4000
>> accuracyPercentage
accuracyPercentage =
40
This means that we have a 40% accuracy or an accuracy of 0.40. Using this example, the predictive model was only able to accurately classify 40% of the test set when you put each test set input through the classifier. This makes sense, because between our predicted outputs and ground truth, only 40%, or 6 outputs match up. These are the 1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th, 10th and 15th elements. There are other metrics to calculating accuracy, like ROC curves, but when calculating accuracy in machine learning, this is what is usually done.

Why matlab neural network classification returns decimal values

I have an input dataset (matrix 25x1575) which is normalized to values between 0 and 1.
I also have a binary formatted output matrix (9x1575) like 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1, 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 ...
I imported both files in matlab nntool and it automatically created a network with 25 input and 9 output nodes as I wanted.
After I trained this network using feed-forward backProp, I tested the model in its training data and each output nodes returns a decimal value like (-0.1978 0.45913 0.12748 0.25072 0.45199 0.59368 0.38359 0.31435 1.0604).
Why it doesn't return discrete values like 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1?
Is there any thing that I must set in nntool to get such values?
Depending on the nature of neurons, the output can be anything. The most popular neurons are linear, sigmoidal curve (range [0, 1]) and Hyperbolic Tangent (range [-1, 1]). The first one can output any value. The latter two c approximate step function (i.e. binary behavior), but it is up to the end user (you) to define the cut-off value for that translation.
You didn't say which neurons you use, but you should definitely read more on how neural networks are implemented and how they work. You may start with this video and then read Artificial Neural Networks for Beginners by C Gershenson.
UPDATE You say that you use tanh-sigmoid neurons and wonder how come you don't get values either very close to -1 or to 1.
The output of tanh neuron is hyperbolic tangent of the sum of all its inputs. Every value between -1 and 1 is possible. What determines the "steepness" of the output (in other words: the proportion of interim values) is the output values of the preceding neurons and their weights. These depend on the output of their preceding neurons and their weights etc etc etc. It is up to the learning algorithm to find the set of weights that minimizes a predefined scoring function, given a certain input. In a typical setup, a scoring function is a function that compares neural network output to a set of desired results and returns a single number that indicates how different the actual and the desired outputs are.
Before using NN you have to do some homework. At the minimum you have to decide what your goal is, how you interpret NN output and how you measure NN performance and how you update the weights.

backpropagation neural network with discrete output

I am working through the xor example with a three layer back propagation network. When the output layer has a sigmoid activation, an input of (1,0) might give 0.99 for a desired output of 1 and an input of (1,1) might give 0.01 for a desired output of 0.
But what if want the output to be discrete, either 0 or 1, do I simply set a threshold in between at 0.5? Would this threshold need to be trained like any other weight?
Well, you can of course put a threshold after the output neuron which makes the values after 0.5 as 1 and, vice versa, all the outputs below 0.5 as zero. I suggest to don't hide the continuous output with a discretization threshold, because an output of 0.4 is less "zero" than a value of 0.001 and this difference can give you useful information about your data.
Do the training without threshold, ie. computes the error on a example by using what the neuron networks outputs, without thresholding it.
Another little detail : you use a transfer function such as sigmoid ? The sigmoid function returns values in [0, 1], but 0 and 1 are asymptote ie. the sigmoid function can come close to those values but never reach them. A consequence of this is that your neural network can not exactly output 0 or 1 ! Thus, using sigmoid times a factor a little above 1 can correct this. This and some other practical aspects of back propagation are discussed here http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-98b.pdf

Neural networks - input values

I have a question that may be trivial but it's not described anywhere i've looked. I'm studying neural networks and everywhere i look there's some theory and some trivial example with some 0s and 1s as an input. I'm wondering: do i have to put only one value as an input value for one neuron, or can it be a vector of, let's say, 3 values (RGB colour for example)?
The above answers are technically correct, but don't explain the simple truth: there is never a situation where you'd need to give a vector of numbers to a single neuron.
From a practical standpoint this is because (as one of the earlier solutions has shown) you can just have a neuron for each number in a vector and then have all of those be the input to a single neuron. This should get you your desired behavior after training, as the second layer neuron can effectively make use of the entire vector.
From a mathematical standpoint, there is a fundamental theorem of coding theory that states that any vector of numbers can be represented as a single number. Thus, if you really don't want an extra layer of neurons, you could simply encode the RGB values into a single number and input that to the neuron. Though, this coding function would probably make most learning problems more difficult, so I doubt this solution would be worth it in most cases.
To summarize: artificial neural networks are used without giving a vector to an input unit, but lose no computational power because of this.
When dealing with multi-dimensional data, I believe a two layer neural network is said to give better result.
In your case:
R[0..1] => (N1)----\
\
G[0..1] => (N2)-----(N4) => Result[0..1]
/
B[0..1] => (N3)----/
As you can see, the N4 neurone can handle 3 entries.
The [0..1] interval is a convention but a good one imo. That way, you can easily code a set of generic neuron classes that can take an arbitrary number of entries (I had template C++ classes with the number of entries as template parameter personally). So you code the logic of your neurons once, then you toy with the structure of the network and/or combinations of functions within your neurons.
Generally, the input for a single neuron is a value between 0 and 1. That convention is not just for ease of implementation but because normalizing the input values to the same range ensures that each input carries similar weighting. (If you have some images with 8 bit color with pixel values between 0 and 7 and some images with 16 bit color with pixel values between 0 and 255 you probably wouldn't want to favor the 24 bit color images just because the numerical values are higher. Similarly, you will probably want your images to be the same dimensions.)
As far as using pixel values as inputs, it is very common to try to gather a higher level representation of the image than its pixels (more info). For example, given a 5 x 5 (normalized) gray scale image:
[1 1 1 1 1]
[0 0 1 0 0]
[0 0 1 0 0]
[0 0 1 0 0]
[0 0 1 0 0]
We could use a the following feature matrices to help discover horizontal, vertical, and diagonal features of the images. See python haar face detection for more information.
[1 1] [0 0] [1 0] [0 1] [1 0], [0 1]
[0 0], [1 1], [1 0], [0 1], [0 1], [1 0]
To build the input vector, v, for this image, take the first 2x2 feature matrix and "apply" it with element-wise multiplication to the first position in the image. Applying,
[1 1] (the first feature matrix) to [1 1] (the first position in the image)
[0 0] [0 0]
will result in 2 because 1*1 + 1*1 + 0*0 + 0*0 = 2. Append 2 to the back of your input vector for this image. Then move this feature matrix to the next position, one to the right, and apply it again, adding the result to the input vector. Do this repeatedly for each position of the feature matrix and for each of the feature matrices. This will build your input vector for a single image. Be sure that you build the vectors in the same order for each image.
In this case the image is black and white, but with RGB values you could extend the algorithm to do the same computation but add 3 values to the input vector for each pixel--one for each color. This should provide you with one input vector per image and a single input to each neuron. The vectors will then need to be normalized before running through the network.
Normally a single neuron takes as its input multiple real numbers and outputs a real number, which typically is calculated as applying the sigmoid function to the sum of the real numbers (scaled, and then plus or minus a constant offset).
If you want to put in, say, two RGB vectors (2 x 3 reals), you need to decide how you want to combine the values. If you add all the elements together and apply the sigmoid function, it is equivalent to getting in six reals "flat". On the other hand, if you process the R elements, then the G elements, and the B elements, all individually (e.g. sum or subtract the pairs), you have in practice three independent neurons.
So in short, no, a single neuron does not take in vector values.
Use light wavelength normalized to visible spectrum as the input.
There are some approximate equations on the net.
Search for RGB to wavelength conversion
or
use HSL color model and extract Hue component and possibly use Saturation and Lightness as well. Well...
It can be whatever you want, as long as you write your inner function accordingly.
The examples you mention use [0;1] as their domain, but you can use R, R², or whatever you want, as long as the function you use in your neurons is defined on this domain.
In your case, you can define your functions on R3 to allow for RGB values to be handled
A trivial example : use (x1, y1, z1),(x2,y2,z2)->(ax1+x2,by1+y2,cz1+z2) as your function to transform two colors into one, a b and c being your learning coefs, which you will determine during the learning phase.
Very detailed information (including the answer to your question) is available on Wikipedia.