I am currently working on a project about life cycle models for vehicles on Brightway. The models I am using are inspired from models on the software Simapro. All the life cycle processes are created fine except for the end of life scenarios. On Simapro the end of life scenarios are described with percentages of recycled mass for each type of product (plastics, aluminium, glass, etc) but I can't find how to translate this into Brightway. Do you have ideas on how to deal with these end of life scenarios on Brightway ? Thank you for your answer.
Example of the definition of an end of life scenario on Simapro
There are many different ways to model End-of-Life, depending on what kind of abstraction you choose to map to the matrix math at the heart of Brightway. There is always some impedence between our intuitive understanding of physical systems, and the computational models we work with. Brightway doesn't have any built-in functionality to calculate fractions of material inputs, but you can do this manually by adding an appropriate EoL activity for each input to your vehicle. This can be in the vehicle activity itself, or as a separate activity. You could also write functions that would add these activities automatically, though my guess is that manual addition makes more sense, as you can check the reasonableness of the linked EoL activities more easily.
One thing to be aware of is that, depending on the background database you are using, the sign of the EoL activity might not be what you expect. Again, what we think of is not necessarily what fits into the model. For example, aluminium going to a recycling center is a physical output of an activity, and all outputs have positive signs (inputs have negative signs in the matrix, but Brightway sets this sign by the type of the exchange). However, ecoinvent models EoL treatment activities as negative inputs (which is identical to positive outputs, the negatives cancel). I would build a simple system to make sure you are getting results you expect before working on more complex systems.
Related
I want to measure whether the impact of a company's headquarter country on my independent variable (goodwill paid) is stronger during recessions. After some researching, I found out that the differences-in-differences analysis could solve my problem. However, in the internet they always show a diagram (see example under: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.publichealth.columbia.edu%2Fresearch%2Fpopulation-health-methods%2Fdifference-difference-estimation&psig=AOvVaw1yMN6knTtOEahZ9vstJpnV&ust=1676208292554000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAwQjRxqFwoTCLjbrNDIjf0CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE ) with the "treatment" and "parallel trends". So two lines that increase or decrease in the same way until the treatment and then one line increase/decreases more than the other.
My question now is what is my treatment and what is my control variable in my example? The treatment cannot be recessions because otherwise I just have the treatment group after the treatment and the control group before the recessions. If you think another statistical test may be better, I would be happy to consider that.
Furthermore, I just want to make sure that I created my model correctly: Goodwil Paid=B0+B1ressions+B2Country+B3ressionsCountry
Would that tell me whether the impact of the country is stronger during recessions?
Thanks a lot for your help.
I am currently working with the ecoinvent 3.6 database in Brightway and I have a question about the end of life treatment processes. I found out that some of these treatment processes have a negative production amount and give negative results when tested. For the same processes opened in Simapro, the production amount is positive and the LCA score is also positive. Screenshot of an activity details in Brightway
Screenshot of the result for this activity in Brightway
Screenshot of the activity details in Simapro
Screenshot of the result for this activity in Simapro
Is there an explanation for this ? And is it possible to know which processes are concerned ? Than you very much for your answer.
it is a thorny sign convention issue. One needs to be aware of these conventions because different LCA softwares and databases can have different conventions.
if you look into the same dataset in ecoinvent website you'll see that the reference product is -1 waste polypropylene. What that means is that it treats 1 kg of polypropylene.
Following the same convention the production flow of that activity on brightway is -1 (unlike normal "production" activities that have a positive production). To be consistent, the use of waste treatment services has also a negative amount (if you look into technosphere exchanges you'll see waste with - sign).
I think simapro treats them differently, and flips the sign of waste treatment activities, that is why you see it positive. It then flips the sign at some point in the calculation.
A good explanation is probably buried in the LCA mailing list somewhere, but I could not find it.
I've been working on a sentence transformation task that involves paraphrase identification as a critical step: if we are confident enough that the state of the program (a sentence repeatedly modified) has become a paraphrase of a target sentence, stop transforming. The overall goal is actually to study potential reasoning in predictive models that can generate language prior to a target sentence. The approach is just one specific way of reaching that goal. Nevertheless, I've become interested in the paraphrase identification task itself, as it's received some boost from language models recently.
The problem I run into is when I manipulate sentences from examples or datasets. For example, in this HuggingFace example, if I negate either sequence or change the subject to Bloomberg, I still get a majority "is paraphrase" prediction. I started going through many examples in the MSRPC training set and negating one sentence in a positive example or making one sentence in a negative example a paraphrase of the other, especially when doing so would be a few word edit. I found to my surprise that various language models, like bert-base-cased-finetuned-mrpc and textattack/roberta-base-MRPC, don't change their confidences much on these sorts of changes. It's surprising as these models claim an f1 score of 0.918+. The dataset is clearly missing a focus on negative examples and small perturbative examples.
My question is, are there datasets, techniques, or models that deal well when given small edits? I know that this is an extremely generic question, much more than is typically asked on StackOverflow, but my concern is in finding practical tools. If there is a theoretical technique, then it might not be suitable as I'm in the category of "available tools define your approach" rather than vice-versa. So I hope that the community would have a recommendation on this.
Short answer to the question: yes, they are overfitting. Most of the important NLP data sets are not actually well-crafted enough to test what they claim to test, and instead test the ability of the model to find subtle (and not-so-subtle) patterns in the data.
The best tool I know for creating data sets that help deal with this is Checklist. The corresponding paper, "Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList" is very readable and goes into depth on this type of issue. They have a very relevant table... but need some terms:
We prompt users to evaluate each capability with
three different test types (when possible): Minimum Functionality tests, Invariance, and Directional Expectation tests... A Minimum Functionality test (MFT), is a collection of simple examples (and labels) to check a
behavior within a capability. MFTs are similar to
creating small and focused testing datasets, and are
particularly useful for detecting when models use
shortcuts to handle complex inputs without actually
mastering the capability.
...An Invariance test (INV) is when we apply
label-preserving perturbations to inputs and expect
the model prediction to remain the same.
A Directional Expectation test (DIR) is similar,
except that the label is expected to change in a certain way. For example, we expect that sentiment
will not become more positive if we add “You are
lame.” to the end of tweets directed at an airline
(Figure 1C).
I haven't been actively involved in NLG for long, so this answer will be a bit more anecdotal than SO's algorithms would like. Starting with the fact that in my corner of Europe, the general sentiment toward peer review requirements for any kind of NLG project are higher by several orders of magnitude compared to other sciences - and likely not without reason or tensor thereof.
This makes funding a bigger challenge, so wherever you are, I wish you luck on that front. I'm not sure of how big of a deal this site is in the niche, but [Ehud Reiter's Blog][1] is where I would start looking into your tooling ideas.
Maybe even reach out to them/him personally, because I can't think of another source that has an academic background and a strong propensity for practical applications of NLG, at least based on the kind of content they've been putting out over the years.
Your background, environment/funding, and seniority level/control you have over the project will eventually compose your vector decision for you. I's just how it goes on the bleeding edge of anything. What I will add, though, is not to limit yourself to a single language or technology in this phase because of those precise reasons you've mentioned. I'd recommend the same in terms of potential open source involvement but if your profile information is accurate, that probably won't happen, no matter what you do and accomplish.
But yeah, in the grand scheme of things, your question is far from too broad, in my view. It identifies a rather unmistakable problem pattern that not all branches of science are as lackadaisical to approach as NLG-adjacent fields seem to be right now. In that regard, it's not broad enough and will need to be promulgated far and wide before community-driven tooling will give you serious options on a micro level.
Blasphemy, sure, but the performance is already stacked against you As for the question potentially being too broad, I'd posit it is not broad enough, so long as we collectively remain in a "oh, I was waiting for you to start doing something about it" phase.
P.S. I'd eliminate any Rust and ECMAScript alternatives prior to looking into Python, blapshemous as this might sound to a 2021 data scientist
. Some might ARight nowccounting forr the ridicule this would receive xou sltrsfx hsbr s fszs drz zhsz s mrnzsl rcrtvidr, sz lrsdz
due to performance easons.
[1]: https://ehudreiter.com/2016/12/18/nlg-vs-templates/
Is there any way to test multiple algorithms rather than doing it once for each and every algorithm; then checking the result? There are a lot of times where I don’t really know which one to use, so I would like to test multiple and get the result (error rate) fairly quick in Azure Machine Learning Studio.
You could connect the scores of multiple algorithms with an 'Evaluate Model' button to evaluate algorithms against each other.
Hope this helps.
The module you are looking for, is the one called “Cross-Validate Model”. It basically splits whatever comes in from the input-port (dataset) into 10 pieces, then reserves the last piece as the “answer”; and trains the nine other subset models and returns a set of accuracy statistics measured towards the last subset. What you would look at is the column called “Mean absolute error” which is the average error for the trained models. You can connect whatever algorithm you want to one of the ports, and subsequently you will receive the result for that algorithm in particular after you “right-click” the port which gives the score.
After that you can assess which algorithm did the best. And as a pro-tip; you could use the Filter-based-feature selection to actually see which column had a significant impact on the result.
You can check section 6.2.4 of hands-on-lab at GitHub https://github.com/Azure-Readiness/hol-azure-machine-learning/blob/master/006-lab-model-evaluation.md which focuses on the evaluation of multiple algorithms etc.
For an ecommerce website how do you measure if a change to your site actually improved usability? What kind of measurements should you gather and how would you set up a framework for making this testing part of development?
Multivariate testing and reporting is a great way to actually measure these kind of things.
It allows you to test what combination of page elements has the greatest conversion rate, providing continual improvement on your site design and usability.
Google Web Optimiser has support for this.
Similar methods that you used to identify the usability problems to begin with-- usability testing. Typically you identify your use-cases and then have a lab study evaluating how users go about accomplishing certain goals. Lab testing is typically good with 8-10 people.
The more information methodology we have adopted to understand our users is to have anonymous data collection (you may need user permission, make your privacy policys clear, etc.) This is simply evaluating what buttons/navigation menus users click on, how users delete something (i.e. changing quantity - are more users entering 0 and updating quantity or hitting X)? This is a bit more complex to setup; you have to develop an infrastructure to hold this data (which is actually just counters, i.e. "Times clicked x: 138838383, Times entered 0: 390393") and allow data points to be created as needed to plug into the design.
To push the measurement of an improvement of a UI change up the stream from end-user (where the data gathering could take a while) to design or implementation, some simple heuristics can be used:
Is the number of actions it takes to perform a scenario less? (If yes, then it has improved). Measurement: # of steps reduced / added.
Does the change reduce the number of kinds of input devices to use (even if # of steps is the same)? By this, I mean if you take something that relied on both the mouse and keyboard and changed it to rely only on the mouse or only on the keyboard, then you have improved useability. Measurement: Change in # of devices used.
Does the change make different parts of the website consistent? E.g. If one part of the e-Commerce site loses changes made while you are not logged on and another part does not, this is inconsistent. Changing it so that they have the same behavior improves usability (preferably to the more fault tolerant please!). Measurement: Make a graph (flow chart really) mapping the ways a particular action could be done. Improvement is a reduction in the # of edges on the graph.
And so on... find some general UI tips, figure out some metrics like the above, and you can approximate usability improvement.
Once you have these design approximations of user improvement, and then gather longer term data, you can see if there is any predictive ability for the design-level usability improvements to the end-user reaction (like: Over the last 10 projects, we've seen an average of 1% quicker scenarios for each action removed, with a range of 0.25% and standard dev of 0.32%).
The first way can be fully subjective or partly quantified: user complaints and positive feedbacks. The problem with this is that you may have some strong biases when it comes to filter those feedbacks, so you better make as quantitative as possible. Having some ticketing system to file every report from the users and gathering statistics about each version of the interface might be useful. Just get your statistics right.
The second way is to measure the difference in a questionnaire taken about the interface by end-users. Answers to each question should be a set of discrete values and then again you can gather statistics for each version of the interface.
The latter way may be much harder to setup (designing a questionnaire and possibly the controlled environment for it as well as the guidelines to interpret the results is a craft by itself) but the former makes it unpleasantly easy to mess up with the measurements. For example, you have to consider the fact that the number of tickets you get for each version is dependent on the time it is used, and that all time ranges are not equal (e.g. a whole class of critical issues may never be discovered before the third or fourth week of usage, or users might tend not to file tickets the first days of use, even if they find issues, etc.).
Torial stole my answer. Although if there is a measure of how long it takes to do a certain task. If the time is reduced and the task is still completed, then that's a good thing.
Also, if there is a way to record the number of cancels, then that would work too.