What does "gels" stand for in Pytorch?
It solves least squares, but what does the name stand for?
It is hard to get comfortable with a function without getting its name and it is surprising that these are not explained in the documentation.
gels is actually a function from LAPACK (Linear Algebra Package) and stands for GEneralalized Least Squares meaning that it works on general matrices:
General matrix
A general real or complex m by n matrix is represented by a real or complex matrix of size (m, n).
Related
I am learning statistics, and have some basic yet core questions on SD:
s = sample size
n = total number of observations
xi = ith observation
μ = arithmetic mean of all observations
σ = the usual definition of SD, i.e. ((1/(n-1))*sum([(xi-μ)**2 for xi in s])**(1/2) in Python lingo
f = frequency of an observation value
I do understand that (1/n)*sum([xi-μ for xi in s]) would be useless (= 0), but would not (1/n)*sum([abs(xi-μ) for xi in s]) have been a measure of variation?
Why stop at power of 1 or 2? Would ((1/(n-1))*sum([abs((xi-μ)**3) for xi in s])**(1/3) or ((1/(n-1))*sum([(xi-μ)**4 for xi in s])**(1/4) and so on have made any sense?
My notion of squaring is that it 'amplifies' the measure of variation from the arithmetic mean while the simple absolute difference is somewhat a linear scale notionally. Would it not amplify it even more if I cubed it (and made absolute value of course) or quad it?
I do agree computationally cubes and quads would have been more expensive. But with the same argument, the absolute values would have been less expensive... So why squares?
Why is the Normal Distribution like it is, i.e. f = (1/(σ*math.sqrt(2*pi)))*e**((-1/2)*((xi-μ)/σ))?
What impact would it have on the normal distribution formula above if I calculated SD as described in (1) and (2) above?
Is it only a matter of our 'getting used to the squares', it could well have been linear, cubed or quad, and we would have trained our minds likewise?
(I may not have been 100% accurate in my number of opening and closing brackets above, but you will get the idea.)
So, if you are looking for an index of dispersion, you actually don't have to use the standard deviation. You can indeed report mean absolute deviation, the summary statistic you suggested. You merely need to be aware of how each summary statistic behaves, for example the SD assigns more weight to outlying variables. You should also consider how each one can be interpreted. For example, with a normal distribution, we know how much of the distribution lies between ±2SD from the mean. For some discussion of mean absolute deviation (and other measures of average absolute deviation, such as the median average deviation) and their uses see here.
Beyond its use as a measure of spread though, SD is related to variance and this is related to some of the other reasons it's popular, because the variance has some nice mathematical properties. A mathematician or statistician would be able to provide a more informed answer here, but squared difference is a smooth function and is differentiable everywhere, allowing one to analytically identify a minimum, which helps when fitting functions to data using least squares estimation. For more detail and for a comparison with least absolute deviations see here. Another major area where variance shines is that it can be easily decomposed and summed, which is useful for example in ANOVA and regression models generally. See here for a discussion.
As to your questions about raising to higher powers, they actually do have uses in statistics! In general, the mean (which is related to average absolute mean), the variance (related to standard deviation), skewness (related to the third power) and kurtosis (related to the fourth power) are all related to the moments of a distribution. Taking differences raised to those powers and standardizing them provides useful information about the shape of a distribution. The video I linked provides some easy intuition.
For some other answers and a larger discussion of why SD is so popular, See here.
Regarding the relationship of sigma and the normal distribution, sigma is simply a parameter that stretches the standard normal distribution, just like the mean changes its location. This is simply a result of the way the standard normal distribution (a normal distribution with mean=0 and SD=variance=1) is mathematically defined, and note that all normal distributions can be derived from the standard normal distribution. This answer illustrates this. Now, you can parameterize a normal distribution in other ways as well, but I believe you do need to provide sigma, whether using the SD or precisions. I don't think you can even parametrize a normal distribution using just the mean and the mean absolute difference. Now, a deeper question is why normal distributions are so incredibly useful in representing widely different phenomena and crop up everywhere. I think this is related to the Central Limit Theorem, but I do not understand the proofs of the theorem well enough to comment further.
I was wondering if there was a direct way of computing the iteration matrix for nth Linear Block Gauss Seidel iteration within OpenMDAO?
thank you
If I understand you correctly, you are referring to the matrix-form of the Gauss Seidel algorithm where you take Ax=b, and break A up into the Diagonal (D), Lower (L) and Upper (U) parts, then use those parts to compute the next iterate.
Specifically you compute [D-L]^-1. This, I believe is what you are referring to as the "iteration matrix" (I am not familiar with this terminology, but based on the algorithm I'm comfortable making an educated guess).
This formulation of the algorithm is useful to think about and a simple way to implement it, but OpenMDAO takes a different approach. The LBGS algorithm implemented in OpenMDAO is set up to work in a matrix-free manner. That means it only interacts with the linear operator methods solve_linear and apply_linear and never explicitly assembles the A matrix at all. Hence there isn't an opportunity to split A up into D, L, U.
Depending on the way you constructed the model, the A matrix you would need might or might not be there at all because OpenMDAO is capable of working in a completely matrix free context. However, if all of your components use the compute_partials or linearize methods to provide partial derivatives then the data you would need for the A matrix does exist in memory.
You'll have to dig for it a bit, and ironically the best place to see how to do that is in the direct solver which does actually require the matrix be formed to compute a factorization.
Also, in that code you'll see a function can iteratively call the linear operator to construct a dense matrix even if the underlying components don't provide their partials directly. Please note that this approach for assembling the matrix is extremely slow and is not recommended for normal operations.
we choose SSE(sum of squared error) for deciding the best fit line instead of sum of residual or sum of absolute residual
The purpose is to allow linear algebra to directly solve for equation coefficients in regression. The other fitting targets you mention cannot be used in this way. Using derivative calculus, it was found that a fitting target of lowest sum of squared error allowed a direct, non-iterative solution to the problem of fitting experimental data to equations that are linear in their coefficients - such as standard polynomial equations.
James is right that the ability to formulate the estimates of regression coefficients as a form of linear algebra is one large advantage of the least squares estimate (minimizing SSE), but using the least squares estimate provides a few other useful properties.
With the least squares estimate you're minimizing the variance of the errors - which is often desired. This gives us the best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE) of the coefficients (given the Gauss–Markov assumptions are met). (Gauss-Markov assumptions and a proof showing why this formulation gives us the best linear unbiased estimates can be found here.)
With the least squares, you also end up with a unique solution (assuming you have more observations than estimated coefficients and no perfect multicollinearity).
As for using the sum of residual, this wouldn’t work well since this would be minimized by having all negative residuals.
But the sum of absolute residual is used in some linear models where you may want the estimates to be more robust to outliers and aren’t necessarily concerned with the variance of the residuals.
For example, in generative adversarial network, we often hear that inference is easy because the conditional distribution of x given latent variable z is 'tractable'.
Also, I read somewhere that Boltzmann machine and variational autoencoder is used where the posterior distribution is not tractable so some sort of approximation need to be applied.
Could anyone tell me what 'tractable' means, in a rigorous definition? Or could anyone explain in any of the examples I gave above, what tractable exactly means in that context?
First of all, let's define what tractable and intractable problems are (Reference: http://www.cs.ucc.ie/~dgb/courses/toc/handout29.pdf).
Tractable Problem: a problem that is solvable by a polynomial-time algorithm. The upper bound is polynomial.
Intractable Problem: a problem that cannot be solved by a polynomial-time algorithm. The lower bound is exponential.
From this perspective, a definition for tractable distribution is that it takes polynomial-time to calculate the probability of this distribution at any given point.
If a distribution is in a closed-form expression, the probability of this distribution can definitely be calculated in polynomial-time, which, in the world of academia, means the distribution is tractable. Intractable distributions take equal to or more than exponential-time, which usually means that with existing computational resources, we can never calculate the probability at a given point with relatively "short" time (any time longer than polynomial-time is long...).
Yesterday, I posted a question about general concept of SVM Primal Form Implementation:
Support Vector Machine Primal Form Implementation
and "lejlot" helped me out to understand that what I am solving is a QP problem.
But I still don't understand how my objective function can be expressed as QP problem
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine#Primal_form)
Also I don't understand how QP and Quasi-Newton method are related
All I know is Quasi-Newton method will SOLVE my QP problem which supposedly formulated from
my objective function (which I don't see the connection)
Can anyone walk me through this please??
For SVM's, the goal is to find a classifier. This problem can be expressed in terms of a function that you are trying to minimize.
Let's first consider the Newton iteration. Newton iteration is a numerical method to find a solution to a problem of the form f(x) = 0.
Instead of solving it analytically we can solve it numerically by the follwing iteration:
x^k+1 = x^k - DF(x)^-1 * F(x)
Here x^k+1 is the k+1th iterate, DF(x)^-1 is the inverse of the Jacobian of F(x) and x is the kth x in the iteration.
This update runs as long as we make progress in terms of step size (delta x) or if our function value approaches 0 to a good degree. The termination criteria can be chosen accordingly.
Now consider solving the problem f'(x)=0. If we formulate the Newton iteration for that, we get
x^k+1 = x - HF(x)^-1 * DF(x)
Where HF(x)^-1 is the inverse of the Hessian matrix and DF(x) the gradient of the function F. Note that we are talking about n-dimensional Analysis and can not just take the quotient. We have to take the inverse of the matrix.
Now we are facing some problems: In each step, we have to calculate the Hessian matrix for the updated x, which is very inefficient. We also have to solve a system of linear equations, namely y = HF(x)^-1 * DF(x) or HF(x)*y = DF(x).
So instead of computing the Hessian in every iteration, we start off with an initial guess of the Hessian (maybe the identity matrix) and perform rank one updates after each iterate. For the exact formulas have a look here.
So how does this link to SVM's?
When you look at the function you are trying to minimize, you can formulate a primal problem, which you can the reformulate as a Dual Lagrangian problem which is convex and can be solved numerically. It is all well documented in the article so I will not try to express the formulas in a less good quality.
But the idea is the following: If you have a dual problem, you can solve it numerically. There are multiple solvers available. In the link you posted, they recommend coordinate descent, which solves the optimization problem for one coordinate at a time. Or you can use subgradient descent. Another method is to use L-BFGS. It is really well explained in this paper.
Another popular algorithm for solving problems like that is ADMM (alternating direction method of multipliers). In order to use ADMM you would have to reformulate the given problem into an equal problem that would give the same solution, but has the correct format for ADMM. For that I suggest reading Boyds script on ADMM.
In general: First, understand the function you are trying to minimize and then choose the numerical method that is most suited. In this case, subgradient descent and coordinate descent are most suited, as stated in the Wikipedia link.