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Category: Machine Learning

Machine Learning With R Q&A

Published 2016-11-08 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant answers a series of questions about R and machine learning:

Question: Is it possible to run R processes in diffrent boxes other than SQL Server itself for scalability reasons?

You have the option of installing the R Server on another server. Just keep in mind that you do have to account for the additional overhead of moving all the data over the network, which needs to weigh in on your decision to move processing to a different server.

Click through for plenty more questions and answers.

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Using Spark MLlib For Categorization

Published 2016-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Taras Matyashovskyy uses Apache Spark MLlib to categorize songs in different genres:

The roadmap for implementation was pretty straightforward:

  • Collect the raw data set of the lyrics (~65k sentences in total):

    • Black Sabbath, In Flames, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Moonspell, Nightwish, Sentenced, etc.
    • Abba, Ace of Base, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, etc.

  • Create training set, i.e. label (0 for metal | 1 for pop) + features (represented as double vectors)

  • Train logistic regression that is the obvious selection for the classification

This is a supervised learning problem, and is pretty fun to walk through.

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Machine Learning Algorithms In R

Published 2016-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant has a list of machine learning algorithms and their implementations in R:

Often times determining which algorithm to use can take a while.  Here is a pretty good flowchart for determining which algorithm should be used given some examples of what the desired outcomes and data contain. The diagram lists the algorithms, which are implemented in Azure ML.  The same algorithms can be implemented in R.  In R there are libraries to help with nearly every task.  Here’s a list of libraries and their accompanying links which can be used in Machine Learning.  This list is no means comprehensive as there are libraries and functions other than the ones listed here, but if you are trying to write a Machine Learning Experiment in R, and are looking at the flowchart, these R functions and Libraries will provide the tools to do the types of Machine Learning Analysis listed.

I think algorithm determination is one of the most difficult parts of machine learning.  Even if you don’t mean to go there, the garden of forking paths is dangerous.

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SKLearn To Azure ML

Published 2016-10-04 by Kevin Feasel

David Crook shows how to build a model using Python’s SciKit library and then operationalize it in Azure ML:

Why Model Outside Azure ML?

Sometimes you run into things like various limitations, speed, data size or perhaps you just iterate better on your own workstation.  I find myself significantly faster on my workstation or in a jupyter notebook that lives on a big ol’ server doing my experiments.  Modelling outside Azure ML allows me to use the full capabilities of whatever infrastructure and framework I want for training.

So Why Operationalize with Azure ML?

AzureML has several benefits such as auto-scale, token generation, high speed python execution modules, api versioning, sharing, tight PaaS integration with things like Stream Analytics among many other things.  This really does make life easier for me.  Sure I can deploy a flask app via docker somewhere, but then, I need to worry about things like load balancing, and then security and I really just don’t want to do that.  I want to build a model, deploy it, and move to the next one.  My value is A.I. not web management, so the more time I spend delivering my value, the more impactful I can be.

Read the whole thing.

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Cortana Intelligence Solutions

Published 2016-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra gives an introductory walkthrough to Cortana Intelligence Solutions:

Cortana Intelligence Solutions is a new tool just released in public preview that enables users to rapidly discover, easily provision, quickly experiment with, and jumpstart production grade analytical solutions using the Cortana Intelligence Suite (CIS).  It does so using preconfigured solutions, reference architectures and design patterns (I’ll just call all these solutions “patterns” for short).  At the heart of each Cortana Intelligence Solution pattern is one or more ARM Templates which describe the Azure resources to be provisioned in the user’s Azure subscription.  Cortana Intelligence Solution patterns can be complex with multiple ARM templates, interspersed with custom tasks (Web Jobs) and/or manual steps (such as Power BI authorization in Stream Analytics job outputs).

So instead of having to manually go to the Azure web portal and provision many sources, these patterns will do it for you automatically.  Think of a pattern as a way to accelerate the process of building an end-to-end demo on top of CIS.  A deployed solution will provision your subscription with necessary CIS components (i.e. Event Hub, Stream Analytics, HDInsight, Data Factory, Machine Learning, etc.) and build the relationships between them.

James also walks through an entire solution, so check it out.

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Using Xgboost In Azure ML Studio

Published 2016-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Koos van Strien wants to use the xgboost model in Azure ML Studio:

Because the high-level path of bringing trained R models from the local R environment towards the cloud Azure ML is almost identical to the Python one I showed two weeks ago, I use the same four steps to guide you through the process:

  1. Export the trained model

  2. Zip the exported files

  3. Upload to the Azure ML environment

  4. Embed in your Azure ML solution

Read the whole thing.

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XGBoost

Published 2016-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Koos van Strien moves from Python to R to run an xgboost algorithm:

Note that the parameters of xgboost used here fall in three categories:

  • General parameters

    • nthread (number of threads used, here 8 = the number of cores in my laptop)

  • Booster parameters

    • max.depth (of tree)
    • eta

  • Learning task parameters

    • objective: type of learning task (softmax for multiclass classification)
    • num_class: needed for the “softmax” algorithm: how many classes to predict?

  • Command Line Parameters

    • nround: number of rounds for boosting

Read the whole thing.

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Azure ML To Python

Published 2016-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Koos van Strien “graduates” from Azure ML into Python:

Python is often used in conjunction with the scikit-learn collection of libraries. The most important libraries used for ML in Python are grouped inside a distribution called Anaconda. This is the distribution that’s also used inside Azure ML1. Besides Python and scikit-learn, Anaconda contains all kinds of Data Science-oriented packages. It’s a good idea to install Anaconda as a distribution and use Jupyter (formerly IPython) as development environment: Anaconda gives you almost the same environment on your local machine as your code will run in once in Azure ML. Jupyter gives you a nice way to keep code (in Python) and write / document (in Markdown) together.

Anaconda can be downloaded from https://www.continuum.io/downloads.

If you’re going down this path, Anaconda is absolutely a great choice.

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LIME

Published 2016-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

William Vorhies discusses a new technical paper on Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations:

What the model actually used for classification were these: ‘posting’, ‘host’, ‘NNTP’, ‘EDU’, ‘have’, ‘there’.  These are meaningless artifacts that appear in both the training and test sets and have nothing to do with the topic except that, for example, the word “posting” (part of the email header) appears in 21.6% of the examples in the training set but only two times in the class “Christianity.”

Is this model going to generalize?  Absolutely not.

An Example from Image Processing

In this example using Google’s Inception NN on arbitrary images the objective was to correctly classify “tree frogs”.  The classifier was correct in about 54% of cases but also interpreted the image as a pool table (7%) and a balloon (5%).

Looks like an interesting paper.  Click through for a link to the paper.

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