Few questions about kohonen neural network - neural-network

I have big data set (time-series, about 50 parameters/values). I want to use Kohonen network to group similar data rows. I've read some about Kohonen neural networks, i understand idea of Kohonen network, but:
I don't know how to implement Kohonen with so many dimensions. I found example on CodeProject, but only with 2 or 3 dimensional input vector. When i have 50 parameters - shall i create 50 weights in my neurons?
I don't know how to update weights of winning neuron (how to calculate new weights?).
My english is not perfect and I don't understand everything I read about Kohonen network, especially descriptions of variables in formulas, thats why im asking.

One should distinguish the dimensionality of the map, which is usually low (e.g. 2 in the common case of a rectangular grid) and the dimensionality of the reference vectors which can be arbitrarily high without problems.
Look at http://www.psychology.mcmaster.ca/4i03/demos/competitive-demo.html for a nice example with 49-dimensional input vectors (7x7 pixel images). The Kohonen map in this case has the form of a one-dimensional ring of 8 units.
See also http://www.demogng.de for a java simulator for various Kohonen-like networks including ring-shaped ones like the one at McMasters. The reference vectors, however, are all 2-dimensional, but only for easier display. They could have arbitrary high dimensions without any change in the algorithms.

Yes, you would need 50 neurons. However, these types of networks are usually low dimensional as described in this self-organizing map article. I have never seen them use more than a few inputs.
You have to use an update formula. From the same article: Wv(s + 1) = Wv(s) + Θ(u, v, s) α(s)(D(t) - Wv(s))

yes, you'll need 50 inputs for each neuron
you basically do a linear interpolation between the neurons and the target (input) neuron, and use W(s + 1) = W(s) + Θ() * α(s) * (Input(t) - W(s)) with Θ being your neighbourhood function.
and you should update all your neurons, not only the winner
which function you use as a neighbourhood function depends on your actual problem.
a common property of such a function is that it has a value 1 when i=k and falls off with the distance euclidian distance. additionally it shrinks with time (in order to localize clusters).
simple neighbourhood functions include linear interpolation (up to a "maximum distance") or a gaussian function

Related

Using neural networks (MLP) for estimation

Im new with NN and i have this problem:
I have a dataset with 300 rows and 33 columns. Each row has 3 more columns for the results.
Im trying to use MLP for trainning a model so that when i have a new row, it estimates those 3 result columns.
I can easily reduce the error during trainning to 0.001 but when i use cross validation it keep estimating very poorly.
It estimates correctly if i use the same entry it used to train, but if i use another values that werent used for trainning the results are very wrong
Im using two hidden layers with 20 neurons each, so my architecture is [33 20 20 3]
For activation function im using biporlarsigmoid function.
Do you guys have some suggestion on where i could try to change to improve this?
Overfitting
As mentioned in the comments, this perfectly describes overfitting.
I strongly suggest reading the wikipedia article on overfitting, as it well describes causes, but I'll summarize some key points here.
Model complexity
Overfitting often happens when you model is needlessly complex for the problem. I don't know anything about your dataset, but I'm guessing [33 20 20 3] is more parameters than necessary for predicting.
Try running your cross-validation methods again, this time with either fewer layers, or fewer nodes per layer. Right now you are using 33*20 + 20*20 + 20*3 = 1120 parameters (weights) to make your prediction, is this necessary?
Regularization
A common solution to overfitting is regularization. The driving principle is KISS (keep it simple, stupid).
By applying an L1 regularizer to your weights, you keep preference for the smallest number of weights to solve your problem. The network will pull many weights to 0 as they aren't need.
By applying an L2 regularizer to your weights, you keep preference for lower rank solutions to your problem. This means that your network will prefer weights matrices that span lower dimensions. Practically this means your weights will be smaller numbers, and are less likely to be able to "memorize" the data.
What is L1 and L2? These are types of vector norms. L1 is the sum of the absolute value of your weights. L2 is the sqrt of the sum of squares of your weights. (L3 is the cubed root of the sum of cubes of weights, L4 ...).
Distortions
Another commonly used technique is to augment your training data with distorted versions of your training samples. This only makes sense with certain types of data. For instance images can be rotated, scaled, shifted, add gaussian noise, etc. without dramatically changing the content of the image.
By adding distortions, your network will no longer memorize your data, but will also learn when things look similar to your data. The number 1 rotated 2 degrees still looks like a 1, so the network should be able to learn from both of these.
Only you know your data. If this is something that can be done with your data (even just adding a little gaussian noise to each feature), then maybe this is worth looking into. But do not use this blindly without considering the implications it may have on your dataset.
Careful analysis of data
I put this last because it is an indirect response to the overfitting problem. Check your data before pumping it through a black-box algorithm (like a neural network). Here are a few questions worth answering if your network doesn't work:
Are any of my features strongly correlated with each other?
How do baseline algorithms perform? (Linear regression, logistic regression, etc.)
How are my training samples distributed among classes? Do I have 298 samples of one class and 1 sample of the other two?
How similar are my samples within a class? Maybe I have 100 samples for this class, but all of them are the same (or nearly the same).

Restricting output classes in multi-class classification in Tensorflow

I am building a bidirectional LSTM to do multi-class sentence classification.
I have in total 13 classes to choose from and I am multiplying the output of my LSTM network to a matrix whose dimensionality is [2*num_hidden_unit,num_classes] and then apply softmax to get the probability of the sentence to fall into 1 of the 13 classes.
So if we consider output[-1] as the network output:
W_output = tf.Variable(tf.truncated_normal([2*num_hidden_unit,num_classes]))
result = tf.matmul(output[-1],W_output) + bias
and I get my [1, 13] matrix (assuming I am not working with batches for the moment).
Now, I also have information that a given sentence does not fall into a given class for sure and I want to restrict the number of classes considered for a given sentence. So let's say for instance that for a given sentence, I know it can fall only in 6 classes so the output should really be a matrix of dimensionality [1,6].
One option I was thinking of is to put a mask over the result matrix where I multiply the rows corresponding to the classes that I want to keep by 1 and the ones I want to discard by 0, by in this way I will just lose some of the information instead of redirecting it.
Anyone has a clue on what to do in this case?
I think your best bet is, as you seem to have described, using a weighted cross entropy loss function where the weights for your "impossible class" are 0 and 1 for the other possible classes. Tensorflow has a weighted cross entropy loss function.
Another interesting but probably less effective method is to feed whatever information you now have about what classes your sentence can/cannot fall into the network at some point (probably towards the end).

Self-Organizing Maps

I have a question on self-organizing maps:
But first, here is my approach on implementing one:
The som neurons are stored in a basic array. Each neuron consists of a vector (another array of the size of the input neurons) of double values which are initialized to a random value.
As far as I understand the algorithm, this is actually all I need to implement it.
So, for the training I choose a sample of the training data at random an calculate the BMU using the Euclidian distance of sample's values and the neuron weights.
Afterwards I update it's weights and all other neurons in it's range depending on the neighborhood function and the learning rate.
Then, I decrease the neighborhood function and the learning rate.
This is done until a fixed amount of iterations.
My question is now: How do I determine the clusters after the training? My approach so far is to present a new input vector and calculate the min Euclidian distance between it and the BMU . But this seems a little naive to me. I'm sure that I've missed something.
There is no single correct way of doing that. As you noted, finding the BMU is one of them and the only one that makes sense if you just want to find the most similar cluster.
If you want to reconstruct your input vector, returning the BMU prototype works too, but may not be very precise (it is equivalent to the Nearest Neighbor rule or 1NN). Then you need to interpolate between neurons to find a better reconstruction. This could be done by weighting each neuron inversely proportional to their distance to the input vector and then computing the weighted average (this is equivalent to weighted KNN). You can also restrict this interpolation only to the BMU's neighbors, which will work faster and may give better results (this would be weighted 5NN). This technique was used here: The Continuous Interpolating Self-organizing Map.
You can see and experiment with those different options here: http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~rcpinto/itm/ (not a SOM, but a close cousin). Click "Apply" to do regression on a curve using the reconstructed vectors, then check "Draw Regression" and try the different options.
BTW, the description of your implementation is correct.
A pretty common approach nowadays is the soft subspace clustering, where feature weights are added to find the most relevant features. You can use these weights to increase performance and improve the BMU calculation with euclidean distance.

3D SIFT for human activity classification in videos. NOT GETTING GOOD ACCURACY.

I am trying to classify human activities in videos(six classes and almost 100 videos per class, 6*100=600 videos). I am using 3D SIFT(both xy and t scale=1) from UCF.
for f= 1:20
f
offset = 0;
c=strcat('running',num2str(f),'.mat');
load(c)
pix=video3Dm;
% Generate descriptors at locations given by subs matrix
for i=1:100
reRun = 1;
while reRun == 1
loc = subs(i+offset,:);
fprintf(1,'Calculating keypoint at location (%d, %d, %d)\n',loc);
% Create a 3DSIFT descriptor at the given location
[keys{i} reRun] = Create_Descriptor(pix,1,1,loc(1),loc(2),loc(3));
if reRun == 1
offset = offset + 1;
end
end
end
fprintf(1,'\nFinished...\n%d points thrown out do to poor descriptive ability.\n',offset);
for t1=1:20
des(t1+((f-1)*100),:)=keys{1,t1}.ivec;
end
f
end
My approach is to first get 50 descriptors(of 640 dimension) for one video, and then perform bag of words with all descriptors(on 50*600= 30000 descriptors). After performing Kmeans(with 1000 k value)
idx1000=kmeans(double(total_des),1000);
I am getting 30k of length index vector. Then I am creating histogram signature of each video based on their index values in clusters. Then perform svmtrain(sum in matlab) on signetures(dim-600*1000).
Some potential problems-
1-I am generating random 300 points in 3D to calculate 50 descriptors on any 50 points from those points 300 points.
2- xy, and time scale values, by default they are "1".
3-Cluster numbers, I am not sure that k=1000 is enough for 30000x640 data.
4-svmtrain, I am using this matlab library.
NOTE: Everything is on MATLAB.
Your basic setup seems correct especially given that you are getting 85-95% accuracy. Now, it's just a matter of tuning your procedure. Unfortunately, there is no way to do this other than testing a variety of parameters examining the results and repeating. I going to break this answer into two parts. Advice about bag of words features, and advice about SVM classifiers.
Tuning Bag of Words Features
You are using 50 3D SIFT Features per video from randomly selected points with a vocabulary of 1000 visual words. As you've already mentioned, the size of the vocabulary is one parameter you can adjust. So is the number of descriptors per video.
Let's say that each video is 60 frames long, (at 30 fps only 2 sec, but let's assume you are sampling at 1fps for a 1 minute video). That means you are capturing less than one descriptor per frame. That seems very low to me even with 3D descriptors especially if the locations are randomly chosen.
I would manually examine the points for which you are generating features. Do they appear be well distributed in both space and time? Are you capturing too much background? Ask yourself, would I be able to distinguish between actions given these features?
If you find that many of the selected points are uninformative, increasing the number of points may help. The kmeans clustering can make a few groups for uninformative outliers, and more points means you hopefully capture a few more informative points. You can also try other methods for selecting points. For example, you could use corner points.
You can also manually examine the points that are clustered together. What sorts of structures do the groups have in common? Are the clusters too mixed? That's usually a sign that you need a larger vocabulary.
Tuning SVMs
Using the Matlab SVM implementation or the Libsvm implementation should not make a difference. They are both the same method and have similar tuning options.
First off, you should really be using cross-validation to tune the SVM to avoid overfitting on your test set.
The most powerful parameter for the SVM is the kernel choice. In Matlab, there are five built in kernel options, and you can also define your own. The kernels also have parameters of their own. For example, the gaussian kernel has a scaling factor, sigma. Typically, you start off with a simple kernel and compare to more complex kernels. For example, start with linear, then test quadratic, cubic and gaussian. To compare, you can simply look at your mean cross-validation accuracy.
At this point, the last option is to look at individual instances that are misclassified and try to identify reasons that they may be more difficult than others. Are there commonalities such as occlusion? Also look directly at the visual words that were selected for these instances. You may find something you overlooked when you were tuning your features.
Good luck!

Interpret the output of neural network in matlab

I have build a neural network model, with 3 classes. I understand that the best output for a classification process is the boolean 1 for a class and boolean zeros for the other classes , for example the best classification result for a certain class, where the output of a classifire that lead on how much this data are belong to this class is the first element in a vector is [1 , 0 , 0]. But the output of the testing data will not be like that,instead it will be a rational numbers like [2.4 ,-1 , .6] ,So how to interpret this result? How to decide to which class the testing data belong?
I have tried to take the absolute value and turn the maximum element to 1 and the other to zeros, so is this correct?
Learner.
It appears your neural network is bad designed.
Regardless your structure is -number of input-hidden-output- layers, when you are doing a multiple classification problem, you must ensure each of your output neurones are evaluating an individual class, that is, each them has a bounded output, in this case, between 0 and 1. Use almost any of the defined function on the output layer for performing this.
Nevertheles, for the Neural Network to work properly, you must strongly remember, that every single neuron loop -from input to output- operates as a classificator, this is, they define a region on your input space which is going to be classified.
Under this framework, every single neuron has a direct interpretable sense on the non-linear expansion the NN is defining, particularly when there are few hidden layers. This is ensured by the general expression of Neural Networks:
Y_out=F_n(Y_n-1*w_n-t_n)
...
Y_1=F_0(Y_in-1*w_0-t_0)
For example, with radial basis neurons -i.e. F_n=sqrt(sum(Yni-Rni)^2) and w_n=1 (identity):
Yn+1=sqrt(sum(Yni-Rni)^2)
a dn-dim spherical -being dn the dimension of the n-1 layer- clusters classification is induced from the first layer. Similarly, elliptical clusters are induced. When two radial basis neuron layers are added under that structure of spherical/elliptical clusters, unions and intersections of spherical/elliptical clusters are induced, three layers are unions and intersections of the previous, and so on.
When using linear neurons -i.e. F_n=(.) (identity), linear classificators are induced, that is, the input space is divided by dn-dim hyperplanes, and when adding two layers, union and intersections of hyperplanes are induced, three layers are unions and intersections of the previous, and so on.
Hence, you can realize the number of neurons per layer is the number of classificators per each class. So if the geometry of the space is -lets put this really graphically- two clusters for the class A, one cluster for the class B and three clusters for the class C, you will need at least six neurons per layer. Thus, assuming you could expect anything, you can consider as a very rough approximate, about n neurons per class per layer, that is, n neurons to n^2 minumum neurons per class per layer. This number can be increased or decreased according the topology of the classification.
Finally, the best advice here is for n outputs (classes), r inputs:
Have r good classificator neurons on the first layers, radial or linear, for segmenting the space according your expectations,
Have n to n^2 neurons per layer, or as per the dificulty of your problem,
Have 2-3 layers, only increase this number after getting clear results,
Have n thresholding networks on the last layer, only one layer, as a continuous function from 0 to 1 (make the crisp on the code)
Cheers...