How to validate my YOLO model trained on custom data set? - validation

I am doing my research regarding object detection using YOLO although I am from civil engineering field and not familiar with computer science. My advisor is asking me to validate my YOLO detection model trained on custom dataset. But my problem is I really don't know how to validate my model. So, please kindly point me out how to validate my model.
Thanks in advance.

I think first you need to make sure that all the cases you are interested in (location of objects, their size, general view of the scene, etc) are represented in your custom dataset - in other words, the collected data reflects your task. You can discuss it with your advisor. Main rule - you label data qualitatively in same manner as you want to see it on the output. more information can be found here
It's really important - garbage in, garbage out, the quality of output of your trained model is determined by the quality of the input (labelled data)
If this is done, it is common practice to split your data into training and test sets. During model training only train set is used, and you can later validate the quality (generalizing ability, robustness, etc) on data that the model did not see - on the test set. It's also important, that this two subsets don't overlap - than your model will be overfitted and the model will not perform the tasks properly.
Than you can train few different models (with some architectural changes for example) on the same train set and validate them on the same test set, and this is a regular validation process.

Related

DistilBert for self-supervision - switch heads for pre-training: MaskedLM and SequenceClassification

Say I want to train a model for sequence classification. And so I define my model to be:
model = DistilBertForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained("bert-base-uncased")
My question is - what would be the optimal way if I want to pre-train this model with masked language modeling task? After pre-training I would like to model to train on the down-stream task of sequence classification.
My understanding is that I can somehow switch the heads of my model and a DistilBertForMaskedLM for pre-training, and then switch it back to the original downstream task. Although I haven't figured out if this is indeed optimal or how to write it.
Does hugging face offer any built in function that accepts the input ids, a percentage of tokens to masked (which aren't pad tokens) and simply trains the model?
Thank you in advance
I've tried to implement this myself, and while it does seem to work it is extremely slow. I figured there could already be implemented solutions instead of trying to optimize my code.

How to check the understanding of a trained model?

I'm currently training two models (BERT & MPNet) for a semantic textual similarity (STS) task using the SentenceTransformers library.
Now I want to check, if the base models and/or the trained models understand specific words/names which occur within the training dataset. I tried masking or calculating the similarity to specific categories related to the words/names but the results were hardly distinguishable.
Is there any way to check or even prove if a model understands a specific word or sequence?

the validation set is used as the test set in top tier venue papers

I have been checking some ICCV and CVPR papers and their codes, I have noticed that many a times the validation set is used as the test set, however as far as I am concerned, these sets should be different as the model being trained finetunes hyperparameters during the validation therefore the model will be biased if the same set is used for testing.
I saw this blog writing:
The validation set is used to evaluate a given model, but this is for frequent evaluation. We as machine learning engineers use this data to fine-tune the model hyperparameters. Hence the model occasionally sees this data, but never does it “Learn” from this. We(mostly humans, at-least as of 2017 😛 ) use the validation set results and update higher level hyperparameters. So the validation set in a way affects a model, but indirectly.
So, it says that it is not good practice but it is common??
There is a paper that is recently published in my domain, on a dataset I work on, this dataset does not come with a validation set and the paper (and many other papers from that group that uses the same dataset) never mentions splitting a val dataset that is separate from the test dataset. It is also sort of difficult to do this as the dataset is rather small and it is hard to split them (because you need to do this at the actor in the videos level (leave one actor out) and there are not many actors.
So what is the consensus? I share the sentiment that it is not good practice but then how come many papers at top tier venues do this?

Which model to pick from K fold Cross Validation

I was reading about cross validation and about how it it is used to select the best model and estimate parameters , I did not really understand the meaning of it.
Suppose I build a Linear regression model and go for a 10 fold cross validation, I think each of the 10 will have different coefficiant values , now from 10 different which should I pick as my final model or estimate parameters.
Or do we use Cross Validation only for the purpose of finding an average error(average of 10 models in our case) and comparing against another model ?
If your build a Linear regression model and go for a 10 fold cross validation, indeed each of the 10 will have different coefficient values. The reason why you use cross validation is that you get a robust idea of the error of your linear model - rather than just evaluating it on one train/test split only, which could be unfortunate or too lucky. CV is more robust as no ten splits can be all ten lucky or all ten unfortunate.
Your final model is then trained on the whole training set - this is where your final coefficients come from.
Cross-validation is used to see how good your models prediction is. It's pretty smart making multiple tests on the same data by splitting it as you probably know (i.e. if you don't have enough training data this is good to use).
As an example it might be used to make sure you aren't overfitting the function. So basically you try your function when you've finished it with Cross-validation and if you see that the error grows a lot somewhere you go back to tweaking the parameters.
Edit:
Read the wikipedia for deeper understanding of how it works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_%28statistics%29
You are basically confusing Grid-search with cross-validation. The idea behind cross-validation is basically to check how well a model will perform in say a real world application. So we basically try randomly splitting the data in different proportions and validate it's performance. It should be noted that the parameters of the model remain the same throughout the cross-validation process.
In Grid-search we try to find the best possible parameters that would give the best results over a specific split of data (say 70% train and 30% test). So in this case, for different combinations of the same model, the dataset remains constant.
Read more about cross-validation here.
Cross Validation is mainly used for the comparison of different models.
For each model, you may get the average generalization error on the k validation sets. Then you will be able to choose the model with the lowest average generation error as your optimal model.
Cross-Validation or CV allows us to compare different machine learning methods and get a sense of how well they will work in practice.
Scenario-1 (Directly related to the question)
Yes, CV can be used to know which method (SVM, Random Forest, etc) will perform best and we can pick that method to work further.
(From these methods different models will be generated and evaluated for each method and an average metric is calculated for each method and the best average metric will help in selecting the method)
After getting the information about the best method/ or best parameters we can train/retrain our model on the training dataset.
For parameters or coefficients, these can be determined by grid search techniques. See grid search
Scenario-2:
Suppose you have a small amount of data and you want to perform training, validation and testing on data. Then dividing such a small amount of data into three sets reduce the training samples drastically and the result will depend on the choice of pairs of training and validation sets.
CV will come to the rescue here. In this case, we don't need the validation set but we still need to hold the test data.
A model will be trained on k-1 folds of training data and the remaining 1 fold will be used for validating the data. A mean and standard deviation metric will be generated to see how well the model will perform in practice.

Validation of hurdle model?

I built a hurdle model, and then used that model to predict from known to unknown data points using the predict command. Is there a way to validate the model and these predictions? Do I have to do this in two parts, for example using sensitivity and specificity for the binomial part of the model?
Any other ideas for how to assess the validity of this model?
For validating predictive models, I usually trust Cross-Validation.
In short: With cross-validation you can measure the predictive performance of your model using only the training data (data with known results). Thus you can get a general opinion on how your model works. Cross-validation works quite well for wide variety of different models. The downside is that it can get quite computation heavy.
With large data sets, 10-fold cross-validation is enough. The smaller your dataset is, the more "folds" you have to do (i.e. with very small datasets, you have to do leave-one-out cross-validation)
With cross-validation, you get predictions for the whole data set. You can then compare these predictions to the actual outputs and measure how well your model performed.
Cross-validated results can take a bit to understand in more complicated comparisons, but for your general purpose question "how to assess the validity of the model", the results should be quite easy to use.

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