Category: Machine Learning

You don’t have to be a data scientist to use machine learning in SQL Server. You can use pre-trained models available for usage out of the box to do your analysis. The following example shows you how you quickly get started and do text sentiment analysis.

Before starting to use this model, you need to install it. The installation is quick and instructions for installing the model can be found here: How to install the models on SQL Server

Once you have SQL Server installed with Machine Learning Services, enabled external script execution, and installed the pre-trained model, you can execute the following script to create a stored procedure that uses Python and the microsoftml function get_sentiment with the pre-trained model to determine the probability of positive sentiment of a text:

Click through to read the whole thing.

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Position Differences And Convolutional Neural Networks

Published 2017-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

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.

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Columnstore Indexes And ML Services

Published 2017-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer picks up on some changes that SQL Server 2017 Machine Learning Services can use with respect to columnstore indexes:

I expect not just a couple of rows to be sent over for the Machine Learning Services, but huge tables with million of rows, that also contain hundreds of columns, because this kind of tables are the basis for the Data Science and Machine Learning processes.
While of course we are focusing here on rather small part of the total process (just the IO between SQL Server relational Engine and the Machine Learning Services), where the analytical process itself can take hours, but the IO can still make a good difference in some cases.
I love this improvement, which is very under-the-hood, but it will help a couple of people to make a decision of migrating to the freshly released SQL Server 2017 instead of the SQL Server 2016.

I haven’t quite taken advantage of this yet (just moved to 2017 but still in 130 compatibility mode) but fingers crossed that I’ll see those improvements.

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Dealing With Word Tensors

Published 2017-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Moody continues his series on natural language processing:

Counting and tensor decompositions are elegant and straightforward techniques. But these methods are grossly underepresented in business contexts. In this post we factorized an example made up of word skipgrams occurring within documents to arrive at word and document vectors simultaneously. This kind of analysis is effective, simple, and yields powerful concepts.

Look to your own data, and before throwing black-box deep learning machines at them, try out tensor factorizations!

He has a set of animated GIFs to help with learning, though I do wish they were about 30% slower so you can take a moment to read each section before it jumps to the next bit.

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Online Learning Algorithms

Published 2017-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Xin Hunt describes the benefits of online learning algorithms:

A few examples of classical online learning algorithms include recursive least squares, stochastic gradient descent and multi-armed bandit algorithms like Thompson sampling. Many online algorithms (including recursive least squares and stochastic gradient descent) have offline versions. These online algorithms are usually developed after the offline version, and are designed for better scaling with large datasets and streaming data. Algorithms like Thompson sampling on the other hand, do not have offline counterparts, because the problems they solve are inherently online.

Let’s look at interactive ad recommendation systems as an example. You’ll find ads powered by these systems when you browse popular publications, weather sites and social media networks. These recommendation systems build customer preference models by tracking your shopping and browsing activities (ad clicking, wish list updates and purchases, for example). Due to the transient nature of shopping behaviors, new recommendations must reflect the most recent activities. This makes online learning a natural choice for these systems.

My favorite online learning algorithm at the moment is Online Passive-Aggressive Algorithms. Not just because that name describes my Twitter feed.

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Measuring Semantic Relatedness

Published 2017-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

Sandipan Dey re-works a university assignment on semantic relatedness in Python:

Let’s define the semantic relatedness of two WordNet nouns x and y as follows:

A = set of synsets in which x appears

B = set of synsets in which y appears

distance(x, y) = length of shortest ancestral path of subsets A and B

sca(x, y) = a shortest common ancestor of subsets A and B

This is the notion of distance that we need to use to implement the distance() and sca() methods in the WordNet data type.

It looks like a helpful assignment for understanding natural language processing a little better.

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Errors Using Native Prediction In SQL Server

Published 2017-10-05 by Kevin Feasel

Sacha Tomey walks us through a few potential issues when converting code which uses SQL Server Machine Learning Services’s sp_execute_external_script procedure to native PREDICT calls:

Stumble One:
Error occurred during execution of the builtin function 'PREDICT' with HRESULT 0x80004001. 
Model type is unsupported.
Reason:

Not all models are supported. At the time of writing, only the following models are supported:

rxLinMod

rxLogit

rxBTrees

rxDtree

rxdForest

sp_rxPredict supports additional models including those available in the MicrosoftML package for R (I was using attempting to use rxFastTrees). I presume this limitation will reduce over time. The list of supported models is referenced in the PREDICT function (Documentation).

sp_rxPredict does require CLR, but it’s a viable alternative if you need to use a model not currently supported—like rxNeuralNet.

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Using Kafka To Drive Machine Learning

Published 2017-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

Kai Waehner has a nice architectural post on using Kafka as the focal point for machine learning training and prediction:

The essence of this architecture is that it uses Kafka as an intermediary between the various data sources from which feature data is collected, the model building environment where the model is fit, and the production application that serves predictions.

Feature data is pulled into Kafka from the various apps and databases that host it. This data is used to build models. The environment for this will vary based on the skills and preferred toolset of the team. The model building could be a data warehouse, a big data environment like Spark or Hadoop, or a simple server running python scripts. The model can be published where the production app that gets the same model parameters can apply it to incoming examples (perhaps using Kafka Streams to help index the feature data for easy usage on demand). The production app can either receive data from Kafka as a pipeline or even be a Kafka Streams application itself.

This is approximately 80% of my interests wrapped up in one post, so of course I’m going to read it…

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Recognizing Wood Knot Images

Published 2017-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Horton and Vanja Paunic walk through a lumber grading scenario with Microsoft R Server:

Here we use the rxFeaturize function from Microsoft R Server, which allows us to perform a number of transformations on the knot images in order to produce numerical features. We first resize the images to fit the dimensions required by the pre-trained deep neural model we will use, then extract the pixels to form a numerical data set, then run that data set through a DNN pre-trained model. The result of the image featurization is a numeric vector (“feature vector”) that represents key characteristics of that image.

Image featurization here is accomplished by using a deep neural network (DNN) model that has already been pre-trained by using millions of images. Currently, MRS supports four types of DNNs – three ResNet models (18, 50, 101)[1] and AlexNet [8].

This is a practical example of how to use image recognition to facilitate machine learning.

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Getting Started With TensorFlow

Published 2017-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Vivek Kalyanrangan shows us how to install TensorFlow:

Installing Tensorflow with GPU requires you to have NVIDIA GPU. AMD video cards are not supported with tensorflow. NVIDIA uses low level GPU computing system called CUDA. It is an NVIDIA proprietary software.

One can go the OpenCL way with AMD but as of now it won’t work with tensorflow.

Also, all NVIDIA devices are not supported. Here is a list from the NVIDIA documentation listing the supported GPUs.

By the end of it, Vivek also shows us a simple trained model.

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