I am pretty new to Tensorflow, and I am currently learning it through given website https://www.tensorflow.org/get_started/get_started
It is said in the manual that:
We've created a model, but we don't know how good it is yet. To evaluate the model on training data, we need a y placeholder to provide the desired values, and we need to write a loss function.
A loss function measures how far apart the current model is from the provided data. We'll use a standard loss model for linear regression, which sums the squares of the deltas between the current model and the provided data. linear_model - y creates a vector where each element is the corresponding example's error delta. We call tf.square to square that error. Then, we sum all the squared errors to create a single scalar that abstracts the error of all examples using tf.reduce_sum:"
q1."we don't know how good it is yet.", I didn't understand this
quote as the simple model created is a simple slope equation and on
what it should train for?, as the model is a simple slope. Is it
require an perfect slope or what? why am I training that model and
for what?
q2.what is a loss function? Is loss function is used to determine the
accuracy of the model? Why is it required?
q3. I didn't understand " 'sums the squares of the deltas' between
the current model and the provided data."
q4.I didn't understood this part of code,"squared_deltas =
tf.square(linear_model - y)
this is the code:
y = tf.placeholder(tf.float32)
squared_deltas = tf.square(linear_model - y)
loss = tf.reduce_sum(squared_deltas)
print(sess.run(loss, {x:[1,2,3,4], y:[0,-1,-2,-3]}))
this may be simple questions, but I am a beginner to Tensorflow and having a hard time understanding it.
1) So you're kind of right about "Why should we train for a simple problem" but this is just an introduction piece. With any machine learning task you need to evaluate your model to see how good it is. In this case you are just trying to train to find the coefficients for the line of best fit.
2) A loss function in any machine learning context represents your error with your model. This usually means a function of your "distance" of your calculated value to the ground truth value. Think of it as an internal evaluation score. You want to minimise your loss so the gradients and parameter changes are based on your loss.
3/4) Your question here is more to do with least square regression. It's a statistical method to create lines of best fit between points. The deltas represent the differences between your calculated values and the truth values. The aim is to minimise the area of the squares and hence minise the error and have a better line of best fit.
What you are doing in this Tensorflow example is creating a machine learning model that will learn the coefficients for the line of best fit automatically using a least squares based system.
Pretty much all of your question have to-do with the loss function.
The loss function is a function that determines how far apart your output are from the expected (correct) output.
It has two usages:
Help the algorithm determine if the tweaking of the weight is helping going in the good or bad direction
Determinate the accuracy (~the number of time your system guesses the correct answer)
The loss function is the sum of the deltas witch is: the addition of the diff (delta) between the expected output and the actual output.
I think It's squared to magnifies the error the algorithm makes.
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Spark ALS recommendation system have value prediction greater than 1
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Closed 3 years ago.
Experimenting with Spark mllib ALS("trainImplicit") for a while now.
Would like to understand
1.why Im getting ratings value more than 1 in the predictions?
2.Is there any need for normalizing the user-product input?
sample result:
[Rating(user=316017, product=114019, rating=3.1923),
Rating(user=316017, product=41930, rating=2.0146997092620897)
]
In the documentation, it is mentioned that the predicted rating values will be somewhere around 0-1.
I know that the ratings values can still be used in recommendations but it would be great if I know the reason.
The cost function in ALS trainImplicit() doesn't impose any condition on predicted rating values as it takes the magnitude of difference from 0/1. So, you may also find some negative values there. That is why it says the predicted values are around [0,1] not necessarily in it.
There is one option to set non-negative factorization only, so that you never get a negative value in predicted rating or feature matrices, but that seemed to drop the performance for our case.
I'm trying to perform document classification into two categories (category1 and category2), using Weka.
I've gathered a training set consisting of 600 documents belonging to both categories and the total number of documents that are going to be classified is 1,000,000.
So to perform the classification, I apply the StringToWordVector filter. I set true the followings from the filter:
- IDF transform
- TF ransform
- OutputWordCounts
I'd like to ask a few questions about this process.
1) How many documents shall I use as training set, so that I over-fitting is avoided?
2) After applying the filter, I get a list of the words in the training set. Do I have to remove any of them to get a better result at the classifier or it doesn't play any role?
3) As classification method I usually choose naiveBayes but the results I get are the followings:
-------------------------
Correctly Classified Instances 393 70.0535 %
Incorrectly Classified Instances 168 29.9465 %
Kappa statistic 0.415
Mean absolute error 0.2943
Root mean squared error 0.5117
Relative absolute error 60.9082 %
Root relative squared error 104.1148 %
----------------------------
and if I use SMO the results are:
------------------------------
Correctly Classified Instances 418 74.5098 %
Incorrectly Classified Instances 143 25.4902 %
Kappa statistic 0.4742
Mean absolute error 0.2549
Root mean squared error 0.5049
Relative absolute error 52.7508 %
Root relative squared error 102.7203 %
Total Number of Instances 561
------------------------------
So in document classification which one is "better" classifier?
Which one is better for small data sets, like the one I have?
I've read that naiveBayes performs better with big data sets but if I increase my data set, will it cause the "over-fitting" effect?
Also, about Kappa statistic, is there any accepted threshold or it doesn't matter in this case because there are only two categories?
Sorry for the long post, but I've been trying for a week to improve the classification results with no success, although I tried to get documents that fit better in each category.
1) How many documents shall I use as training set, so that I
over-fitting is avoided? \
You don't need to choose the size of training set, in WEKA, you just use the 10-fold cross-validation. Back to the question, machine learning algorithms influence much more than data set in over-fitting problem.
2) After applying the filter, I get a list of the words in the
training set. Do I have to remove any of them to get a better result
at the classifier or it doesn't play any role? \
Definitely it does. But whether the result get better can not be promised.
3) As classification method I usually choose naiveBayes but the
results I get are the followings: \
Usually, to define whether a classify algorithm is good or not, the ROC/AUC/F-measure value is always considered as the most important indicator. You can learn them in any machine learning book.
To answers your questions:
I would use (10 fold) cross-validation to evaluate your method. The model is trained trained 10 times on 90% of the data and tested on 10% of the data using different parts of the data each time. The results are therefor less biased towards your current (random) selection of train and test set.
Removing stop words (i.e., frequently occurring words with little discriminating value like the, he or and) is a common strategy to improve your classifier. Weka's StringToWordVector allows you to select a file containing these stop words, but it should also have a default list with English stop words.
Given your results, SMO performs the best of the two classifiers (e.g., it has more Correctly Classified Instances). You might also want to take a look at (Lib)SVM or LibLinear (You may need to install them if they are not in Weka natively; Weka 3.7.6 has a package manager allowing for easy installation), which can perform quite well on document classification as well.
Regarding the second question
2) After applying the filter, I get a list of the words in the training set. Do I have to remove any of them to get a better result at the classifier or it doesn't play any role?
I was building a classifier and training it with the famous 20news group dataset, when testing it without the preprocessing the results were not good. So, i pre-processed the data according to the following steps:
Substitute TAB, NEWLINE and RETURN characters by SPACE.
Keep only letters (that is, turn punctuation, numbers, etc. into SPACES).
Turn all letters to lowercase.
Substitute multiple SPACES by a single SPACE.
The title/subject of each document is simply added in the beginning of the document's text.
no-short Obtained from the previous file, by removing words that are less than 3 characters long. For example, removing "he" but keeping "him".
no-stop Obtained from the previous file, by removing the 524 SMART stopwords. Some of them had already been removed, because they were shorter than 3 characters.
stemmed Obtained from the previous file, by applying Porter's Stemmer to the remaining
words. Information about stemming can be found here.
These steps are taken from http://web.ist.utl.pt/~acardoso/datasets/
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I have a problem where I am trying to create a neural network for Tic-Tac-Toe. However, for some reason, training the neural network causes it to produce nearly the same output for any given input.
I did take a look at Artificial neural networks benchmark, but my network implementation is built for neurons with the same activation function for each neuron, i.e. no constant neurons.
To make sure the problem wasn't just due to my choice of training set (1218 board states and moves generated by a genetic algorithm), I tried to train the network to reproduce XOR. The logistic activation function was used. Instead of using the derivative, I multiplied the error by output*(1-output) as some sources suggested that this was equivalent to using the derivative. I can put the Haskell source on HPaste, but it's a little embarrassing to look at. The network has 3 layers: the first layer has 2 inputs and 4 outputs, the second has 4 inputs and 1 output, and the third has 1 output. Increasing to 4 neurons in the second layer didn't help, and neither did increasing to 8 outputs in the first layer.
I then calculated errors, network output, bias updates, and the weight updates by hand based on http://hebb.mit.edu/courses/9.641/2002/lectures/lecture04.pdf to make sure there wasn't an error in those parts of the code (there wasn't, but I will probably do it again just to make sure). Because I am using batch training, I did not multiply by x in equation (4) there. I am adding the weight change, though http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ai-faq/neural-nets/part2/section-2.html suggests to subtract it instead.
The problem persisted, even in this simplified network. For example, these are the results after 500 epochs of batch training and of incremental training.
Input |Target|Output (Batch) |Output(Incremental)
[1.0,1.0]|[0.0] |[0.5003781562785173]|[0.5009731800870864]
[1.0,0.0]|[1.0] |[0.5003740346965251]|[0.5006347214672715]
[0.0,1.0]|[1.0] |[0.5003734471544522]|[0.500589332376345]
[0.0,0.0]|[0.0] |[0.5003674110937019]|[0.500095157458231]
Subtracting instead of adding produces the same problem, except everything is 0.99 something instead of 0.50 something. 5000 epochs produces the same result, except the batch-trained network returns exactly 0.5 for each case. (Heck, even 10,000 epochs didn't work for batch training.)
Is there anything in general that could produce this behavior?
Also, I looked at the intermediate errors for incremental training, and the although the inputs of the hidden/input layers varied, the error for the output neuron was always +/-0.12. For batch training, the errors were increasing, but extremely slowly and the errors were all extremely small (x10^-7). Different initial random weights and biases made no difference, either.
Note that this is a school project, so hints/guides would be more helpful. Although reinventing the wheel and making my own network (in a language I don't know well!) was a horrible idea, I felt it would be more appropriate for a school project (so I know what's going on...in theory, at least. There doesn't seem to be a computer science teacher at my school).
EDIT: Two layers, an input layer of 2 inputs to 8 outputs, and an output layer of 8 inputs to 1 output, produces much the same results: 0.5+/-0.2 (or so) for each training case. I'm also playing around with pyBrain, seeing if any network structure there will work.
Edit 2: I am using a learning rate of 0.1. Sorry for forgetting about that.
Edit 3: Pybrain's "trainUntilConvergence" doesn't get me a fully trained network, either, but 20000 epochs does, with 16 neurons in the hidden layer. 10000 epochs and 4 neurons, not so much, but close. So, in Haskell, with the input layer having 2 inputs & 2 outputs, hidden layer with 2 inputs and 8 outputs, and output layer with 8 inputs and 1 output...I get the same problem with 10000 epochs. And with 20000 epochs.
Edit 4: I ran the network by hand again based on the MIT PDF above, and the values match, so the code should be correct unless I am misunderstanding those equations.
Some of my source code is at http://hpaste.org/42453/neural_network__not_working; I'm working on cleaning my code somewhat and putting it in a Github (rather than a private Bitbucket) repository.
All of the relevant source code is now at https://github.com/l33tnerd/hsann.
I've had similar problems, but was able to solve by changing these:
Scale down the problem to manageable size. I first tried too many inputs, with too many hidden layer units. Once I scaled down the problem, I could see if the solution to the smaller problem was working. This also works because when it's scaled down, the times to compute the weights drop down significantly, so I can try many different things without waiting.
Make sure you have enough hidden units. This was a major problem for me. I had about 900 inputs connecting to ~10 units in the hidden layer. This was way too small to quickly converge. But also became very slow if I added additional units. Scaling down the number of inputs helped a lot.
Change the activation function and its parameters. I was using tanh at first. I tried other functions: sigmoid, normalized sigmoid, Gaussian, etc.. I also found that changing the function parameters to make the functions steeper or shallower affected how quickly the network converged.
Change learning algorithm parameters. Try different learning rates (0.01 to 0.9). Also try different momentum parameters, if your algo supports it (0.1 to 0.9).
Hope this helps those who find this thread on Google!
So I realise this is extremely late for the original post, but I came across this because I was having a similar problem and none of the reasons posted here cover what was wrong in my case.
I was working on a simple regression problem, but every time I trained the network it would converge to a point where it was giving me the same output (or sometimes a few different outputs) for each input. I played with the learning rate, the number of hidden layers/nodes, the optimization algorithm etc but it made no difference. Even when I looked at a ridiculously simple example, trying to predict the output (1d) of two different inputs (1d):
import numpy as np
import torch
import torch.nn as nn
import torch.nn.functional as F
class net(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, obs_size, hidden_size):
super(net, self).__init__()
self.fc = nn.Linear(obs_size, hidden_size)
self.out = nn.Linear(hidden_size, 1)
def forward(self, obs):
h = F.relu(self.fc(obs))
return self.out(h)
inputs = np.array([[0.5],[0.9]])
targets = torch.tensor([3.0, 2.0], dtype=torch.float32)
network = net(1,5)
optimizer = torch.optim.Adam(network.parameters(), lr=0.001)
for i in range(10000):
out = network(torch.tensor(inputs, dtype=torch.float32))
loss = F.mse_loss(out, targets)
optimizer.zero_grad()
loss.backward()
optimizer.step()
print("Loss: %f outputs: %f, %f"%(loss.data.numpy(), out.data.numpy()[0], out.data.numpy()[1]))
but STILL it was always outputting the average value of the outputs for both inputs. It turns out the reason is that the dimensions of my outputs and targets were not the same: the targets were Size[2], and the outputs were Size[2,1], and for some reason PyTorch was broadcasting the outputs to be Size[2,2] in the MSE loss, which completely messes everything up. Once I changed:
targets = torch.tensor([3.0, 2.0], dtype=torch.float32)
to
targets = torch.tensor([[3.0], [2.0]], dtype=torch.float32)
It worked as it should. This was obviously done with PyTorch, but I suspect maybe other libraries broadcast variables in the same way.
For me it was happening exactly like in your case, the output of neural network was always the same no matter the training & number of layers etc.
Turns out my back-propagation algorithm had a problem. At one place I was multiplying by -1 where it wasn't required.
There could be another problem like this. The question is how to debug it?
Steps to debug:
Step1 : Write the algorithm such that it can take variable number of input layers and variable number of input & output nodes.
Step2 : Reduce the hidden layers to 0. Reduce input to 2 nodes, output to 1 node.
Step3 : Now train for binary-OR-Operation.
Step4 : If it converges correctly, go to Step 8.
Step5 : If it doesn't converge, train it only for 1 training sample
Step6 : Print all the forward and prognostication variables (weights, node-outputs, deltas etc)
Step7 : Take pen&paper and calculate all the variables manually.
Step8 : Cross verify the values with algorithm.
Step9 : If you don't find any problem with 0 hidden layers. Increase hidden layer size to 1. Repeat step 5,6,7,8
It sounds like a lot of work, but it works very well IMHO.
I know, that for the original post this is far, too late but maybe I can help someone with this, as I faced the same problem.
For me the problem was, that my input data had missing values in important columns, where the training/test data were not missing. I replaced these values with zero values and voilà, suddenly the results were plausible. So maybe check your data, maybe it si misrepresented
It's hard to tell without seeing a code sample but it is possible occure for a net because its number of hidden neron.with incresing in number of neron and number of hiden layer it is not possible to train a net with small set of training data.until it is possible to make a net with smaller layer and nerons it is amiss to use a larger net.therefore perhaps your problem solved with attention to this matters.
I haven't tested it with the XOR problem in the question, but for my original dataset based on Tic-Tac-Toe, I believe that I have gotten the network to train somewhat (I only ran 1000 epochs, which wasn't enough): the quickpropagation network can win/tie over half of its games; backpropagation can get about 41%. The problems came down to implementation errors (small ones) and not understanding the difference between the error derivative (which is per-weight) and the error for each neuron, which I did not pick up on in my research. #darkcanuck's answer about training the bias similarly to a weight would probably have helped, though I didn't implement it. I also rewrote my code in Python so that I could more easily hack with it. Therefore, although I haven't gotten the network to match the minimax algorithm's efficiency, I believe that I have managed to solve the problem.
I faced a similar issue earlier when my data was not properly normalized. Once I normalized the data everything ran correctly.
Recently, I faced this issue again and after debugging, I found that there can be another reason for neural networks giving the same output. If you have a neural network that has a weight decay term such as that in the RSNNS package, make sure that your decay term is not so large that all weights go to essentially 0.
I was using the caret package for in R. Initially, I was using a decay hyperparameter = 0.01. When I looked at the diagnostics, I saw that the RMSE was being calculated for each fold (of cross validation), but the Rsquared was always NA. In this case all predictions were coming out to the same value.
Once I reduced the decay to a much lower value (1E-5 and lower), I got the expected results.
I hope this helps.
I was running into the same problem with my model when number of layers is large. I was using a learning rate of 0.0001. When I lower the learning rate to 0.0000001 the problem seems solved. I think algorithms stuck on local minumums when learning rate is too low
It's hard to tell without seeing a code sample, but a bias bug can have that effect (e.g. forgetting to add the bias to the input), so I would take a closer look at that part of the code.
Based on your comments, I'd agree with #finnw that you have a bias problem. You should treat the bias as a constant "1" (or -1 if you prefer) input to each neuron. Each neuron will also have its own weight for the bias, so a neuron's output should be the sum of the weighted inputs, plus the bias times its weight, passed through the activation function. Bias weights are updated during training just like the other weights.
Fausett's "Fundamentals of Neural Networks" (p.300) has an XOR example using binary inputs and a network with 2 inputs, 1 hidden layer of 4 neurons and one output neuron. Weights are randomly initialized between +0.5 and -0.5. With a learning rate of 0.02 the example network converges after about 3000 epochs. You should be able to get a result in the same ballpark if you get the bias problems (and any other bugs) ironed out.
Also note that you cannot solve the XOR problem without a hidden layer in your network.
I encountered a similar issue, I found out that it was a problem with how my weights were being generated.
I was using:
w = numpy.random.rand(layers[i], layers[i+1])
This generated a random weight between 0 and 1.
The problem was solved when I used randn() instead:
w = numpy.random.randn(layers[i], layers[i+1])
This generates negative weights, which helped my outputs become more varied.
I ran into this exact issue. I was predicting 6 rows of data with 1200+ columns using nnet.
Each column would return a different prediction but all of the rows in that column would be the same value.
I got around this by increasing the size parameter significantly. I increased it from 1-5 to 11+.
I have also heard that decreasing your decay rate can help.
I've had similar problems with machine learning algorithms and when I looked at the code I found random generators that were not really random. If you do not use a new random seed (such Unix time for example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time) then it is possible to get the exact same results over and over again.