Can I get predictions from Winbugs/OpenBUGS? - winbugs

I am new to WinBUGS and OpenBUGS. I just ran an example model, and am wondering whether I can get the predictions generated by WinBUGS/OpenBUGS. If not, is there any convenient way to achieve this (e.g. with the help of other applications such as R)?

Yes, you can. In Bayesian tools, it is very easy to get predictions. In your design matrix, just add new rows, with response variable set to NA. You can see concrete example here.

Related

checking for convergence in complex hierarchical models JAGS

I have estimated a complex hierarchical model with many random effects, but don't really know what the best approach is to checking for convergend. I have complex longitudinal data from a few hundred individuals and estimate quite a few parameters for every individual. Because of that, I have way to many traceplots to inspect visually. Or should I really spend a day going through all the traceplots? What would be a better way to check for convergence? Do I have to calculate Gelman and Rubin's Rhat for every parameter on the person level? And when can I conclude that the model converged? When absolutely all of the thousends of parameters reached convergence? Is it even sensible to expect that? Or is there something like "overall convergence"? And what does it mean when some person-level parameters did not converge? Does it make sense to use autorun.jags from the R2jags package with such a model or will it just run for ever? I know, these are a lot of question, but I just don't know how to approach that.
The measure I am using for convergence is a potential scale reduction factor (psrf)* using the gelman.diag function from the R package coda.
But nevertheless, I am also quickly visually inspecting all the traceplots, even though I also have tens/hundreds of them. It can be really fast if you put them in PNG files and then quickly go through them using e.g. IrfanView (let me know if you need me to expand on this).
The reason you should inspect the traceplots is pretty well described by an example from Marc Kery (author of great Bayesian books): see "Never blindly trust Rhat for convergence in a Bayesian analysis", here I include a self explanatory image from this email:
This is related to Rhat statistics while I use psrf, but it's pretty likely that psrf suffers from this too... and better to check the chains.
*) Gelman, A. & Rubin, D. B. Inference from iterative simulation using multiple sequences. Stat. Sci. 7, 457–472 (1992).

How to plot all the stream lines in paraview?

I am simulating the case "Cavity driven lid" and I try to get all the stream lines with the stream tracer of paraview, but I only get the ones that intersect the reference line, and because of that there are vortices that are not visible. How can I see all the stream-lines in the domain?
Thanks a lot in adavance.
To add a little bit to Mathieu's answer, if you really want streamlines everywhere, then you can create a Stream Tracer With Custom Source (as Mathieu suggested) and set your data to both the Input and the Seed Source. That will create a streamline originating from every point in your dataset, which is pretty much what you asked for.
However, while you can do this, you will probably not be happy with the results. First of all, unless your data is trivially small, this will take a long time to compute and create a large amount of data. Even worse, the result will be so dense that you won't be able to see anything. You will get all those interesting streamlines through vortices, but they will be completely hidden by all the boring streamlines around them.
Thus, you are better off with trying to derive a data set that contains seed points that are likely to trace a stream through the vortices that you are interested in. One thing you might want to try is to compute the vorticity of your vector field (Gradient Of Unstructured Data Set when turning on advanced option Compute Vorticity), find the magnitude of that (Calculator), and then use the Threshold filter to pull out the cells with large vorticity. Then use that as your Seed Source.
Another (probably better) option if your data is 2D or you can extract an interesting surface along the flow of your data is to use the Surface LIC plugin. Details can be found at https://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Line_Integral_Convolution.
You have to choose a representative source for your streamline.
You could use a "Sphere Source", so in the StreamTracer properties.
If that fails, you can use a StreamTracerWithCustomSource and use your own source that you will have to create yourself first.

How to create a "Denoising Autoencoder" in Matlab?

I know Matlab has the function TrainAutoencoder(input, settings) to create and train an autoencoder. The result is capable of running the two functions of "Encode" and "Decode".
But this is only applicable to the case of normal autoencoders. What if you want to have a denoising autoencoder? I searched and found some sample codes, where they used the "Network" function to convert the autoencoder to a normal network and then Train(network, noisyInput, smoothOutput)like a denoising autoencoder.
But there are multiple missing parts:
How to use this new network object to "encode" new data points? it doesn't support the encode().
How to get the "latent" variables to the features, out of this "network'?
I appreciate if anyone could help me resolve this issue.
Thanks,
-Moein
At present (2019a), MATALAB does not permit users to add layers manually in autoencoder. If you want to build up your own, you will have start from the scratch by using layers provided by MATLAB;
In order to to use TrainNetwork(...) to train your model, you will have you find out a way to insert your data into an object called imDatastore. The difficulty for autoencoder's data is that there is NO label, which is required by imDatastore, hence you will have to find out a smart way to avoid it--essentially you are to deal with a so-called OCC (One Class Classification) problem.
https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.io.datastore.imagedatastore.html
Use activations(...) to dump outputs from intermediate (hidden) layers
https://www.mathworks.com/help/deeplearning/ref/activations.html?searchHighlight=activations&s_tid=doc_srchtitle
I swang between using MATLAB and Python (Keras) for deep learning for a couple of weeks, eventually I chose the latter, albeit I am a long-term and loyal user to MATLAB and a rookie to Python. My two cents are that there are too many restrictions in the former regarding deep learning.
Good luck.:-)
If you 'simulation' means prediction/inference, simply use activations(...) to dump outputs from any intermediate (hidden) layers as I mentioned earlier so that you can check them.
Another way is that you construct an identical network but with the encoding part only, copy your trained parameters into it, and feed your simulated signals.

How does word embedding/ word vectors work/created?

How does word2vec create vectors for words? I trained two word2vec models using two different files (from commoncrawl website) but I am getting same word vectors for a given word from both models.
Actually, I have created multiple word2vec models using different text files from the commoncrawl website. Now I want to check which model is better among all. How can select the best model out of all these models and why I am getting same word vectors for different models?
Sorry, If the question is not clear.
If you are getting identical word-vectors from models that you've prepared from different text corpuses, something is likely wrong in your process. You may not be performing any training at all, perhaps because of a problem in how the text iterable is provided to the Word2Vec class. (In that case, word-vectors would remain at their initial, randomly-initialized values.)
You should enable logging, and review the logs carefully to see that sensible counts of words, examples, progress, and incremental-progress are displayed during the process. You should also check that results for some superficial, ad-hoc checks look sensible after training. For example, does model.most_similar('hot') return other words/concepts somewhat like 'hot'?
Once you're sure models are being trained on varied corpuses – in which case their word-vectors should be very different from each other – deciding which model is 'best' depends on your specific goals with word-vectors.
You should devise a repeatable, quantitative way to evaluate a model against your intended end-uses. This might start crudely with a few of your own manual reviews of results, like looking over most_similar() results for important words for better/worse results – but should become more extensive. rigorous, and automated as your project progresses.
An example of such an automated scoring is the accuracy() method on gensim's word-vectors object. See:
https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/gensim/blob/6d6f5dcfa3af4bc61c47dfdf5cdbd8e1364d0c3a/gensim/models/keyedvectors.py#L652
If supplied with a specifically-formatted file of word-analogies, it will check how well the word-vectors solve those analogies. For example, the questions-words.txt of Google's original word2vec code release includes the analogies they used to report vector quality. Note, though, that the word-vectors that are best for some purposes, like understanding text topics or sentiment, might not also be the best at solving this style of analogy, and vice-versa. If training your own word-vectors, it's best to choose your training corpus/parameters based on your own goal-specific criteria for what 'good' vectors will be.

Spark-mllib retraining saved models

I am trying to make a classification with spark-mllib, especially using RandomForestModel.
I have taken a look on this example from spark (RandomForestClassificationExample.scala), but I need a somewhat expanded approach.
I need to be able to train a model, save the model for future usage, but also to be able to load it and train further. Like, extend the dataset and train again.
I completely understand the need to export and import a model for future usage.
Unfortunately, training "further" isn't possible with Spark nor does it make sense. Thus it's recommended to retrain the model with the data from use to train the first model + new data.
Your first training values/metrics don't have much sense anymore if you want to add more data (e.g features, intercept, coefficients, etc.)
I hope that this answers your question.
You may need to look for some reinforcement learning technique instead of Random Forest if you want to use the old model and retrain it with new data.
That I know, there's deeplearning4j that implements deep reinforcement learning algorithms on top of Spark (and Hadoop).
If you only need to save JavaRDD[Object], you can do (in Java)
model.saveAsObjectFile()
Values will be writter out using Java Serialization. Then, to read your data you do:
JavaRDD[Object] model = jsc.objectFile(pathOfYourModel)
Be careful, object files are not available in Python. But you could use saveAsPickleFile() to write your model and pickleFile() to read it.