I want you to help me figure out which problem am I dealing with (pattern recognition or time series forecasting) and find the best NN architecture suited for this problem.
In my problem, I have many finite sets of two dimensional data (learning sets)
Lets N be the size of the data set I want to calculate using the NN.
I want my NN to learn these data and by giving it the first m data of the data set it gives me the remaining N-m data.
I think it's rather a pattern recognition problem, so which is the best NN architecture suited for this kind.
Thank you.
As far as I have understood you problem, you have a dataset with N rows. And you want to train your network using first M rows. And then you want your NN to predict the rest N-M rows.
Typically, in forecasting (timeseries prediction), we do this kind of stuffs. We train our model with historical data and try to predict future values.
So, in your case, top M rows could be training data in the training phase.And during the model accuracy evaluation phase, future values could be your N-M rows.
Typically, recurrent networks are best suited for temporal data, because, they can take care of ordered data.
ENCOG also provides a special dataset for temporal data.And you can use them for your problem.
Related
Consider the training process of deep FF neural network using mini-batch gradient descent. As far as I understand, at each epoch of the training we have different random set of mini-batches. Then iterating over all mini batches and computing the gradients of the NN parameters we will get random gradients at each iteration and, therefore, random directions for the model parameters to minimize the cost function. Let's imagine we fixed the hyperparameters of the training algorithm and started the training process again and again, then we would end up with models, which completely differs from each other, because in those trainings the changes of model parameters were different.
1) Is it always the case when we use such random based training algorithms?
2) If it is so, where is the guaranty that training the NN one more time with the best hyperparameters found during the previous trainings and validations will yield us the best model again?
3) Is it possible to find such hyperparameters, which will always yield the best models?
Neural Network are solving a optimization problem, As long as it is computing a gradient in right direction but can be random, it doesn't hurt its objective to generalize over data. It can stuck in some local optima. But there are many good methods like Adam, RMSProp, momentum based etc, by which it can accomplish its objective.
Another reason, when you say mini-batch, there is at least some sample by which it can generalize over those sample, there can be fluctuation in the error rate, and but at least it can give us a local solution.
Even, at each random sampling, these mini-batch have different-2 sample, which helps in generalize well over the complete distribution.
For hyperparameter selection, you need to do tuning and validate result on unseen data, there is no straight forward method to choose these.
I have a question regarding cross validation in Linear regression model.
From my understanding, in cross validation, we split the data into (say) 10 folds and train the data from 9 folds and the remaining folds we use for testing. We repeat this process until we test all of the folds, so that every folds are tested exactly once.
When we are training the model from 9 folds, should we not get a different model (may be slightly different from the model that we have created when using the whole dataset)? I know that we take an average of all the "n" performances.
But, what about the model? Shouldn't the resulting model also be taken as the average of all the "n" models? I see that the resulting model is same as the model which we created using whole of the dataset before cross-validation. If we are considering the overall model even after cross-validation (and not taking avg of all the models), then what's the point of calculating average performance from n different models (because they are trained from different folds of data and are supposed to be different, right?)
I apologize if my question is not clear or too funny.
Thanks for reading, though!
I think that there is some confusion in some of the answers proposed because of the use of the word "model" in the question asked. If I am guessing correctly, you are referring to the fact that in K-fold cross-validation we learn K-different predictors (or decision functions), which you call "model" (this is a bad idea because in machine learning we also do model selection which is choosing between families of predictors and this is something which can be done using cross-validation). Cross-validation is typically used for hyperparameter selection or to choose between different algorithms or different families of predictors. Once these chosen, the most common approach is to relearn a predictor with the selected hyperparameter and algorithm from all the data.
However, if the loss function which is optimized is convex with respect to the predictor, than it is possible to simply average the different predictors obtained from each fold.
This is because for a convex risk, the risk of the average of the predictor is always smaller than the average of the individual risks.
The PROs and CONs of averaging (vs retraining) are as follows
PROs: (1) In each fold, the evaluation that you made on the held out set gives you an unbiased estimate of the risk for those very predictors that you have obtained, and for these estimates the only source of uncertainty is due to the estimate of the empirical risk (the average of the loss function) on the held out data.
This should be contrasted with the logic which is used when you are retraining and which is that the cross-validation risk is an estimate of the "expected value of the risk of a given learning algorithm" (and not of a given predictor) so that if you relearn from data from the same distribution, you should have in average the same level of performance. But note that this is in average and when retraining from the whole data this could go up or down. In other words, there is an additional source of uncertainty due to the fact that you will retrain.
(2) The hyperparameters have been selected exactly for the number of datapoints that you used in each fold to learn. If you relearn from the whole dataset, the optimal value of the hyperparameter is in theory and in practice not the same anymore, and so in the idea of retraining, you really cross your fingers and hope that the hyperparameters that you have chosen are still fine for your larger dataset.
If you used leave-one-out, there is obviously no concern there, and if the number of data point is large with 10 fold-CV you should be fine. But if you are learning from 25 data points with 5 fold CV, the hyperparameters for 20 points are not really the same as for 25 points...
CONs: Well, intuitively you don't benefit from training with all the data at once
There are unfortunately very little thorough theory on this but the following two papers especially the second paper consider precisely the averaging or aggregation of the predictors from K-fold CV.
Jung, Y. (2016). Efficient Tuning Parameter Selection by Cross-Validated Score in High Dimensional Models. International Journal of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, 10(1), 19-25.
Maillard, G., Arlot, S., & Lerasle, M. (2019). Aggregated Hold-Out. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.04890.
The answer is simple: you use the process of (repeated) cross validation (CV) to obtain a relatively stable performance estimate for a model instead of improving it.
Think of trying out different model types and parametrizations which are differently well suited for your problem. Using CV you obtain many different estimates on how each model type and parametrization would perform on unseen data. From those results you usually choose one well suited model type + parametrization which you will use, then train it again on all (training) data. The reason for doing this many times (different partitions with repeats, each using different partition splits) is to get a stable estimation of the performance - which will enable you to e.g. look at the mean/median performance and its spread (would give you information about how well the model usually performs and how likely it is to be lucky/unlucky and get better/worse results instead).
Two more things:
Usually, using CV will improve your results in the end - simply because you take a model that is better suited for the job.
You mentioned taking the "average" model. This actually exists as "model averaging", where you average the results of multiple, possibly differently trained models to obtain a single result. Its one way to use an ensemble of models instead of a single one. But also for those you want to use CV in the end for choosing reasonable model.
I like your thinking. I think you have just accidentally discovered Random Forest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_forest
Without repeated cv your seemingly best model is likely to be only a mediocre model when you score it on new data...
I am trying to extract common patterns that always appear whenever a certain event occurs.
For example, patient A, B, and C all had a heart attack. Using the readings from there pulse, I want to find the common patterns before the heart attack stroke.
In the next stage I want to do this using multiple dimensions. For example, using the readings from the patients pulse, temperature, and blood pressure, what are the common patterns that occurred in the three dimensions taking into consideration the time and order between each dimension.
What is the best way to solve this problem using Neural Networks and which type of network is best?
(Just need some pointing in the right direction)
and thank you all for reading
Described problem looks like a time series prediction problem. That means a basic prediction problem for a continuous or discrete phenomena generated by some existing process. As a raw data for this problem we will have a sequence of samples x(t), x(t+1), x(t+2), ..., where x() means an output of considered process and t means some arbitrary timepoint.
For artificial neural networks solution we will consider a time series prediction, where we will organize our raw data to a new sequences. As you should know, we consider X as a matrix of input vectors that will be used in ANN learning. For time series prediction we will construct a new collection on following schema.
In the most basic form your input vector x will be a sequence of samples (x(t-k), x(t-k+1), ..., x(t-1), x(t)) taken at some arbitrary timepoint t, appended to it predecessor samples from timepoints t-k, t-k+1, ..., t-1. You should generate every example for every possible timepoint t like this.
But the key is to preprocess data so that we get the best prediction results.
Assuming your data (phenomena) is continuous, you should consider to apply some sampling technique. You could start with an experiment for some naive sampling period Δt, but there are stronger methods. See for example Nyquist–Shannon Sampling Theorem, where the key idea is to allow to recover continuous x(t) from discrete x(Δt) samples. This is reasonable when we consider that we probably expect our ANNs to do this.
Assuming your data is discrete... you still should need to try sampling, as this will speed up your computations and might possibly provide better generalization. But the key advice is: do experiments! as the best architecture depends on data and also will require to preprocess them correctly.
The next thing is network output layer. From your question, it appears that this will be a binary class prediction. But maybe a wider prediction vector is worth considering? How about to predict the future of considered samples, that is x(t+1), x(t+2) and experiment with different horizons (length of the future)?
Further reading:
Somebody mentioned Python here. Here is some good tutorial on timeseries prediction with Keras: Victor Schmidt, Keras recurrent tutorial, Deep Learning Tutorials
This paper is good if you need some real example: Fessant, Francoise, Samy Bengio, and Daniel Collobert. "On the prediction of solar activity using different neural network models." Annales Geophysicae. Vol. 14. No. 1. 1996.
I'm relatively new to Matlab ANN Toolbox. I am training the NN with pattern recognition and target matrix of 3x8670 containing 1s and 0s, using one hidden layer, 40 neurons and the rest with default settings. When I get the simulated output for new set of inputs, then the values are around 0 and 1. I then arrange them in descending order and choose a fixed number(which is known to me) out of 8670 observations to be 1 and rest to be zero.
Every time I run the program, the first row of the simulated output always has close to 100% accuracy and the following rows dont exhibit the same kind of accuracy.
Is there a logical explanation in general? I understand that answering this query conclusively might require the understanding of program and problem, but its made of of several functions to clearly explain. Can I make some changes in the training to get consistence output?
If you have any suggestions please share it with me.
Thanks,
Nishant
Your problem statement is not clear for me. For example, what you mean by: "I then arrange them in descending order and choose a fixed number ..."
As I understand, you did not get appropriate output from your NN as compared to the real target. I mean, your output from NN is difference than target. If so, there are different possibilities which should be considered:
How do you divide training/test/validation sets for training phase? The most division should be assigned to training (around 75%) and rest for test/validation.
How is your training data set? Can it support most scenarios as you expected? If your trained data set is not somewhat similar to your test data sets (e.g., you have some new records/samples in the test data set which had not (near) appear in the training phase, it explains as 'outlier' and NN cannot work efficiently with these types of samples, so you need clustering approach not NN classification approach), your results from NN is out-of-range and NN cannot provide ideal accuracy as you need. NN is good for those data set training, where there is no very difference between training and test data sets. Otherwise, NN is not appropriate.
Sometimes you have an appropriate training data set, but the problem is training itself. In this condition, you need other types of NN, because feed-forward NNs such as MLP cannot work with compacted and not well-separated regions of data very well. You need strong function approximation such as RBF and SVM.
I'm trying to build an app to detect images which are advertisements from the webpages. Once I detect those I`ll not be allowing those to be displayed on the client side.
Basically I'm using Back-propagation algorithm to train the neural network using the dataset given here: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Internet+Advertisements.
But in that dataset no. of attributes are very high. In fact one of the mentors of the project told me that If you train the Neural Network with that many attributes, it'll take lots of time to get trained. So is there a way to optimize the input dataset? Or I just have to use that many attributes?
1558 is actually a modest number of features/attributes. The # of instances(3279) is also small. The problem is not on the dataset side, but on the training algorithm side.
ANN is slow in training, I'd suggest you to use a logistic regression or svm. Both of them are very fast to train. Especially, svm has a lot of fast algorithms.
In this dataset, you are actually analyzing text, but not image. I think a linear family classifier, i.e. logistic regression or svm, is better for your job.
If you are using for production and you cannot use open source code. Logistic regression is very easy to implement compared to a good ANN and SVM.
If you decide to use logistic regression or SVM, I can future recommend some articles or source code for you to refer.
If you're actually using a backpropagation network with 1558 input nodes and only 3279 samples, then the training time is the least of your problems: Even if you have a very small network with only one hidden layer containing 10 neurons, you have 1558*10 weights between the input layer and the hidden layer. How can you expect to get a good estimate for 15580 degrees of freedom from only 3279 samples? (And that simple calculation doesn't even take the "curse of dimensionality" into account)
You have to analyze your data to find out how to optimize it. Try to understand your input data: Which (tuples of) features are (jointly) statistically significant? (use standard statistical methods for this) Are some features redundant? (Principal component analysis is a good stating point for this.) Don't expect the artificial neural network to do that work for you.
Also: remeber Duda&Hart's famous "no-free-lunch-theorem": No classification algorithm works for every problem. And for any classification algorithm X, there is a problem where flipping a coin leads to better results than X. If you take this into account, deciding what algorithm to use before analyzing your data might not be a smart idea. You might well have picked the algorithm that actually performs worse than blind guessing on your specific problem! (By the way: Duda&Hart&Storks's book about pattern classification is a great starting point to learn about this, if you haven't read it yet.)
aplly a seperate ANN for each category of features
for example
457 inputs 1 output for url terms ( ANN1 )
495 inputs 1 output for origurl ( ANN2 )
...
then train all of them
use another main ANN to join results