Figuring out TensorFlow's BoostedTrees layer-by-layer approach - python

I've been reading the article associated with the implementation of boosted trees in TensorFlow in the paper, where a layer-by-layer approach is discussed
... and novel Layer-by-Layer boosting, which allows for stronger trees
(leading to faster convergence) and deeper models.
Though no where in the article this approach is discussed.
I am pretty sure that the n_batches_per_layer parameter passed in the BosstedTreesClassifier/Regressor is related to this concept.
My questions are
What is this approach? Any source to read more about it?
What is the meaning of the n_batches_per_layer parameter?
What should I set the n_batches_per_layer parameter to follow the standard training scheme of boosted trees?

n_batches_per_layer is how many batches do you want to use to train for each layer (i.e. a given depth in your tree). It is basically a portion of the data to use to build 1 layer, measured in batches. For example if you set your batch size = len(train_set) and n_batches_per_layer = 1, then you will use the entire train set for each layer.
So I would recommend if their dataset fits into memory then set batch_size = len(train_set), the number of n_batches_per_layer = 1. Otherwise set it to int(len(train_data)/batch_size) -- though you could try experimenting with a smaller number for faster training.

Related

In Leave One Out Cross Validation, How can I Use `shap.Explainer()` Function to Explain a Machine Learning Model?

Background of the Problem
I want to explain the outcome of machine learning (ML) models using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) which is implemented in the shap library of Python. As a parameter of the function shap.Explainer(), I need to pass an ML model (e.g. XGBRegressor()). However, in each iteration of the Leave One Out Cross Validation (LOOCV), the ML model will be different as in each iteration, I am training on a different dataset (1 participant’s data will be different). Also, the model will be different as I am doing feature selection in each iteration.
Then, My Question
In LOOCV, How can I use shap.Explainer() function of shap library to present the performance of a machine learning model? It can be noted that I have checked several tutorials (e.g. this one, this one) and also several questions (e.g. this one) of SO. But I failed to find the answer of the problem.
Thanks for reading!
Update
I know that in LOOCV, the model found in each iteration can be explained by shap.Explainer(). However, as there is 250 participants' data, if I apply shap here for each model, there will be 250 output! Thus, I want to get a single output which will present the performance of the 250 models.
You seem to train model on a 250 datapoints while doing LOOCV. This is about choosing a model with hyperparams that will ensure best generalization ability.
Model explanation is different from training in that you don't sift through different sets of hyperparams -- note, 250 LOOCV is already overkill. Will you do that with 250'000 rows? -- you are rather trying to understand which features influence output in what direction and by how much.
Training has it's own limitations (availability of data, if new data resembles the data the model was trained on, if the model good enough to pick up peculiarities of data and generalize well etc), but don't overestimate explanation exercise either. It's still an attempt to understand how inputs influence outputs. You may be willing to average 250 different matrices of SHAP values. But do you expect the result to be much more different from a single random train/test split?
Note as well:
However, in each iteration of the Leave One Out Cross Validation (LOOCV), the ML model will be different as in each iteration, I am training on a different dataset (1 participant’s data will be different).
In each iteration of LOOCV the model is still the same (same features, hyperparams may be different, depending on your definition of iteration). It's still the same dataset (same features)
Also, the model will be different as I am doing feature selection in each iteration.
Doesn't matter. Feed resulting model to SHAP explainer and you'll get what you want.

When should I consider to use pretrain-model word2vec model weights?

Suppose my corpus is reasonably large - having tens-of-thousands of unique words. I can either use it to build a word2vec model directly(Approach #1 in the code below) or initialize a new word2vec model with pre-trained model weights and fine tune it with my own corpus(Approach #2). Is the approach #2 worth consideration? If so, is there a rule of thumb on when I should consider a pre-trained model?
# Approach #1
from gensim.models import Word2Vec
model = Word2Vec(my_corpus, vector_size=300, min_count=1)
# Approach #2
model = Word2Vec(vector_size=300, min_count=1)
model.build_vocab(my_corpus)
model.intersect_word2vec_format("GoogleNews-vectors-negative300.bin", binary=True, lockf=1.0)
model.train(my_corpus, total_examples=len(my_corpus))
The general answer to this type of question is: you should try them both, and see which works better for your purposes.
No one without your exact data & project goals can be sure which will work better in your situation, and you'll need to exact same kind of ability-to-evaluate alterante choices to do all sorts of very basic, necessary tuning of your work.
Separately:
"fine-tuning" word2vec-vectors can mean many things, and can introduce a number of expert-leve thorny tradeoff-decisions - the sorts of tradeoffs that can only be navigated if you've got a robust way to test different choices against each other.
The specific simple tuning approach your code shows - which relies on an experimental method (intersect_word2vec_format()) that might not work in the latest Gensim – is pretty limited, and since it discards all the words in the outside vectors that aren't already in your own corpus, also discards one of the major reasons people often want to mix older vectors in - to cover more words not in their training data. (I doubt that approach will be useful in many cases, but as per above, to be sure you'd want to try it with respect to your data/goals.
It's almost always a bad idea to use min_count=1 with word2vec & similar algorithms. If such rare words are truly important, find more training examples so good vectors can be trained for them. But without enough training examples, they're usually better to ignore - keeping them even makes the vectors for surrounding words worse.

Improving prediction accuracy in Bayesian Causal Network

I would like to determine the causes of an unexpected outcome (or anamoly) in a thermodynamic process. I have continuous data of the associated variables and trying to make use of 'Bayesian Network (BN)' for the determination of causality relationships. For this purpose, I used a library called 'Causalnex' in Python.
I have followed the tutorial section of this library to build the DAG,BN model and everything works fine upto the step of predictions. The prediction results of minority/less majority classes have an accuracy of around 60-70% (80-90% with SMOTE/SMOTETomek and a particular random state) whereas a stable accuracy of more than 90% is expected. I have implemented following data-preprocessing steps.
Ensuring no missing/NaN values
Discretization (only it is supported by the library)
SMOTE/SMOTETomek for data balancing
Various train/test size combinations
I am struggling to figure out the ways to optimize the model. I could not find any supportive material in Internet for the same.
Are there any Guidelines or 'Best practices' of data pre-processing techniques and dataset requirements that particulary work for this library/ BN model? Could you please suggest any troubleshooting methods to identify the causes of low accuracy/metrics? Perhaps a misunderstood node-node causal relationship in DAG causes mediocre accuracy?
Any ideas/literature/other suitable library regarding this would be of great help!
A few tips that can help:
Changing/Tuning the Structure learning.
Trying different thresholds. When doing from_pandas, you can experiment with different w-threshold values (and the beta term (if you are using from_pandas_lasso)).
This will change the density of the network. A more dense structure implies a BN with more parameters. If the structure is more dense, you have more parameters and your model may perform better. If it is too dense, though, you may not have enough data to train it and may overfit.
Center the Data. Empirically, it seems that NOTEARS (the algorithm behind from_pandas) works best if the data is centered. So, subtracting the mean of the see this may be a good idea.
Ensure causality. NOTEARS does not ensure causality. So we need "experts" to judge the output and make the necessary modifications. If you see edges that don't make causal sense, you can either remove them or add them as tabu_edges and train your network again.
Experiment with discretisation. The performance can be very sensitive to how you discretise the data. Experimenting with various types of discretisation can help. You can use:
Methods available in Causalnex (uniform, for example)
fixed discretisations based on what thresholds make sense for your data
MDLP is a supervised way to discretise data. You can apply MDLP for each node having as "target" one of its children. There are 2 main packages for MDLP in pypy: mdlp and mdlp-discretization

Keras: Over fitting Conv2D

I'm trying to build a convolutional based model. I trained two different structures as following. As you can see for single layer there isn't any obvious change along number of epochs. Bi-layer Conv2D presents improving in accuracy and losses for train dataset, but validation characteristics are going to be a tragedy.
According to the fact that I can't increase my data-set what should I do to improve validation characteristics?
I've examined regularizer L1 & L2 but they didn't affect my model.
1) You can use adaptive learning rate (exponential decay or step dependent may work for you) Furthermore, you can try extreme high learning rates when your model goes into local minimum.
2) If you are training with images, you can flip, rotate or other stuff to increase your dataset size and maybe some other augmentation techniques might work for your case.
3) Try to change the model like deeper, shallower, wider, narrower.
4) If you are doing a classification model, please ensure that you are not using sigmoid as your activation function in the end unless you are doing binary classification.
5) Always check your dataset's situation before training session.
Your train-test split may not be suitable for your case.
There might be extreme noises in your data.
Some amount of your data might be corrupted.
Note: I will update them whenever a new idea comes to my mind. Furthermore, I didn't want to repeat the comments and other answers, both of them are having valuable information for your case.
The validation becomes a tragedy because model is overfitting on the training data you can try if any of this works,
1)Batch normalisation would be a good option to go with.
2)Try reducing batch size.
I tried a variety of models known to work well on small datasets, but as I suspected, and as is my ultimate verdict - it is a lost cause.
You don't have nearly enough data to train a good DL model, or even an ML model like SVM - as matter's exacerbated by having eight separate classes; your dataset would stand some chance with an SVM for binary classification, but none for 8-class. As a last resort, you can try XGBoost, but I wouldn't bet on it.
What can you do? Get more data. There's no way around it. I don't have an exact number, but for 8-class classification, I'd say you need anywhere from 50-200x your current data to get reasonable results. Mind also that your validation performance is bound to be much worse on a bigger validation set, accounted for in this number.
For readers, OP shared his dataset with me; shapes are: X = (1152, 1024, 1), y = (1152, 8)

neural network find best hyperameters or architecture first

I'm implementing my first neural network for images classification.
I would like to know if i should start to find best hyperparameters first and then try to modify my neural network architecture (e.g number of layer, dropout...) or architecture then hyperameters?
First you should decide for an architecture and then play around with the hyperparameters. To compare different hyperparameters it is important to have the same base (architecture).
Of course you can also play around with the architecture (layers, nodes,...).But I think here it is easier to search for an architecture online, because often the same or a similar problem yet have been solved or described in a tutorial/blog.
The dropout is also a (training-)hyperparameter and not part of the architecture!
The answer is as always : it depends
What are you trying to achieve?
If you're hoping to make the worlds best image classifier by trial and error then you might want to ask yourself if you think you have more compute available than the people who have already done this. For a really good classifier there are several ones that come with tensorflow/keras and can be easily implemented. If you're goofing around and learning the coding then I'd recommend different architectures because that's going to teach you more functions. If you have a dataset you don't think existing solutions will be good at analysing and genuinely need the best network to solve classify them then unfortunately it still depends...
How to decide:
Firstly decide on the rough order of magnitude for your overall parameter count (the literal number of parameters your model has). For a given number of parameters, architecture is likely to produce the biggest difference in results between representative hyperparameter choices (don't choke your network down to a single neuron in the middle and expect it to be representative of that architecture).
Its important to compare the rough performance per parameter so you're not giving an edge to the networks with greater overfitting capacity. You don't need to use all your training data or even train to completion, mostly you'll find the better networks learn faster and finish better (mostly). In the past I've done grid searches with multiple trials at each point using significantly reduced data then optimised the architecture with the most potential by considering the gradients of the grid search. Fun fact: with sufficient time you can use gradient descent methods on hyperparameters to find local minima. You might well find that there are many similarly top performing models, all of which should you can tune until a clear winner emerges.

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