Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Machine Learning

Comparing TensorFlow Versus PyTorch

Published 2018-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Anirudh Rao compares PyTorch to TensorFlow:

For small-scale server-side deployments both frameworks are easy to wrap in e.g. a Flask web server.

For mobile and embedded deployments, TensorFlow works really well. This is more than what can be said of most other deep learning frameworks including PyTorch.

Deploying to Android or iOS does require a non-trivial amount of work in TensorFlow.

You don’t have to rewrite the entire inference portion of your model in Java or C++.

Other than performance, one of the noticeable features of TensorFlow Serving is that models can be hot-swapped easily without bringing the service down.

Read on for the full comparison.

Comments closed

Using R To Hit Azure ML From Power BI

Published 2018-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati shows how you can use R to hit an Azure ML endpoint to populate a data set in Power BI:

You need to create a model in Azure ML Studio and create a web service for it.

The traditional example in Predict a passenger on Titanic ship is going to survived or not?

we have a dataset about passengers like their age, gender, and passenger class, then we are going to predict whether they are going to survive or not

Open Azure ML Studio and follow the steps to create a model for predicting this. Navigate to Azure ML Studio.

Then download the dataset for titanic from here

Click through for the step-by-step instructions.

Comments closed

Image Clustering With Keras And R

Published 2018-10-09 by Kevin Feasel

Shirin Glander shows us how to use R to extract learned features from Keras and cluster those features:

For each of these images, I am running the predict() function of Keras with the VGG16 model. Because I excluded the last layers of the model, this function will not actually return any class predictions as it would normally do; instead we will get the output of the last layer: block5_pool (MaxPooling2D).

These, we can use as learned features (or abstractions) of the images. Running this part of the code takes several minutes, so I save the output to a RData file (because I samples randomly, the classes you see below might not be the same as in the sample_fruits list above).

Read the whole thing.

Comments closed

What’s New With Machine Learning Services

Published 2018-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Niels Berglund looks at SQL Server 2019’s Machine Learning Services offering for updates:

So, when I read What’s new in SQL Server 2019, I came across a lot of interesting “stuff”, but one thing that stood out was Java language programmability extensions. In essence, it allows us to execute Java code in SQL Server by using a pre-built Java language extension! The way it works is as with R and Python; the code executes outside of the SQL Server engine, and you use sp_execute_external_script as the entry-point.

I haven’t had time to execute any Java code as of yet, but in the coming days, I definitely will drill into this. Something I noticed is that the architecture for SQL Server Machine Learning Services has changed (or had additions to it).

That Java support is for Spark, I’d imagine.  And I hope they allow for Scala.

Comments closed

Hadoop + SQL Server In 2019

Published 2018-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Travis Wright shows off a big part of what the SQL Server team has been working on the last couple of years:

SQL Server 2019 big data clusters provide a complete AI platform. Data can be easily ingested via Spark Streaming or traditional SQL inserts and stored in HDFS, relational tables, graph, or JSON/XML. Data can be prepared by using either Spark jobs or Transact-SQL (T-SQL) queries and fed into machine learning model training routines in either Spark or the SQL Server master instance using a variety of programming languages, including Java, Python, R, and Scala. The resulting models can then be operationalized in batch scoring jobs in Spark, in T-SQL stored procedures for real-time scoring, or encapsulated in REST API containers hosted in the big data cluster.

SQL Server big data clusters provide all the tools and systems to ingest, store, and prepare data for analysis as well as to train the machine learning models, store the models, and operationalize them.
Data can be ingested using Spark Streaming, by inserting data directly to HDFS through the HDFS API, or by inserting data into SQL Server through standard T-SQL insert queries. The data can be stored in files in HDFS, or partitioned and stored in data pools, or stored in the SQL Server master instance in tables, graph, or JSON/XML. Either T-SQL or Spark can be used to prepare data by running batch jobs to transform the data, aggregate it, or perform other data wrangling tasks.

Data scientists can choose either to use SQL Server Machine Learning Services in the master instance to run R, Python, or Java model training scripts or to use Spark. In either case, the full library of open-source machine learning libraries, such as TensorFlow or Caffe, can be used to train models.

Lastly, once the models are trained, they can be operationalized in the SQL Server master instance using real-time, native scoring via the PREDICT function in a stored procedure in the SQL Server master instance; or you can use batch scoring over the data in HDFS with Spark. Alternatively, using tools provided with the big data cluster, data engineers can easily wrap the model in a REST API and provision the API + model as a container on the big data cluster as a scoring microservice for easy integration into any application.

I’ve wanted Spark integration ever since 2016 and we’re going to get it.

Comments closed

Building A Neural Network In R With Keras

Published 2018-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Pablo Casas walks us through Keras on R:

One of the key points in Deep Learning is to understand the dimensions of the vector, matrices and/or arrays that the model needs. I found that these are the types supported by Keras.

In Python’s words, it is the shape of the array.

To do a binary classification task, we are going to create a one-hot vector. It works the same way for more than 2 classes.

For instance:

  • The value 1 will be the vector [0,1]
  • The value 0 will be the vector [1,0]

Keras provides the to_categorical function to achieve this goal.

This example doesn’t include using CUDA, but the data sizes are small enough that it doesn’t matter much.  H/T R-Bloggers

Comments closed

Bayesian Neural Networks

Published 2018-08-16 by Kevin Feasel

Yoel Zeldes thinks about neural networks from a different perspective:

The term logP(w), which represents our prior, acts as a regularization term. Choosing a Gaussian distribution with mean 0 as the prior, you’ll get the mathematical equivalence of L2 regularization.

Now that we start thinking about neural networks as probabilistic creatures, we can let the fun begin. For start, who says we have to output one set of weights at the end of the training process? What if instead of learning the model’s weights, we learn a distribution over the weights? This will allow us to estimate uncertainty over the weights. So how do we do that?

It’s an interesting approach to the problem.

Comments closed

Combining Apache Kafka With TensorFlow

Published 2018-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Kai Waehner has an example of an application which uses Apache Kafka to stream car sensor data to TensorFlow on Google ML Engine:

A great benefit of Confluent MQTT Proxy is simplicity for realizing IoT scenarios without the need for a MQTT Broker. You can forward messages directly from the MQTT devices to Kafka via the MQTT Proxy. This reduces efforts and costs significantly. This is a perfect solution if you “just” want to communicate between Kafka and MQTT devices.

If you want to see the other part of the story (integration with sink applications like Elasticsearch / Grafana), please take a look at the Github project “KSQL for streaming IoT data“. This realizes the integration with ElasticSearch and Grafana via Kafka Connect and the Elastic connector.

Check it out and then take a gander at Kai’s GitHub repo.

Comments closed

Plotting ML Results In R

Published 2018-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Bernardo Lares shows off the plots he creates in R to compare ML models:

Split and compare quantiles

This parameter is the easiest to sell to the C-level guys. “Did you know that with this model, if we chop the worst 20% of leads we would have avoided 60% of the frauds and only lose 8% of our sales?” That’s what this plot will give you.

The math behind the plot might be a bit foggy for some readers so let me try and explain further: if you sort from the lowest to the highest score all your observations / people / leads, then you can literally, for instance, select the top 5 or bottom 15% or so. What we do now is split all those “ranked” rows into similar-sized-buckets to get the best bucket, the second best one, and so on. Then, if you split all the “Goods” and the “Bads” into two columns, keeping their buckets’ colours, we still have it sorted and separated, right? To conclude, if you’d say that the worst 20% cases (all from the same worst colour and bucket) were to take an action, then how many of each label would that represent on your test set? There you go!

Read on to see what else he uses and how you can build it yourself.

Comments closed

Building TensorFlow Neural Networks On Spark With Keras

Published 2018-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Jules Damji has an example of using the PyCharm IDE to use Keras to build TensorFlow neural network models on the Databricks MLflow library:

Our example in the video is a simple Keras network, modified from Keras Model Examples, that creates a simple multi-layer binary classification model with a couple of hidden and dropout layers and respective activation functions. Binary classification is a common machine learning task applied widely to classify images or text into two classes. For example, an image is a cat or dog; or a tweet is positive or negative in sentiment; and whether mail is spam or not spam.

But the point here is not so much to demonstrate a complex neural network model as to show the ease with which you can develop with Keras and TensorFlow, log an MLflow run, and experiment—all within PyCharm on your laptop.

Click through for the video and explanation of the process.

Comments closed