I used least square method but matlab return compeletly wrong answer - matlab

I must solve an over constrained problem (Equations more than unknowns). So I have to use least square method.
First I create coefficient matrix .It is a 225*375 matrix. For inversing, I use pinv() function and then multiply it in load matrix .
My problem is about plate bending under uniform load with clamped edge. I expect at least correct answer in my boundary (the deflection must be zero), but even in boundary I have wrong answer.
I have read in a book that sometimes an error occurs in the Least Square method, which should be corrected manually by the user but I couldn’t find any more explanation about it elsewhere.

First of all we need more data about your problem:
What's the model?
Where are the measurements coming from?
Yet few notes about what I could figure from your issue:
If you have boundaries on the solution you should use Constrained Least Squares. If you do it on MATLAB it is easily can be done (Look at Quadratic Programming as well).
Does L2 error fit your problem? Maybe you should a different
There's no bug in the implementation of MATLAB. Using pinv gives the minimum norm (Both of the solution vector and the residual L2 norm) solution in the range of the given matrix. It might be you either construct the data in a wrong manner or the model you're using isn't adequate.

Related

Why do we take the derivative of the transfer function in calculating back propagation algorithm?

What is the concept behind taking the derivative? It's interesting that for somehow teaching a system, we have to adjust its weights. But why are we doing this using a derivation of the transfer function. What is in derivation that helps us. I know derivation is the slope of a continuous function at a given point, but what does it have to do with the problem.
You must already know that the cost function is a function with the weights as the variables.
For now consider it as f(W).
Our main motive here is to find a W for which we get the minimum value for f(W).
One of the ways for doing this is to plot function f in one axis and W in another....... but remember that here W is not just a single variable but a collection of variables.
So what can be the other way?
It can be as simple as changing values of W and see if we get a lower value or not than the previous value of W.
But taking random values for all the variables in W can be a tedious task.
So what we do is, we first take random values for W and see the output of f(W) and the slope at all the values of each variable(we get this by partially differentiating the function with the i'th variable and putting the value of the i'th variable).
now once we know the slope at that point in space we move a little further towards the lower side in the slope (this little factor is termed alpha in gradient descent) and this goes on until the slope gives a opposite value stating we already reached the lowest point in the graph(graph with n dimensions, function vs W, W being a collection of n variables).
The reason is that we are trying to minimize the loss. Specifically, we do this by a gradient descent method. It basically means that from our current point in the parameter space (determined by the complete set of current weights), we want to go in a direction which will decrease the loss function. Visualize standing on a hillside and walking down the direction where the slope is steepest.
Mathematically, the direction that gives you the steepest descent from your current point in parameter space is the negative gradient. And the gradient is nothing but the vector made up of all the derivatives of the loss function with respect to each single parameter.
Backpropagation is an application of the Chain Rule to neural networks. If the forward pass involves applying a transfer function, the gradient of the loss function with respect to the weights will include the derivative of the transfer function, since the derivative of f(g(x)) is f’(g(x))g’(x).
Your question is a really good one! Why should I move the weight more in one direction when the slope of the error wrt. the weight is high? Does that really make sense? In fact it does makes sense if the error function wrt. the weight is a parabola. However it is a wild guess to assume it is a parabola. As rcpinto says, assuming the error function is a parabola, make the derivation of the a updates simple with the Chain Rule.
However, there are some other parameter update rules that actually addresses this, non-intuitive assumption. You can make update rule that takes the weight a fixed size step in the down-slope direction, and then maybe later in the training decrease the step size logarithmic as you train. (I'm not sure if this method has a formal name.)
There are also som alternative error function that can be used. Look up Cross Entropy in you neural network text book. This is an adjustment to the error function such that the derivative (of the transfer function) factor in the update rule cancels out. Just remember to pick the right cross entropy function based on you output transfer function.
When I first started getting into Neural Nets, I had this question too.
The other answers here have explained the math which makes it pretty clear that a derivative term will appear in your calculations while you are trying to update the weights. But all of those calculations are being done in order to implement Back-propagation, which is just one of the ways of updating weights! Now read on...
You are correct in assuming that at the end of the day, all a neural network tries to do is update its weights to fit the data you feed into it. Within this statement lies your answer too. What you are getting confused with here is the idea of the Back-propagation algorithm. Many textbooks use backprop to update neural nets by default but do not mention that there are other ways to update weights too. This leads to the confusion that neural nets and backprop are the same thing and are inherently connected. This also leads to the false belief that neural nets need backprop to train.
Please remember that Back-propagation is just ONE of the ways out there to train your neural network (although it is the most famous one). Now, you must have seen the math involved in backprop, and hence you can see where the derivative term comes in from (some other answers have also explained that). It is possible that other training methods won't need the derivatives, although most of them do. Read on to find out why....
Think about this intuitively, we are talking about CHANGING weights, the direct mathematical operation related to change is a derivative, makes sense that you should need to evaluate derivatives to change weights.
Do let me know if you are still confused and I'll try to modify my answer to make it better. Just as a parting piece of information, another common misconception is that gradient descent is a part of backprop, just like it is assumed that backprop is a part of neural nets. Gradient descent is just one way to minimize your cost function, there are plenty of others you can use. One of the answers above makes this wrong assumption too when it says "Specifically Gradient Descent". This is factually incorrect. :)
Training a neural network means minimizing an associated "error" function wrt the networks weights. Now there are optimization methods that use only function values (Simplex method of Nelder and Mead, Hooke and Jeeves, etc), methods that in addition use first derivatives (steepest descend, quasi Newton, conjugate gradient) and Newton methods using second derivatives as well. So if you want to use a derivative method, you have to calculate the derivatives of the error function, which in return involves the derivatives of the transfer or activation function.
Back propagation is just a nice algorithm to calculate the derivatives, and nothing more.
Yes, the question was really good, this question was also came in my head while i am understanding the Backpropagation. After doing ForwordPropagation on neural network we do back propagation in network to minimize the total error. And there also many other way to minimize the error.your question is why we are doing derivative in backpropagation, the reason is that, As we all know the meaning of derivative is to find the slope of a function or in other words we can find change of particular thing with respect to particular thing. So here we are doing derivative to minimize the total error with respect to the corresponding weights of the network.
and here by doing the derivation of total error with respect to weights we can find it's slope or in other words we can find what is the change in total error with respect to the small change of the weight, so that we can update the weight to minimize the error with the help of this Gradient Descent formula, that is, Weight= weight-Alpha*(del(Total error)/del(weight)).Or in other words New Weights = Old Weights - learning-rate x Partial derivatives of loss function w.r.t. parameters.
Here Alpha is the learning rate which is control the weight update, means if the derivative the - ve than Alpha make it +ve(Becouse of -Alpha in formula) and if +ve it's remain +ve so that weight update goes in +ve direction and it's reflected to minimize the Total error.And also the as derivative part is multiples with Alpha, it's decrees the step size of Alpha when the weight converge to the optimal value of weight(minimum error). Thats why we are doing derivative to minimize the error.

How calculating hessian works for Neural Network learning

Can anyone explain to me in a easy and less mathematical way what is a Hessian and how does it work in practice when optimizing the learning process for a neural network ?
To understand the Hessian you first need to understand Jacobian, and to understand a Jacobian you need to understand the derivative
Derivative is the measure of how fast function value changes withe the change of the argument. So if you have the function f(x)=x^2 you can compute its derivative and obtain a knowledge how fast f(x+t) changes with small enough t. This gives you knowledge about basic dynamics of the function
Gradient shows you in multidimensional functions the direction of the biggest value change (which is based on the directional derivatives) so given a function ie. g(x,y)=-x+y^2 you will know, that it is better to minimize the value of x, while strongly maximize the vlaue of y. This is a base of gradient based methods, like steepest descent technique (used in the traditional backpropagation methods).
Jacobian is yet another generalization, as your function might have many values, like g(x,y)=(x+1, xy, x-z), thus you now have 23 partial derivatives, one gradient per each output value (each of 2 values) thus forming together a matrix of 2*3=6 values.
Now, derivative shows you the dynamics of the function itself. But you can go one step further, if you can use this dynamics to find the optimum of the function, maybe you can do even better if you find out the dynamics of this dynamics, and so - compute derivatives of second order? This is exactly what Hessian is, it is a matrix of second order derivatives of your function. It captures the dynamics of the derivatives, so how fast (in what direction) does the change change. It may seem a bit complex at the first sight, but if you think about it for a while it becomes quite clear. You want to go in the direction of the gradient, but you do not know "how far" (what is the correct step size). And so you define new, smaller optimization problem, where you are asking "ok, I have this gradient, how can I tell where to go?" and solve it analogously, using derivatives (and derivatives of the derivatives form the Hessian).
You may also look at this in the geometrical way - gradient based optimization approximates your function with the line. You simply try to find a line which is closest to your function in a current point, and so it defines a direction of change. Now, lines are quite primitive, maybe we could use some more complex shapes like.... parabolas? Second derivative, hessian methods are just trying to fit the parabola (quadratic function, f(x)=ax^2+bx+c) to your current position. And based on this approximation - chose the valid step.

Different results for Fundamental Matrix in Matlab

I am implementing stereo matching and as preprocessing I am trying to rectify images without camera calibration.
I am using surf detector to detect and match features on images and try to align them. After I find all matches, I remove all that doesn't lie on the epipolar lines, using this function:
[fMatrix, epipolarInliers, status] = estimateFundamentalMatrix(...
matchedPoints1, matchedPoints2, 'Method', 'RANSAC', ...
'NumTrials', 10000, 'DistanceThreshold', 0.1, 'Confidence', 99.99);
inlierPoints1 = matchedPoints1(epipolarInliers, :);
inlierPoints2 = matchedPoints2(epipolarInliers, :);
figure; showMatchedFeatures(I1, I2, inlierPoints1, inlierPoints2);
legend('Inlier points in I1', 'Inlier points in I2');
Problem is, that if I run this function with the same data, I am still getting different results causing differences in resulted disparity map in each run on the same data
Pulatively matched points are still the same, but inliners points differs in each run.
Here you can see that some matches are different in result:
UPDATE: I thought that differences was caused by RANSAC method, but using LMedS, MSAC, I am still getting different results on the same data
EDIT: Admittedly, this is only a partial answer, since I am only explaining why this is even possible with these fitting methods and not how to improve the input keypoints to avoid this problem from the start. There are problems with the distribution of your keypoint matches, as noted in the other answers, and there are ways to address that at the stage of keypoint detection. But, the reason the same input can yield different results for repeated executions of estimateFundamentalMatrix with the same pairs of keypoints is because of the following. (Again, this does not provide sound advice for improving keypoints so as to solve this problem).
The reason for different results on repeated executions, is related to the the RANSAC method (and LMedS and MSAC). They all utilize stochastic (random) sampling and are thus non-deterministic. All methods except Norm8Point operate by randomly sampling 8 pairs of points at a time for (up to) NumTrials.
But first, note that the different results you get for the same inputs are not equally suitable (they will not have the same residuals) but the search space can easily lead to any such minimum because the optimization algorithms are not deterministic. As the other answers rightly suggest, improve your keypoints and this won't be a problem, but here is why the robust fitting methods can do this and some ways to modify their behavior.
Notice the documentation for the 'NumTrials' option (ADDED NOTE: changing this is not the solution, but this does explain the behavior):
'NumTrials' — Number of random trials for finding the outliers
500 (default) | integer
Number of random trials for finding the outliers, specified as the comma-separated pair consisting of 'NumTrials' and an integer value. This parameter applies when you set the Method parameter to LMedS, RANSAC, MSAC, or LTS.
MSAC (M-estimator SAmple Consensus) is a modified RANSAC (RANdom SAmple Consensus). Deterministic algorithms for LMedS have exponential complexity and thus stochastic sampling is practically required.
Before you decide to use Norm8Point (again, not the solution), keep in mind that this method assumes NO outliers, and is thus not robust to erroneous matches. Try using more trials to stabilize the other methods (EDIT: I mean, rather than switching to Norm8Point, but if you are able to back up in your algorithms then address the the inputs -- the keypoints -- as a first line of attack). Also, to reset the random number generator, you could do rng('default') before each call to estimateFundamentalMatrix. But again, note that while this will force the same answer each run, improving your key point distribution is the better solution in general.
I know its too late for your answer, but I guess it would be useful for someone in the future. Actually, the problem in your case is two fold,
Degenerate location of features, i.e., The location of features is mostly localized (on you :P) and not well-spread throughout the image.
These matches are sort of on the same plane. I know you would argue that your body is not planar, but comparing it to the depth of the room, it sort of is.
Mathematically, this means you are kind of extracting E (or F) from a planar surface, which always has infinite solutions. To sort this out, I would suggest using some constrain on distance between any two extracted SURF features, i.e., any two SURF features used for matching should be at least 40 or 100 pixels apart (depending on the resolution of your image).
Another way to get better SURF features is to set 'NumOctaves' in detectSURFFeatures(rgb2gray(I1),'NumOctaves',5); to larger values.
I am facing the same problem and this has helped (a little bit).

Ridge coefficients larger than least squares

I've been using Matlab to compute coefficients for a model using both least squares and ridge. I was pretty sure that all my coding has been correct.
But for one dataset, (Boston housing), the ridge coefficients are larger than the least squares coefficients. Is this actually possible? What does it means?
Or have I made a coding error?.....
It seems that it might not be a problem at all...
1) In the typical least squares problem, you have to choose beta vector that minimizes
||y-X*beta||^2
2) Another associated problem (known as Lasso problem) is to find beta vector that minimizes
||y-X*beta||^2 + lambda*||beta||
3) Finally, in the ridge regression, your problem is to find beta vector that minimizes
||y-X*beta||^2 + lambda*||beta||^2
Note that in problem (2) above, it is clear that you are specifically penalizing the size of the [beta_i]s.
On the other hand, in problem (3) above, you are penalizing the differences in the sizes of the betas_i. I mean if you have in the vector beta, small beta_i s and large beta_i s, your cost is still going to be large. Imagine that the vector beta=[0.1;0.0001] in the problem (1). While to reduce "proportionally" both beta_is in problem (2) seems to be a good solution, the same does not happen in problem (3), where the best is to increase a little the size of beta_2=0.0001 in order to reduce more the size of beta_1=0.1.
Therefore, if your matlab solution of problem (3) presents beta_i s with sizes more similar, it seems that you are doing well.
I hope I help, but I never run this kind of regression before and I dont have the matlab here as well.

Linear regression, with limits

I have a set of points, (x, y), where each y has an error range y.low to y.high. Assume a linear regression is appropriate (in some cases the data may originally have followed a power law, but has been transformed [log, log] to be linear).
Calculating a best fit line is easy, but I need to make sure the line stays within the error range for every point. If the regressed line goes outside the ranges, and I simply push it up or down to stay between, is this the best fit available, or might the slope need changed as well?
I realize that in some cases, a lower bound of 1 point and an upper bound of another point may require a different slope, in which case presumably just touching those 2 bounds is the best fit.
The constrained problem as stated can have both a different intercept and a different slope compared to the unconstrained problem.
Consider the following example (the solid line shows the OLS fit):
Now if you imagine very tight [y.low; y.high] bounds around the first two points and extremely loose bounds over the last one. The constrained fit would be close to the dotted line. Clearly, the two fits have different slopes and different intercepts.
Your problem is essentially the least squares with linear inequality constraints. The relevant algorithms are treated, for example, in "Solving least squares problems" by Charles L. Lawson and Richard J. Hanson.
Here is a direct link to the relevant chapter (I hope the link works). Your problem can be trivially transformed to Problem LSI (by multiplying your y.high constraints by -1).
As far as coding this up, I'd suggest taking a look at LAPACK: there may already be a function there that solves this problem (I haven't checked).
I know MATLAB has an optimization library that can do constrained SQP (sequential quadratic programming) and also lots of other methods for solving quadratic minimization problems with inequality constraints. The cost function you want to minimize will be the sum of the squared errors between your fit and the data. The constraints are those you mentioned. I'm sure there are free libraries that do the same thing too.