How do I intuitively interpret a sigmoidal neural network model? - algorithm

There are multiple sources, but they explain at a bit too high a level for me a to actually understand.
Here is my knowledge of how this model works;
We feed-forward information in prior layer's nodes using the weight * value. We do NOT use the sigmoid function here. This is because any hidden layers will force the value to be POSITIVE if we use the sigmoid function here. If it is always positive, then subsequent values can never be less than 0.5.
When we have fed forward to the output, we then use the sigmoid function on the output.
So in total we only use the sigmoid function on the output layer values only.
I will try to include a hopefully not terrible diagram
https://imgur.com/a/4EzkpH5
I have tested with my own code, and evidently it should not be the sigmoid function on every value and weight, but I am unsure if it is just the sum of weight*value

So basically you have a set of features for your model. These features are independent variables which will be responsible for producing of the output. So features are the inputs and the predicted values are the outputs. This is indeed a function.
It is easy to understand neural networks if we study them in terms of functions.
First multiply the feature vector with the vector of weights. Meaning, the dot product of the both vectors must be produced.
The dot product is a scalar if you have a single node ( neuron ). Apply sigmoid function on the product. The output is the final prediction.
The whole model could be expressed as a single composite function like,
y = sigmoid( dot( w , x ) )
Also understanding back propogation ( gradient descent ) for NN makes some intuition if we treat NN as functions.
In the above function,
sigmoid : applies sigmoid activation function to the argument.
dot : returns the dot product of two vectors.
Also, use vector notation as far as possible. It saves you from the confusion related with summations.
Hope it helps.

Activation functions serve an important role in neural network models: they can, given the choice of activation function, grant the network the capability to model non-linear datasets.
The example illustrated in the figure you posted (rendered below) will be limited to model linear problems where the output value is between 0 and 1 (the range of the sigmoidal function). However, the model would support non-linear datasets if the sigmoidal was applied to the two nodes in the middle. StackOverflow is not the place to discuss the theoretic foundation of why this works, instead I recommend looking into some light reading like this ebook: Neural Networks and Deep Learning (no affiliation).
As a side note: the final, output layer of a network are sometimes instantiated as a simple sum, or a ReLU. This will widen the range of the network's output.

Related

Question about activation function of image task in Deep Learning

Let me ask you about the image task of Deep Learning (here, image identification).
DeepLearning recognizes that it can be classified into three layers: input layer, intermediate layer, and output layer.
① Input layer → Intermediate layer
② Intermediate layer → Output layer
I understand that it is normal for ① and ② to use the activation function.
I recognize as follows.
Regarding (1), the ReLU function and sigmoid function are used.
Regarding (2), the softmax function is used.
I would like to know why (1) and (2) each use a specific function by convention.
Also, are there cases where the activation function is used, and are there any results evaluated by various functions?
If anyone knows anything about the above, please let me know.
Also, if you have a reference web page or treatise, please let me know.
The choice of activation function in the hidden layer will control how well the network model learns the training dataset. The choice of activation function in the output layer will define the type of predictions the model can make.
An activation function in a neural network defines how the weighted sum of the input is transformed into an output from a node or nodes in a layer of the network. Many activation functions are nonlinear and may be referred to as the “nonlinearity” in the layer or the network design. Nonlinear activation functions are preferred as they allow the nodes to learn more complex structures in the data.
Hidden Layer
ReLU (rectified linear units) activation function, is now-a-days the most common function used for hidden layers because it is both simple to implement and effective at overcoming the limitations of other previously popular activation functions, such as Sigmoid and Tanh. Specifically, it is less susceptible to vanishing gradients that prevent deep models from being trained, although it can suffer from other problems like saturated or “dead” units.
A general problem with both the sigmoid and tanh functions is that they saturate. This means that large values snap to 1.0 and small values snap to -1 or 0 for tanh and sigmoid respectively. Further, the functions are only really sensitive to changes around their mid-point of their input, such as 0.5 for sigmoid and 0.0 for tanh.
The limited sensitivity and saturation of the function happen regardless of whether the summed activation from the node provided as input contains useful information or not. Once saturated, it becomes challenging for the learning algorithm to continue to adapt the weights to improve the performance of the model.
Because rectified linear units are nearly linear, they preserve many of the properties that make linear models easy to optimize with gradient-based methods. They also preserve many of the properties that make linear models generalize well.
Because the rectified function is linear for half of the input domain and nonlinear for the other half, it is referred to as a piecewise linear function or a hinge function. However, the function remains very close to linear, in the sense that is a piecewise linear function with two linear pieces.
Outer Layer
Common activation functions to consider for use in the output layer are: Linear, Logistic (Sigmoid) and Softmax.
The linear activation function is also called “identity” (multiplied by 1.0) or “no activation.” This is because the linear activation function does not change the weighted sum of the input in any way and instead returns the value directly.
The softmax function outputs a vector of values that sum to 1.0 that can be interpreted as probabilities of class membership. It is related to the argmax function that outputs a 0 for all options and 1 for the chosen option. Softmax is a “softer” version of argmax that allows a probability-like output of a winner-take-all function. As such, the input to the function is a vector of real values and the output is a vector of the same length with values that sum to 1.0 like probabilities.
Choose the activation function for your output layer based on the type of prediction problem that you are solving. Specifically, the type of variable that is being predicted.
For example, you may divide prediction problems into two main groups, predicting a categorical variable (classification) and predicting a numerical variable (regression).
If your problem is a regression problem, you should use a linear activation function.
Regression: One node, linear activation.
If your problem is a classification problem, then there are three main types of classification problems and each may use a different activation function.
Predicting a probability is not a regression problem; it is classification. In all cases of classification, your model will predict the probability of class membership (e.g. probability that an example belongs to each class) that you can convert to a crisp class label by rounding (for sigmoid) or argmax (for softmax).
If there are two mutually exclusive classes (binary classification), then your output layer will have one node and a sigmoid activation function should be used. If there are more than two mutually exclusive classes (multiclass classification), then your output layer will have one node per class and a softmax activation should be used. If there are two or more mutually inclusive classes (multilabel classification), then your output layer will have one node for each class and a sigmoid activation function is used.
Binary Classification: One node, sigmoid activation.
Multi-class Classification: One node per class, softmax activation.
Multi-label Classification: One node per class, sigmoid activation.
The softmax function is used as the activation function in the output layer of neural network models that predict a multinomial probability distribution. That is, softmax is used as the activation function for multi-class classification problems where class membership is required on more than two class labels.
The function can be used as an activation function for a hidden layer in a neural network, although this is less common. It may be used when the model internally needs to choose or weight multiple different inputs at a bottleneck or concatenation layer.
Reference: machinelearningmastery.com
relu and leakyrelu and tanh activation functions in the input and hidden are used for numeric function prediction. leakyrelu and tanh find signal better for equations and linear trends. I used leakyrelu and tanh for linear problems. sigmoid activation is used for classification and binary cross entropy problems. tanh worked well for binary cross entropy problem in credit loan risk.
you can use softmax when your outputting multiple labels as a probability. In this example, I use the ufo text description to output the probable shape of the ufo.
https://github.com/dnishimoto/python-deep-learning/blob/master/UFO%20.ipynb
['Egg','Cross','Sphere','Triangle','Disk','Oval','Rectangle','Teardrop']
softmax returns a probability for each output label
model=Sequential()
model.add(Embedding(vocab_size, 8, input_length=max_length))
model.add(Flatten())
model.add(Dense(len(LABELS), activation='softmax'))
model.compile(optimizer='adam', loss='categorical_crossentropy', metrics=['accuracy'])
egg shaped ufos are the most common sightings

Shall I treat Industry Classification codes as double data type in K-means clustering?

Since K-means cannot handle categorical variables directly, I want to know if it is correct to convert International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities or ISIC into double data types to cluster it using K-means along with other financial and transactional data? Or shall I try other techniques such as one hot encoding?
The biggest assumption is that ISIC codes are categorical not numeric variables since code “2930” refers to “Manufacture of parts and accessories for motor vehicles” and not money, kilos, feet, etc., but there is a sort of pattern in such codes since they are not assigned randomly and have a hierarchy for instance 2930 belongs to Section C “Manufacturing” and Division 29 “Manufacture of motor vehicles, trailers and semi-trailers”.
As you want to use standard K-Means, you need your data has a geometric meaning. Hence, if your mapping of the codes into the geometric space is linear, you will not get any proper clustering result. As the distance of the code does not project in their value. For example code 2930 is as close to code 2931 as code 2929. Therefore, you need a nonlinear mapping for the categorical space to the geometric space to using the standard k-mean clustering.
One solution is using from machine learning techniques similar to word-to-vec (for vectorizing words) if you have enough data for co-occurrences of these codes.
Clustering is all about distance measurement.
Discretizing numeric variable to categorical is a partial solution. As earlier highlighted, the underlying question is how to measure the distance for a discretized variable with other discretized variable and numeric variable?
In literature, there are several unsupervised algorithms for treating mixed data. Take a look at the k-prototypes algorithm and the Gower distance.
The k-prototypes in R is given in clustMixType package. The Gower distance in R is given in the function daisy in the cluster package. If using Python, you can look at this post
Huang, Z. (1997). Clustering large data sets with mixed numeric and categorical values. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 1st Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining,(PAKDD).
Gower, J. C. (1971). A general coefficient of similarity and some of its properties. Biometrics, 857-871.
K-means is designed to minimize the sum of squares.
Does minimizing the sum of squares make sense for your problem? Probably not!
While 29, 2903 and 2930 are supposedly all related 2899 likely is not very much related to 2900. Hence, a least squares approach will produce undesired results.
The method is really designed for continuous variables of the same type and scale. One-hot encoded variables cause more problems than they solve - these are a naive hack to make the function "run", but the results are statistically questionable.
Try to figure out what he right thing to do is. It's probably not least squares here.

Confusion with neural networks in MATLAB

I'm working on character recognition (and later fingerprint recognition) using neural networks. I'm getting confused with the sequence of events. I'm training the net with 26 letters. Later I will increase this to include 26 clean letters and 26 noisy letters. If I want to recognize one letter say "A", what is the right way to do this? Here is what I'm doing now.
1) Train network with a 26x100 matrix; each row contains a letter from segmentation of the bmp (10x10).
2) However, for the test targets I use my input matrix for "A". I had 25 rows of zeros after the first row so that my input matrix is the same size as my target matrix.
3) I run perform(net, testTargets,outputs) where outputs are the outputs from the net trained with the 26x100 matrix. testTargets is the matrix for "A".
This doesn't seem right though. Is training supposed by separate from recognizing any character? What I want to happen is as follows.
1) Training the network for an image file that I select (after processing the image into logical arrays).
2) Use this trained network to recognize letter in a different image file.
So train the network to recognize A through Z. Then pick an image, run the network to see what letters are recognized from the picked image.
Okay, so it seems that the question here seems to be more along the lines of "How do I neural networks" I can outline the basic procedure here to try to solidify the idea in your mind, but as far as actually implementing it goes you're on your own. Personally I believe that proprietary languages (MATLAB) are an abomination, but I always appreciate intellectual zeal.
The basic concept of a neural net is that you have a series of nodes in layers with weights that connect them (depending on what you want to do you can either just connect each node to the layer above and beneath, or connect every node, or anywhere in betweeen.). Each node has a "work function" or a probabilistic function that represents the chance that the given node, or neuron will evaluate to "on" or 1.
The general workflow starts from whatever top layer neurons/nodes you've got, initializing them to the values of your data (in your case, you would probably start each of these off as the pixel values in your image, normalized to be binary would be simplest). Each of those nodes would then be multiplied by a weight and fed down towards your second layer, which would be considered a "hidden layer" depending on the sum (either geometric or arithmetic sum, depending on your implementation) which would be used with the work function to determine the state of your hidden layer.
That last point was a little theoretical and hard to follow, so here's an example. Imagine your first row has three nodes ([1,0,1]), and the weights connecting the three of those nodes to the first node in your second layer are something like ([0.5, 2.0, 0.6]). If you're doing an arithmetic sum that means that the weighting on the first node in your "hidden layer" would be
1*0.5 + 0*2.0 + 1*0.6 = 1.1
If you're using a logistic function as your work function (a very common choice, though tanh is also common) this would make the chance of that node evaluating to 1 approximately 75%.
You would probably want your final layer to have 26 nodes, one for each letter, but you could add in more hidden layers to improve your model. You would assume that the letter your model predicted would be the final node with the largest weighting heading in.
After you have that up and running you want to train it though, because you probably just randomly seeded your weights, which makes sense. There are a lot of different methods for this, but I'll generally outline back-propagation which is a very common method of training neural nets. The idea is essentially, since you know which character the image should have been recognized, you compare the result to the one that your model actually predicted. If your model accurately predicted the character you're fine, you can leave the model as is, since it worked. If you predicted an incorrect character you want to go back through your neural net and increment the weights that lead from the pixel nodes you fed in to the ending node that is the character that should have been predicted. You should also decrement the weights that led to the character it incorrectly returned.
Hope that helps, let me know if you have any more questions.

An understandable clusterization

I have a dataset. Each element of this set consists of numerical and categorical variables. Categorical variables are nominal and ordinal.
There is some natural structure in this dataset. Commonly, experts clusterize datasets such as mine using their 'expert knowledge', but I want to automate this process of clusterization.
Most algorithms for clusterization use distance (Euclidean, Mahalanobdis and so on) between objects to group them in clusters. But it is hard to find some reasonable metrics for mixed data types, i.e. we can't find a distance between 'glass' and 'steel'. So I came to the conclusion that I have to use conditional probabilities P(feature = 'something' | Class) and some utility function that depends on them. It is reasonable for categorical variables, and it works fine with numeric variables assuming they are distributed normally.
So it became clear to me that algorithms like K-means will not produce good results.
At this time I try to work with COBWEB algorithm, that fully matches my ideas of using conditional probabilities. But I faced another obsacles: results of clusterization are really hard to interpret, if not impossible. As a result I wanted to get something like a set of rules that describes each cluster (e.g. if feature1 = 'a' and feature2 in [30, 60], it is cluster1), like descision trees for classification.
So, my question is:
Is there any existing clusterization algorithm that works with mixed data type and produces an understandable (and reasonable for humans) description of clusters.
Additional info:
As I understand my task is in the field of conceptual clustering. I can't define a similarity function as it was suggested (it as an ultimate goal of the whoal project), because of the field of study - it is very complicated and mercyless in terms of formalization. As far as I understand the most reasonable approach is the one used in COBWEB, but I'm not sure how to adapt it, so I can get an undestandable description of clusters.
Decision Tree
As it was suggested, I tried to train a decision tree on the clustering output, thus getting a description of clusters as a set of rules. But unfortunately interpretation of this rules is almost as hard as with the raw clustering output. First of only a few first levels of rules from the root node do make any sense: closer to the leaf - less sense we have. Secondly, these rules doesn't match any expert knowledge.
So, I came to the conclusion that clustering is a black-box, and it worth not trying to interpret its results.
Also
I had an interesting idea to modify a 'decision tree for regression' algorithm in a certain way: istead of calculating an intra-group variance calcualte a category utility function and use it as a split criterion. As a result we should have a decision tree with leafs-clusters and clusters description out of the box. But I haven't tried to do so, and I am not sure about accuracy and everything else.
For most algorithms, you will need to define similarity. It doesn't need to be a proper distance function (e.g. satisfy triangle inequality).
K-means is particularly bad, because it also needs to compute means. So it's better to stay away from it if you cannot compute means, or are using a different distance function than Euclidean.
However, consider defining a distance function that captures your domain knowledge of similarity. It can be composed of other distance functions, say you use the harmonic mean of the Euclidean distance (maybe weighted with some scaling factor) and a categorial similarity function.
Once you have a decent similarity function, a whole bunch of algorithms will become available to you. e.g. DBSCAN (Wikipedia) or OPTICS (Wikipedia). ELKI may be of interest to you, they have a Tutorial on writing custom distance functions.
Interpretation is a separate thing. Unfortunately, few clustering algorithms will give you a human-readable interpretation of what they found. They may give you things such as a representative (e.g. the mean of a cluster in k-means), but little more. But of course you could next train a decision tree on the clustering output and try to interpret the decision tree learned from the clustering. Because the one really nice feature about decision trees, is that they are somewhat human understandable. But just like a Support Vector Machine will not give you an explanation, most (if not all) clustering algorithms will not do that either, sorry, unless you do this kind of post-processing. Plus, it will actually work with any clustering algorithm, which is a nice property if you want to compare multiple algorithms.
There was a related publication last year. It is a bit obscure and experimental (on a workshop at ECML-PKDD), and requires the data set to have a quite extensive ground truth in form of rankings. In the example, they used color similarity rankings and some labels. The key idea is to analyze the cluster and find the best explanation using the given ground truth(s). They were trying to use it to e.g. say "this cluster found is largely based on this particular shade of green, so it is not very interesting, but the other cluster cannot be explained very well, you need to investigate it closer - maybe the algorithm discovered something new here". But it was very experimental (Workshops are for work-in-progress type of research). You might be able to use this, by just using your features as ground truth. It should then detect if a cluster can be easily explained by things such as "attribute5 is approx. 0.4 with low variance". But it will not forcibly create such an explanation!
H.-P. Kriegel, E. Schubert, A. Zimek
Evaluation of Multiple Clustering Solutions
In 2nd MultiClust Workshop: Discovering, Summarizing and Using Multiple Clusterings Held in Conjunction with ECML PKDD 2011. http://dme.rwth-aachen.de/en/MultiClust2011
A common approach to solve this type of clustering problem is to define a statistical model that captures relevant characteristics of your data. Cluster assignments can be derived by using a mixture model (as in the Gaussian Mixture Model) then finding the mixture component with the highest probability for a particular data point.
In your case, each example is a vector has both real and categorical components. A simple approach is to model each component of the vector separately.
I generated a small example dataset where each example is a vector of two dimensions. The first dimension is a normally distributed variable and the second is a choice of five categories (see graph):
There are a number of frameworks that are available to run monte carlo inference for statistical models. BUGS is probably the most popular (http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/). I created this model in Stan (http://mc-stan.org/), which uses a different sampling technique than BUGs and is more efficient for many problems:
data {
int<lower=0> N; //number of data points
int<lower=0> C; //number of categories
real x[N]; // normally distributed component data
int y[N]; // categorical component data
}
parameters {
real<lower=0,upper=1> theta; // mixture probability
real mu[2]; // means for the normal component
simplex[C] phi[2]; // categorical distributions for the categorical component
}
transformed parameters {
real log_theta;
real log_one_minus_theta;
vector[C] log_phi[2];
vector[C] alpha;
log_theta <- log(theta);
log_one_minus_theta <- log(1.0 - theta);
for( c in 1:C)
alpha[c] <- .5;
for( k in 1:2)
for( c in 1:C)
log_phi[k,c] <- log(phi[k,c]);
}
model {
theta ~ uniform(0,1); // equivalently, ~ beta(1,1);
for (k in 1:2){
mu[k] ~ normal(0,10);
phi[k] ~ dirichlet(alpha);
}
for (n in 1:N) {
lp__ <- lp__ + log_sum_exp(log_theta + normal_log(x[n],mu[1],1) + log_phi[1,y[n]],
log_one_minus_theta + normal_log(x[n],mu[2],1) + log_phi[2,y[n]]);
}
}
I compiled and ran the Stan model and used the parameters from the final sample to compute the probability of each datapoint under each mixture component. I then assigned each datapoint to the mixture component (cluster) with higher probability to recover the cluster assignments below:
Basically, the parameters for each mixture component will give you the core characteristics of each cluster if you have created a model appropriate for your dataset.
For heterogenous, non-Euclidean data vectors as you describe, hierarchical clustering algorithms often work best. The conditional probability condition you describe can be incorporated as an ordering of attributes used to perform cluster agglomeration or division. The semantics of the resulting clusters are easy to describe.

Confusion Matrix of Bayesian Network

I'm trying to understand bayesian network. I have a data file which has 10 attributes, I want to acquire the confusion table of this data table ,I thought I need to calculate tp,fp, fn, tn of all fields. Is it true ? if it's then what i need to do for bayesian network.
Really need some guidance, I'm lost.
The process usually goes like this:
You have some labeled data instances
which you want to use to train a
classifier, so that it can predict
the class of new unlabeled instances.
Using your classifier
of choice (neural networks, bayes
net, SVM, etc...) we build a
model with your training data
as input.
At this point, you usually would like
to evaluate the performance of the
model before deploying it. So using a
previously unused subset of the data
(test set), we compare the model
classification for these instances
against that of the actual class. A
good way to summarize these results
is by a confusion matrix which shows
how each class of instances is
predicted.
For binary classification tasks, the convention is to assign one class as positive, and the other as negative. Thus from the confusion matrix, the percentage of positive instances that are correctly classified as positive is know as the True Positive (TP) rate. The other definitions follows the same convention...
Confusion matrix is used to evaluate the performance of a classifier, any classifier.
What you are asking is a confusion matrix with more than two classes.
Here is the steps how you do:
Build a classifier for each class, where the training set consists of
the set of documents in the class (positive labels) and its
complement (negative labels).
Given the test document, apply each classifier separately.
Assign the document to the class with the maximum score, the
maximum confidence value, or the maximum probability
Here is the reference for the paper you can have more information:
Picca, Davide, Benoît Curdy, and François Bavaud.2006.Non-linear correspondence analysis in text retrieval: A kernel view. In Proc. JADT.

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