Theano, structured v.s. regular gradient - theano

I don't know whether SO is a good place to ask this question, but I can't find the document talking about the different between structured gradient and regular gradient in the Theano library. What are they ?

Do you mean with respect to sparse operations?
As mentioned here.
There are 2 types of gradients for sparse operations: normal gradient
and structured gradient.
The difference only applies to sparse matrices because with sparse matrices you may or may not care about the effect of the "empty space" in a sparse matrix on the gradients.
More here.

Related

Does Gpytorch use Analytic gradient or Automatic differentiation for training?

I am confused about how gpytorch calculates the gradients with respect to parameters of the model. For instance, lets say I am using ExactGP with Gaussian likelihood, RBF kernel, and constant mean and using MLE (maximum likelihood estimate) for finding the parameters of the model (mean, kernel parameters, and noise). One way to calculate the gradient w.r.t parameters of the model is using analytical gradient which means taking derivative of negative log-likelihood with respect to parameters and finding the equation for each derivation. Another way is to use automatic differentiation provided by pytorch.
Gpytorch authors have mentioned in their paper with the title of "GPyTorch: Blackbox Matrix-Matrix Gaussian Process Inference with GPU Acceleration" that they are using analytical gradient or at least this is what I understood by reading the paper. Am I correct? Also, I couldn't find the code that they have implemented the analytical gradient.
Could anyone help me understand this better, please?
The "automatic differentiation provided by PyTorch" does compute the analytic gradient (via back-propagation, note that there is no finite differencing or anything like that involved) - it just does so automatically.
https://github.com/cornellius-gp/gpytorch/discussions/1949#discussioncomment-2384471

Is there any support for BiPlots when using PCA in spark.ml?

I have used kmeans and PCA to attempt to visualise high dimensional k-means clusters in two dimensions but have lost the meaning of the clusters in 2D.
Is there anyway to project the features onto to 2D plot to return some interpretability?
Any non-linear dimensionality reduction method might work better (also called "manifold learning", e.g. see sklearn's suite). The t-sne method is generally quite popular for this.
However, these do not take your cluster labels into account. If you wanted to do that (although generally you do not), you could add a penalty to the manifold learning technique that forces same-cluster points to be close together, for example.

Can anyone explain me all the parameters of sklearn SVM.SVC in a simplified manner?

I am trying to lean SVC classifier of SVM model in sklearn. I have learned to use it on various datasets and even applied gridsearch to improve the results but I have not yet understood some parameters like C, gamma.
If anyone can give me simple but detail explanation of each parameter, it would be great.
Since we are trying to minimize some objective function, we can add some 'size' measure of the coefficient vector itself to the function. C is essentially the inverse of the weight on that 'regularization' term. Decreasing C will prevent overfitting by forcing the coefficients to be sparse or small, depending on the penalty. Increasing C too much will promote underfitting.
Gamma is a parameter for the RBF kernel. Increasing gamma allows for a more complex decision boundary (which can lead to overfitting, but can also improve results--it depends on the data).
This scikit-learn tutorial graphically shows the effect of changing both hyperparameters.

How to consistently standardize sparse feature matrix in scikit-learn?

I am using sklearn's DictVectorizer to construct a large, sparse feature matrix, which is fed to an ElasticNet model. Elastic net (and similar linear models) work best when predictors (columns in the feature matrix) are centered and scaled. The recommended approach is to build a Pipeline that uses a StandardScaler prior to the regressor, however that doesn't work with sparse features, as stated in the docs.
I thought to use the normalize=True flag in ElasticNet which seems to support sparse data, however it's not clear whether the normalization is applied during prediction to the test data as well. Does anyone know if normalize=True applies for prediction as well? If not, is there a way to use the same standardization on the training and test set when dealing with sparse features?
Digging through the sklearn code, it looks like when fit_intercept=True and normalize=True, the coefficients estimated on the normalized data are projected back to the original scale of the data. This is similar to the way glmnet in R handles standardization. The relevant code snippet is the method _set_intercept of LinearModel, see https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/blob/master/sklearn/linear_model/base.py#L158. So predictions on unseen data use coefficients in the original scale, i.e., normalize=True is safe to use.

Setting feature weights for KNN

I am working with sklearn's implementation of KNN. While my input data has about 20 features, I believe some of the features are more important than others. Is there a way to:
set the feature weights for each feature when "training" the KNN learner.
learn what the optimal weight values are with or without pre-processing the data.
On a related note, I understand generally KNN does not require training but since sklearn implements it using KDTrees, the tree must be generated from the training data. However, this sounds like its turning KNN into a binary tree problem. Is that the case?
Thanks.
kNN is simply based on a distance function. When you say "feature two is more important than others" it usually means difference in feature two is worth, say, 10x difference in other coords. Simple way to achive this is by multiplying coord #2 by its weight. So you put into the tree not the original coords but coords multiplied by their respective weights.
In case your features are combinations of the coords, you might need to apply appropriate matrix transform on your coords before applying weights, see PCA (principal component analysis). PCA is likely to help you with question 2.
The answer to question to is called "metric learning" and currently not implemented in Scikit-learn. Using the popular Mahalanobis distance amounts to rescaling the data using StandardScaler. Ideally you would want your metric to take into account the labels.

Resources