Category: Machine Learning

Jen Underwood has some good tips when preparing data for a machine learning operation:

Data preparation for machine learning requires business domain expertise, bias awareness and an experimental thought process. Before preparing your data, you’ll first define a business problem solve. During that exercise, you’ll select an outcome metric and brainstorm potential input variables that influence it from many varied perspectives. From there you will begin identifying, collecting, cleaning, shaping and sampling data to run through automated machine learning model processes.

Note that it is also not unusual for relevant machine learning input data to occur outside of existing transactional processes. If that is the case, you can still start creating a first-generation machine learning model with existing data and continue to build new model versions over time as supplementary data is acquired.

Click through for the ten tips.

Adrian Colyer has a two-parter summarizing an interesting academic paper regarding deep neural networks.  Part one introduces the theory:

Section 2.4 contains a discussion on the crucial role of noise in making the analysis useful (which sounds kind of odd on first reading!). I don’t fully understand this part, but here’s the gist:

The learning complexity is related to the number of relevant bits required from the input patterns  for a good enough prediction of the output label , or the minimal  under a constraint on  given by the IB.

Without some noise (introduced for example by the use of sigmoid activation functions) the mutual information is simply the entropy independent of the actual function we’re trying to learn, and nothing in the structure of the points  gives us any hint as to the learning complexity of the rule. With some noise, the function turns into a stochastic rule, and we can escape this problem. Anyone with a lay-person’s explanation of why this works, please do post in the comments!

Part two digs in deeper:

The different colours in the chart represent the different hidden layers (and there are multiple points of each colour because we’re looking at 50 different runs all plotted together). On the x-axis is , so as we move to the right on the x-axis, the amount of mutual information between the hidden layer and the input  increases. On the y-axis is , so as we move up on the y-axis, the amount of mutual information between the hidden layer and the output  increases.

I’m used to thinking of progressing through the network layers from left to right, so it took a few moments for it to sink in that it’s the lowest layer which appears in the top-right of this plot (maintains the most mutual information), and the top-most layer which appears in the bottom-left (has retained almost no mutual information before any training). So the information path being followed goes from the top-right corner to the bottom-left traveling down the slope.

This is worth a careful reading.

Rodrigo Agundez shows how to fool neural networks:

A comprehensive and complete summary can be found in the When DNNs go wrong blog, which I recommend you to read.

All these amazing studies use state of the art deep learning techniques, which makes them (in my opinion) difficult to reproduce and to answer questions we might have as non-experts in this subject.

My intention in this blog is to bring the main concepts down to earth, to an easily reproducible setting where they are clear and actually visible. In addition, I hope this short blog can provide a better understanding of the limitations of discriminative models in general. The complete code used in this blog post can be found here.

This is a great article.

Pete Warden shares his knowledge of how convolutional neural networks deal with position differences in images:

If you’re trying to recognize all images with the sun shape in them, how do you make sure that the model works even if the sun can be at any position in the image? It’s an interesting problem because there are really three stages of enlightenment in how you perceive it:

• If you haven’t tried to program computers, it looks simple to solve because our eyes and brain have no problem dealing with the differences in positioning.

• If you have tried to solve similar problems with traditional programming, your heart will probably sink because you’ll know both how hard dealing with input differences will be, and how tough it can be to explain to your clients why it’s so tricky.

• As a certified Deep Learning Guru, you’ll sagely stroke your beard and smile, safe in the knowledge that your networks will take such trivial issues in their stride.

It’s a good read.