Object-centric Data Modelling for Process Mining and BI

Object-centric Process Mining on Data Mesh Architectures

In addition to Business Intelligence (BI), Process Mining is no longer a new phenomenon, but almost all larger companies are conducting this data-driven process analysis in their organization.

The database for Process Mining is also establishing itself as an important hub for Data Science and AI applications, as process traces are very granular and informative about what is really going on in the business processes.

The trend towards powerful in-house cloud platforms for data and analysis ensures that large volumes of data can increasingly be stored and used flexibly. This aspect can be applied well to Process Mining, hand in hand with BI and AI.

New big data architectures and, above all, data sharing concepts such as Data Mesh are ideal for creating a common database for many data products and applications.

The Event Log Data Model for Process Mining

Process Mining as an analytical system can very well be imagined as an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg, which is visible above the surface of the water, is the actual visual process analysis. In essence, a graph analysis that displays the process flow as a flow chart. This is where the processes are filtered and analyzed.

The lower part of the iceberg is barely visible to the normal analyst on the tool interface, but is essential for implementation and success: this is the Event Log as the data basis for graph and data analysis in Process Mining. The creation of this data model requires the data connection to the source system (e.g. SAP ERP), the extraction of the data and, above all, the data modeling for the event log.

Simple Data Model for a Process Mining Event Log

Simple Data Model for a Process Mining Event Log.

As part of data engineering, the data traces that indicate process activities are brought into a log-like schema. A simple event log is therefore a simple table with the minimum requirement of a process number (case ID), a time stamp and an activity description.

Event Log in Process Mining

Example Event Log for Process Mining

An Event Log can be seen as one big data table containing all the process information. Splitting this big table into several data tables is due to the goal of increasing the efficiency of storing the data in a normalized database.

The following example SQL-query is inserting Event-Activities from a SAP ERP System into an existing event log database table (one big table). It shows that events are based on timestamps (CPUDT, CPUTM) and refer each to one of a list of possible activities (dependent on VGABE).

Attention: Please see this SQL as a pure example of event mining for a classic (single table) event log! It is based on a German SAP ERP configuration with customized processes.

An Event Log can also include many other columns (attributes) that describe the respective process activity in more detail or the higher-level process context.

Incidentally, Process Mining can also work with more than just one timestamp per activity. Even the small Process Mining tool Fluxicon Disco made it possible to handle two activities from the outset. For example, when creating an order in the ERP system, the opening and closing of an input screen could be recorded as a timestamp and the execution time of the micro-task analyzed. This concept is continued as so-called task mining.

Task Mining

Task Mining is a subtype of Process Mining and can utilize user interaction data, which includes keystrokes, mouse clicks or data input on a computer. It can also include user recordings and screenshots with different timestamp intervals.

As Task Mining provides a clearer insight into specific sub-processes, program managers and HR managers can also understand which parts of the process can be automated through tools such as RPA. So whenever you hear that Process Mining can prepare RPA definitions you can expect that Task Mining is the real deal.

Machine Learning for Process and Task Mining on Text and Video Data

Process Mining and Task Mining is already benefiting a lot from Text Recognition (Named-Entity Recognition, NER) by Natural Lamguage Processing (NLP) by identifying events of processes e.g. in text of tickets or e-mails. And even more Task Mining will benefit form Computer Vision since videos of manufacturing processes or traffic situations can be read out. Even MTM analysis can be done with Computer Vision which detects movement and actions in video material.

Object-Centric Process Mining

Object-centric Process Data Modeling is an advanced approach of dynamic data modelling for analyzing complex business processes, especially those involving multiple interconnected entities. Unlike classical process mining, which focuses on linear sequences of activities of a specific process chain, object-centric process mining delves into the intricacies of how different entities, such as orders, items, and invoices, interact with each other. This method is particularly effective in capturing the complexities and many-to-many relationships inherent in modern business processes.

Note from the author: The concept and name of object-centric process mining was introduced by Wil M.P. van der Aalst 2019 and as a product feature term by Celonis in 2022 and is used extensively in marketing. This concept is based on dynamic data modelling. I probably developed my first event log made of dynamic data models back in 2016 and used it for an industrial customer. At that time, I couldn’t use the Celonis tool for this because you could only model very dedicated event logs for Celonis and the tool couldn’t remap the attributes of the event log while on the other hand a tool like Fluxicon disco could easily handle all kinds of attributes in an event log and allowed switching the event perspective e.g. from sales order number to material number or production order number easily.

An object-centric data model is a big deal because it offers the opportunity for a holistic approach and as a database a single source of truth for Process Mining but also for other types of analytical applications.

Enhancement of the Data Model for Obect-Centricity

The Event Log is a data model that stores events and their related attributes. A classic Event Log has next to the Case ID, the timestamp and a activity description also process related attributes containing information e.g. about material, department, user, amounts, units, prices, currencies, volume, volume classes and much much more. This is something we can literally objectify!

The problem of this classic event log approach is that this information is transformed and joined to the Event Log specific to the process it is designed for.

An object-centric event log is a central data store for all kind of events mapped to all relevant objects to these events. For that reason our event log – that brings object into the center of gravity – we need a relational bridge table (Event_Object_Relation) into the focus. This tables creates the n to m relation between events (with their timestamps and other event-specific values) and all objects.

For fulfillment of relational database normalization the object table contains the object attributes only but relates their object attribut values from another table to these objects.

Advanced Event Log with dynamic Relations between Objects and Events

Advanced Event Log with dynamic Relations between Objects and Events

The above showed data model is already object-centric but still can become more dynamic in order to object attributes by object type (e.g. the type material will have different attributes then the type invoice or department). Furthermore the problem that not just events and their activities have timestamps but also objects can have specific timestamps (e.g. deadline or resignation dates).

Advanced Event Log with dynamic Relations between Objects and Events and dynamic bounded attributes and their values to Events - And the same for Objects.

Advanced Event Log with dynamic Relations between Objects and Events and dynamic bounded attributes and their values to Events – And the same for Objects.

A last step makes the event log data model more easy to analyze with BI tools: Adding a classical time dimension adding information about each timestamp (by date, not by time of day), e.g. weekdays or public holidays.

Advanced Event Log with dynamic Relations between Objects and Events and dynamic bounded attributes and their values to Events and Objects. The measured timestamps (and duration times in case of Task Mining) are enhanced with a time-dimension for BI applications.

Advanced Event Log with dynamic Relations between Objects and Events and dynamic bounded attributes and their values to Events and Objects. The measured timestamps (and duration times in case of Task Mining) are enhanced with a time-dimension for BI applications.

For analysis the way of Business Intelligence this normalized data model can already be used. On the other hand it is also possible to transform it into a fact-dimensional data model like the star schema (Kimball approach). Also Data Science related use cases will find granular data e.g. for training a regression model for predicting duration times by process.

Note from the author: Process Mining is often regarded as a separate discipline of analysis and this is a justified classification, as process mining is essentially a graph analysis based on the event log. Nevertheless, process mining can be considered a sub-discipline of business intelligence. It is therefore hardly surprising that some process mining tools are actually just a plugin for Power BI, Tableau or Qlik.

Storing the Object-Centrc Analytical Data Model on Data Mesh Architecture

Central data models, particularly when used in a Data Mesh in the Enterprise Cloud, are highly beneficial for Process Mining, Business Intelligence, Data Science, and AI Training. They offer consistency and standardization across data structures, improving data accuracy and integrity. This centralized approach streamlines data governance and management, enhancing efficiency. The scalability and flexibility provided by data mesh architectures on the cloud are very beneficial for handling large datasets useful for all analytical applications.

Note from the author: Process Mining data models are very similar to normalized data models for BI reporting according to Bill Inmon (as a counterpart to Ralph Kimball), but are much more granular. While classic BI is satisfied with the header and item data of orders, process mining also requires all changes to these orders. Process mining therefore exceeds this data requirement. Furthermore, process mining is complementary to data science, for example the prediction of process runtimes or failures. It is therefore all the more important that these efforts in this treasure trove of data are centrally available to the company.

Central single source of truth models also foster collaboration, providing a common data language for cross-functional teams and reducing redundancy, leading to cost savings. They enable quicker data processing and decision-making, support advanced analytics and AI with standardized data formats, and are adaptable to changing business needs.

DATANOMIQ Data Mesh Cloud Architecture - This image is animated! Click to enlarge!

DATANOMIQ Data Mesh Cloud Architecture – This image is animated! Click to enlarge!

 

Central data models in a cloud-based Data Mesh Architecture (e.g. on Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform or SAP Dataverse) significantly improve data utilization and drive effective business outcomes. And that´s why you should host any object-centric data model not in a dedicated tool for analysis but centralized on a Data Lakehouse System.

About the Process Mining Tool for Object-Centric Process Mining

Celonis is the first tool that can handle object-centric dynamic process mining event logs natively in the event collection. However, it is not neccessary to have Celonis for using object-centric process mining if you have the dynamic data model on your own cloud distributed with the concept of a data mesh. Other tools for process mining such as Signavio, UiPath, and process.science or even the simple desktop tool Fluxicon Disco can be used as well. The important point is that the data mesh approach allows you to easily generate classic event logs for each analysis perspective using the dynamic object-centric data model which can be used for all tools of process visualization…

… and you can also use this central data model to generate data extracts for all other data applications (BI, Data Science, and AI training) as well!

DATANOMIQ Cloud Architecture for Data Mesh - Process Mining, BI and Data Science Applications

Data Mesh Architecture on Cloud for BI, Data Science and Process Mining

Companies use Business Intelligence (BI), Data Science, and Process Mining to leverage data for better decision-making, improve operational efficiency, and gain a competitive edge. BI provides real-time data analysis and performance monitoring, while Data Science enables a deep dive into dependencies in data with data mining and automates decision making with predictive analytics and personalized customer experiences. Process Mining offers process transparency, compliance insights, and process optimization. The integration of these technologies helps companies harness data for growth and efficiency.

Applications of BI, Data Science and Process Mining grow together

More and more all these disciplines are growing together as they need to be combined in order to get the best insights. So while Process Mining can be seen as a subpart of BI while both are using Machine Learning for better analytical results. Furthermore all theses analytical methods need more or less the same data sources and even the same datasets again and again.

Bring separate(d) applications together with Data Mesh

While all these analytical concepts grow together, they are often still seen as separated applications. There often remains the question of responsibility in a big organization. If this responsibility is decided as not being a central one, Data Mesh could be a solution.

Data Mesh is an architectural approach for managing data within organizations. It advocates decentralizing data ownership to domain-oriented teams. Each team becomes responsible for its Data Products, and a self-serve data infrastructure is established. This enables scalability, agility, and improved data quality while promoting data democratization.

In the context of a Data Mesh, a Data Product refers to a valuable dataset or data service that is managed and owned by a specific domain-oriented team within an organization. It is one of the key concepts in the Data Mesh architecture, where data ownership and responsibility are distributed across domain teams rather than centralized in a single data team.

A Data Product can take various forms, depending on the domain’s requirements and the data it manages. It could be a curated dataset, a machine learning model, an API that exposes data, a real-time data stream, a data visualization dashboard, or any other data-related asset that provides value to the organization.

However, successful implementation requires addressing cultural, governance, and technological aspects. One of this aspect is the cloud architecture for the realization of Data Mesh.

Example of a Data Mesh on Microsoft Azure Cloud using Databricks

The following image shows an example of a Data Mesh created and managed by DATANOMIQ for an organization which uses and re-uses datasets from various data sources (ERP, CRM, DMS, IoT,..) in order to provide the data as well as suitable data models as data products to applications of Data Science, Process Mining (Celonis, UiPath, Signavio & more) and Business Intelligence (Tableau, Power BI, Qlik & more).

Data Mesh on Azure Cloud with Databricks and Delta Lake for Applications of Business Intelligence, Data Science and Process Mining.

Data Mesh on Azure Cloud with Databricks and Delta Lake for Applications of Business Intelligence, Data Science and Process Mining.

Microsoft Azure Cloud is favored by many companies, especially for European industrial companies, due to its scalability, flexibility, and industry-specific solutions. It offers robust IoT and edge computing capabilities, advanced data analytics, and AI services. Azure’s strong focus on security, compliance, and global presence, along with hybrid cloud capabilities and cost management tools, make it an ideal choice for industrial firms seeking to modernize, innovate, and improve efficiency. However, this concept on the Azure Cloud is just an example and can easily be implemented on the Google Cloud (GCP), Amazon Cloud (AWS) and now even on the SAP Cloud (Datasphere) using Databricks.

Databricks is an ideal tool for realizing a Data Mesh due to its unified data platform, scalability, and performance. It enables data collaboration and sharing, supports Delta Lake for data quality, and ensures robust data governance and security. With real-time analytics, machine learning integration, and data visualization capabilities, Databricks facilitates the implementation of a decentralized, domain-oriented data architecture we need for Data Mesh.

Furthermore there are also alternate architectures without Databricks but more cloud-specific resources possible, for Microsoft Azure e.g. using Azure Synapse instead. See this as an example which has many possible alternatives.

Summary – What value can you expect?

With the concept of Data Mesh you will be able to access all your organizational internal and external data sources once and provides the data as several data models for all your analytical applications. The data models are seen as data products with defined value, costs and ownership. Each applications has its own data model. While Data Science Applications have more raw data, BI applications get their well prepared star schema galaxy models, and Process Mining apps get normalized event logs. Using data sharing (in Databricks: Delta Sharing) data products or single datasets can be shared through applications and owners.

Was ist eine Vektor-Datenbank? Und warum spielt sie für AI eine so große Rolle?

Wie können Unternehmen und andere Organisationen sicherstellen, dass kein Wissen verloren geht? Intranet, ERP, CRM, DMS oder letztendlich einfach Datenbanken mögen die erste Antwort darauf sein. Doch Datenbanken sind nicht gleich Datenbanken, ganz besonders, da operative IT-Systeme meistens auf relationalen Datenbanken aufsetzen. In diesen geht nur leider dann doch irgendwann das Wissen verloren… Und das auch dann, wenn es nie aus ihnen herausgelöscht wird!

Die meisten Datenbanken sind darauf ausgelegt, Daten zu speichern und wieder abrufbar zu machen. Neben den relationalen Datenbanken (SQL) gibt es auch die NoSQL-Datenbanken wie den Key-Value-Store, Dokumenten- und Graph-Datenbanken mit recht speziellen Anwendungsgebieten. Vektor-Datenbanken sind ein weiterer Typ von Datenbank, die unter Einsatz von AI (Deep Learning, n-grams, …) Wissen in Vektoren übersetzen und damit vergleichbarer und wieder auffindbarer machen. Diese Funktion der Datenbank spielt seinen Vorteil insbesondere bei vielen Dimensionen aus, wie sie Text- und Bild-Daten haben.

Databases Types: Vector Database, Graph Database, Key-Value-Database, Document Database, Relational Database with Row or Column oriented table structures

Datenbank-Typen in grobkörniger Darstellung. Es gibt in der Realität jedoch viele Feinheiten, Übergänge und Überbrückungen zwischen den Datenbanktypen, z. B. zwischen emulierter und nativer Graph-Datenbank. Manche Dokumenten- Vektor-Datenbanken können auch relationale Datenmodellierung. Und eigentlich relationale Datenbanken wie z. B. PostgreSQL können mit Zusatzmodulen auch Vektoren verarbeiten.

Vektor-Datenbanken speichern Daten grundsätzlich nicht relational oder in einer anderen Form menschlich konstruierter Verbindungen. Dennoch sichert die Datenbank gewissermaßen Verbindungen indirekt, die von Menschen jedoch – in einem hochdimensionalen Raum – nicht mehr hergeleitet werden können und sich auf bestimmte Kontexte beziehen, die sich aus den Daten selbst ergeben. Maschinelles Lernen kommt mit der nummerischen Auflösung von Text- und Bild-Daten (und natürlich auch bei ganz anderen Daten, z. B. Sound) am besten zurecht und genau dafür sind Vektor-Datenbanken unschlagbar.

Was ist eine Vektor-Datenbank?

Eine Vektordatenbank speichert Vektoren neben den traditionellen Datenformaten (Annotation) ab. Ein Vektor ist eine mathematische Struktur, ein Element in einem Vektorraum, der eine Reihe von Dimensionen hat (oder zumindest dann interessant wird, genaugenommen starten wir beim Null-Vektor). Jede Dimension in einem Vektor repräsentiert eine Art von Information oder Merkmal. Ein gutes Beispiel ist ein Vektor, der ein Bild repräsentiert: jede Dimension könnte die Intensität eines bestimmten Pixels in dem Bild repräsentieren.
Auf dieseVektor Datenbank Illustration (vereinfacht, symbolisch) Weise kann eine ganze Sammlung von Bildern als eine Sammlung von Vektoren dargestellt werden. Noch gängiger jedoch sind Vektorräume, die Texte z. B. über die Häufigkeit des Auftretens von Textbausteinen (Wörter, Silben, Buchstaben) in sich einbetten (Embeddings). Embeddings sind folglich Vektoren, die durch die Projektion des Textes auf einen Vektorraum entstehen.

Vektor-Datenbanken sind besonders nützlich, wenn man Ähnlichkeiten zwischen Vektoren finden muss, z. B. ähnliche Bilder in einer Sammlung oder die Wörter “Hund” und “Katze”, die zwar in ihren Buchstaben keine Ähnlichkeit haben, jedoch in ihrem Kontext als Haustiere. Mit Vektor-Algorithmen können diese Ähnlichkeiten schnell und effizient aufgespürt werden, was sich mit traditionellen relationalen Datenbanken sehr viel schwieriger und vor allem ineffizienter darstellt.

Vektordatenbanken können auch hochdimensionale Daten effizient verarbeiten, was in vielen modernen Anwendungen, wie zum Beispiel Deep Learning, wichtig ist. Einige Beispiele für Vektordatenbanken sind Elasticsearch / Vector Search, Weaviate, Faiss von Facebook und Annoy von Spotify.

Viele Lernalgorithmen des maschinellen Lernens basieren auf Vektor-basierter Ähnlichkeitsmessung, z. B. der k-Nächste-Nachbarn-Prädiktionsalgorithmus (Regression/Klassifikation) oder K-Means-Clustering. Die Ähnlichkeitsbetrachtung erfolgt mit Distanzmessung im Vektorraum. Die dafür bekannteste Methode, die Euklidische Distanz zwischen zwei Punkten, basiert auf dem Satz des Pythagoras (Hypotenuse ist gleich der Quadratwurzel aus den beiden Dimensions-Katheten im Quadrat, im zwei-dimensionalen Raum). Es kann jedoch sinnvoll sein, aus Gründen der Effizienz oder besserer Konvergenz des maschinellen Lernens andere als die Euklidische Distanz in Betracht zu ziehen.

Vectore-based distance measuring methods: Euclidean Distance L2-Norm, Manhatten Distance L1-Norm, Chebyshev Distance and Cosine Distance

Vectore-based distance measuring methods: Euclidean Distance L2-Norm, Manhatten Distance L1-Norm, Chebyshev Distance and Cosine Distance

Vektor-Datenbanken für Deep Learning

Der Aufbau von künstlichen Neuronalen Netzen im Deep Learning sieht nicht vor, dass ganze Sätze in ihren textlichen Bestandteilen in das jeweilige Netz eingelesen werden, denn sie funktionieren am besten mit rein nummerischen Input. Die Texte müssen in diese transformiert werden, eventuell auch nach diesen in Cluster eingeteilt und für verschiedene Trainingsszenarien separiert werden.

Vektordatenbanken werden für die Datenvorbereitung (Annotation) und als Trainingsdatenbank für Deep Learning zur effizienten Speicherung, Organisation und Manipulation der Texte genutzt. Für Natural Language Processing (NLP) benötigen Modelle des Deep Learnings die zuvor genannten Word Embedding, also hochdimensionale Vektoren, die Informationen über Worte, Sätze oder Dokumente repräsentieren. Nur eine Vektordatenbank macht diese effizient abrufbar.

Vektor-Datenbank und Large Language Modells (LLM)

Ohne Vektor-Datenbanken wären die Erfolge von OpenAI und anderen Anbietern von LLMs nicht möglich geworden. Aber fernab der Entwicklung in San Francisco kann jedes Unternehmen unter Einsatz von Vektor-Datenbanken und den APIs von Google, OpenAI / Microsoft oder mit echten Open Source LLMs (Self-Hosting) ein wahres Orakel über die eigenen Unternehmensdaten herstellen. Dazu werden über APIs die Embedding-Engines z. B. von OpenAI genutzt. Wir von DATANOMIQ nutzen diese Architektur, um Unternehmen und andere Organisationen dazu zu befähigen, dass kein Wissen mehr verloren geht.
Vektor-Datenbank für KI-Applikation (z. B. OpenAI ChatGPT)

Mit der DATANOMIQ Enterprise AI Architektur, die auf jeder Cloud ausrollfähig ist, verfügen Unternehmen über einen intelligenten Unternehmens-Repräsentanten als KI, der für Mitarbeiter relevante Dokumente und Antworten auf Fragen liefert. Sollte irgendein Mitarbeiter im Unternehmen bereits einen bestimmten Vorgang, Vorfall oder z. B. eine technische Konstruktion oder einen rechtlichen Vertrag bearbeitet haben, der einem aktuellen Fall ähnlich ist, wird die AI dies aufspüren und sinnvollen Kontext, Querverweise oder Vorschläge oder lückenauffüllende Daten liefern.

Die AI lernt permanent mit, Unternehmenswissen geht nicht verloren. Das ist Wissensmanagement auf einem neuen Level, dank Vektor-Datenbanken und KI.

How to tackle lack of data: an overview on transfer learning

1, Data is the new oil, but labeled data might be closer to it

Even though we have been in the 3rd AI boom and machine learning is showing concrete effectiveness at a commercial level, after the first two AI booms we are facing a problem: lack of labeled data or data themselves. The increasing number of papers on deep learning demonstrate that researches on AI have developed rapidly recently. If architectures of neural networks and supervised learning are all you know about deep learning, you will be overwhelmed by complications of topics studied these days, for example generative models, making more compact neural net models by for example knowledge distillation, and explainable AI (XAI). Those researches are often conducted on easily available benchmark datasets which you can easily download, often with corresponding ground truth data (label data) necessary for training. However once you try to apply the techniques to more specific data, you usually cannot prepare enough label data which theoretical researches assume. Thus among fascinating deep learning topics, in this article I am going to pick up how to tackle lack of label or data themselves, and transfer learning. Transfer learning is a technique of machine learning to take advantages of knowledge learned in one dataset to deal with a task in another dataset. Presumably due to this fact, Andrew Ng, in his presentation in NeurIPS 2016, gave a rough and abstract predictions of how transfer learning in machine learning would make commercial success like white lines in the figure below. The explanation is straightforward, and given the trends in topics of researches on machine learning these days, this prediction is actually right. But at the same time, in my opinion supervised learning, transfer learning, and unsupervised learning cannot be clearly separated like the graph originally suggested by Andrew Ng. Those fields complement each other, and one can easily shift to another.

Source: https://ruder.io/transfer-learning/ The lines and texts in white are based on explanations by Andrew Ng. The orange cells are placed at random, so not that they represent commercial success of each field.

Along with the rapid progress of deep learning mentioned above, a lot of hypes and catchphrases regarding big data and machine learning were made, and an interesting one is “Data is the new oil.” That might have been said only because big data is sources of various industries. But I would say, the characteristic is more striking in training data for machine learning. Distributions of training data for machine learning are more complicated like various energy resources besides oil in the world. Labeled data might be also like uranium. Just as uranium-235 accounting for only less than one percent of uranium in the world can be used to generate energy, only a part of massive data in the world is labeled such that they can be used for supervised machine learning. And as uranium-235 is used effectively jointly with less active uranium-238, labeled data show greater potentials with unlabeled data. And training data for machine learning have another unpleasant analogy to energy resources. Like most mainstream energy resources, only limited companies or institutions would be able to mine and refine huge labeled datasets with gigantic computation resources, and most people more or less need to rely on that for their business. Even though alternative renewable energy resources are proposed, principal energy resources are indispensable for making industries stable. As well, even though a lot of techniques actually have been proposed to lack of data, it often turns out just fine-tuning pre-trained models is the most practical, which need huge datasets and rich computational resources. And I think recent success in for example BERT or GPT made this trend more visible.

*I am sorry in a case I am mistaken about energy resources. I just wanted to come up with some cool metaphors.

But I still think knowing about transfer learning more comprehensively would be effective. That is partly because I have been working on relatively unique data which are hard to even label. As I was studying computer vision (CV) in plant science field, I frequently saw relatively unique data obtained with special apparatuses. Such data are for the most part look far from very general dataset, which huge pre-trained models are trained on. At the same time such plant data have very complicated structures and hard to label. And also in my work, have to detect certain values in various formats in very specific documents, in German. Such data are far from general datasets, and even labeling is hard in that case. We have to carefully tackle lack of data every time on each type of data in that case.

In this article I would first like to explain in the first place what it is like to lack data and next introduce representative techniques to tackle lack of labeled data. Many of them are classified to transfer learning, but other techniques like unsupervised learning or self-supervised learning are used in them or share a lot in their ideas. Thus my main purpose of writing this article is to let you have a richer view on transfer learning. And you would see “transfer learning” these days are mainly about fine-tuning of pre-trained models. Also how to tackle lack of data or labels is in other words how to efficiently achieve good performance in machine learning. Thus even if tons of high quality labeled data are at your disposal, learning those ideas would be still effective to you. I hope you could find some hints of machine learning through my articles.

2, What does lack of data or labels mean in the first place?

We need to first consider what lack of labels or data means, and my answer to the title of this section is “It depends.” The more data you have, the better performances you get. And the bigger machine learning models are, the more data they usually need for training. I assume that people reading this article more or less understand neural networks and how they are trained with back propagation. But let’s review the process here. Most machine learning frameworks are more or less expressed like the figure below unless reinforcement learning is considered. The ultimate purpose of machine learning is to train a model f(\boldsymbol{x}_n;\boldsymbol{\theta}) by adjusting parameters \boldsymbol{\theta}. And the parameters \boldsymbol{\theta} are optimized so that a loss function L is minimized. If it is a supervised learning, the a value of a loss function is denoted L(f(\boldsymbol{x}_n, \boldsymbol{\theta}), \boldsymbol{y}_n) =L(\hat{\boldsymbol{y}}_n, \boldsymbol{y}_n), and it gets smaller as f(\boldsymbol{x}_n, \boldsymbol{\theta}) gets closer to \boldsymbol{y}_n. That is, \boldsymbol{y}_n is giving supervision to adjust f(\boldsymbol{\theta}) via L(\hat{\boldsymbol{y}}_n, \boldsymbol{y}_n). And in a case of unsupervised learning, a loss function is L(\hat{\boldsymbol{y}}_n), which is often heuristically handcrafted.

The very first problem from lacking training data you would learn is overfitting. That is, a machine learning model can be specialized too much for a training dataset, and it loses generalization to other data from the same dataset. It is like students with little imaginations and flexibility gradually memorizing all the answers in a textbook and failing to answer new questions they have not encountered yet. Overfitting is judged by relations of training and validation loss like in the graph below. Training loss in blue indicates how the students adjust to the textbook. The smaller the training loss is, the more they memorizes from the textbook and the less flexible they are. The orange line indicates their performance in newly appeared questions in tests. The smaller the validation loss is, the better the students perform on tests. Thus the students should stop learning with the textbook when the validation loss is about to increase. This is called early stopping in machine learning. And if you increase training data, the orange graph usually shifts to the right side, usually providing smaller validation loss, namely better performance. An important point is, this ideal relations of training and validation losses will not appear if sizes or expressivity of a model is not enough. Thus the more training data you use, the more parameters you need for the model to enhance its expressivity.

 

*Depending on sizes of training data, the curve of training loss also changes, so please bear it in mind that this graph is not correct and is very simplified.

What I said so far might sound too elementary. My point is, the more data you have, and the bigger computation resource you have, the better performance you get. In other words, machine learning has scalability with data and parameters. This characteristic is clearly observed in models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) like in the graphs below. When I read some papers,often I am very fascinated by their performances. But sometimes it turns out that the methods are mainly creatively in terms of how they increase training data, which is personally boring. And even if performance of GPT looks astonishing, I cannot really like them because of this simple fact.

However another important point is, conversely you don’t need to increase training data or parameters of a model once it achieves an ideal score in metrics. When you make a toy model with small training data, as long as your clients or co-researchers are already happy, that is enough. Therefore lack of data or labels has to be discussed depending on sizes of machine learning and their performances you expect. Given those points mentioned so far, my answer to the question “What does lack of data or labels mean?” would rephrased like “If your model is properly designed to reach the performance you expect and it starts overfitting, you are facing lack of data.” And such decisions basically has to be made based on experiments.

3, Types of lack of data

Even though I explained lack of labels or data is a contextual matter, the problems actually exist at any case. That is, you often fail to achieve ideas accuracy partly due to lack of training data. I would like to classify types of situations of data of label shortage as below.

We should first think about the case where lack of labels does not matter in the first place. If you can analyze data with statistical knowledge or unsupervised machine learning, just extracting data without labeling would be enough. And sometimes ad hoc analysis with simple data visualization will help your decision makings. And some dashboards made from those unlabeled data will already give you some insights into data.

The next case is that, popular machine learning fields with enough investments usually have huge datasets that huge academic institutes or companies have been preparing.  For example KITTI dataset, which include labels like trajectories and depth data, is by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute. Such datasets are useful for self-driving-related researches, and many types of ground truth data are provided such as odometry, depth, opticla flow, detection. This kind of data might be considered “enough” only because they are enough for training machine learning models and quantitatively evaluating them in papers, regardless of practical usefulness at a commercial level. But at any rate, popular fields with large benchmark datasets are likely to get investments for commercial uses.

Next let’s see cases of data shortage. You should also keep it in mind that there are also several types of situations of data shortage. In fact there are cases where certain labels are supposed to be scarce such as classifications of imbalanced data, for example anomaly detection, judging spam mails,  or medical examination. In those problems only some percent of data are classified as “errors,” “spam,” or “disease,” and others are classified as “normal.” Just keeping classifying data into “normal” would give maybe more than 95% accuracy. But finding the rest some percent accurately is much more important. In this case model performances need to be evaluated with ROC curves, namely relations of true positives and false positives.

The next type is more related to cases assumed in transfer learning. Some data are in the first place very expensive to obtain. For example CT images have to be stored by special medical apparatuses as you know. And even if a lot of CT images are already obtained, annotating the images often needs professional skills, thus its annotations cost is high. Another case of high annotation cost is for example detection or segmentation of objects in images. Even if you can collect numerous images on the Internet, annotating bounding boxes or pixel-wise segments require a lot of time. Annotating around 1000 images  for classification might be ok, but annotating them at a pixel level is really time consuming. If you have a tablet, I would like you to paint each segment of objects in a picture with different colors. And you should multiply the time spent by 80,000, as many as the training images needed for Mask R-CNN, a popular model for instance segmentation. As you can imagine, it is a huge tediou work. Even preparing some 50 labeled images for fine-tuning is paiful, and even annotations for computer vision tasks itself is also a field of deep learning.

*I would say medical image processing is a relatively popular field in CV with deep learning, and there are several famous datasets on this field.

4, An overview on ways for dealing with lack of labeled data

I am going to first roughly introduce what kind of approaches can be taken to deal with lack of labeled data or data itself, but you should also keep it in mind that they are not clearly separated. Just as I am going to explain, one type of techniques can easily shift to another type. You should flexibly switch among them depending on your situations. And also please keep it in mind that these are well-studied areas, and tons of ingenious papers are announced one after another, usually giving slight changes in their performances. Problems I point out about each technique might not be a problem anymore with recently published researches on researches currently peer-read. It is hard to prove that something does not exist. Given those points, I think it is convenient to classify technique of dealing with label or data shortage as below.

Through this article, ideas of domains are important. A domain simply means a combination of a dataset and a task with it. Transfer learning is a family of machine learning techniques to make uses of knowledge learned in a domain to another domain, and the former is called a source domain, the latter a target domain. And discrepancies between a source domain and a target domain is called a domain shift. The figure below abstractly visualize examples of domains and domain shifts. Intuitively it is easy to imagine that face a CV task and an NLP task have bigger domain shifts than domains of leaf images taken from different angles, but quantitatively evaluating domain shifts is in practice hard, and I am not going to introduce the topic because that will need a lot of mathematics.

Instead of formulating transfer learning, I would like to take learning languages as an intuitive example of transfer learning. Most people master at least one native language before learning another one. Baby brains are a kind of fantastic machine learning models, and after overcoming many obstacles they master native languages. And people take advantages of their mother tongues to learn another language. Usually they learn foreign languages by comparing structures of translated sentences. And naturally, if both a foreign language and your language have analogies like grammatical cases or genders in common, language learning would be easy. In other words, proficiency in one language is helpful in leaning some language. But it is also possible that your native language badly affects learning the second language, due to grammatical structures, pronunciations. The case of a source domain deteriorating performances in a target domain is called negative transfer and contexts of transfer learning.

*I know similarities languages are not the sole and definite barometers of effectiveness in learning foreign languages. Sizes of economy or markets in a country would also affects English language acquisition of people there. But at least it is unfair to compare for example German or Dutch people learning English with Japanese, Chinese people learning it. Unlike Eastern Asian people who have to learn thousands of characters to at least read decent texts or who use very different grammars, European people obviously can use “transfer learning” to learn English.

5, Increasing training data

When you lack data or labels, the most straightforward and often quick solution is to just increase data. The two topics I will cover in this section are mainly conducted in one domain.

Data augmentation

Data augmentation is one of the first techniques you would learn to mitigate overfitting of machine learning, which is in short caused by lack of data. The idea is very simple and it is implemented well in deep learning libraries, so I would only briefly talk about it here. The idea of data augmentation is simply transforming input data by for example flipping, rotating, zooming, changing colors. By doing so for example an input image \boldsymbol{x}_n of a butterfly below with a label of \boldsymbol{y}_n = \text{Butterfly} can be converted to more than 6 images. This corresponds to getting a converted \boldsymbol{x}'_n= g(\boldsymbol{x}_n) in the machine learning outline in the last section. And this process is the same as increasing the size of a dataet \mathcal {D}. And one point you have to be careful is, you must not change \boldsymbol{x}_n too much to change corresponding \boldsymbol{y}_n. For example if \boldsymbol{x}_n is distorted too much, it cannot be recognized as \boldsymbol{y}_n anymore even by humans. Or if you rotate an image of a digit 6 180 degrees, its becomes 9. Recent researches focus on automatically find what kind of data augmentation is effective by using for example reinforcement learning.

Here let me take an example of data augmentation technique that would be contrary to your intuition. A technique named mixup literally mix up data with different classes and their labels. In classification problems, labels are expressed as one-hot vectors, that is only an element corresponding to a correct element is 1 and the others are 0. In a case of binary dog-or-cat classification, each label is \boldsymbol{y}_n = (1, 0)^T or \boldsymbol{y}_n = (0, 1)^T, respectively. In data augmentation, distorting data too much is a taboo because label data is contaminated, but in mixup you literally mix up labels. Randomly choosing a two inputs \boldsymbol{x}_n , \boldsymbol{x}_{n'} and a  number \lambda \in [0,1], you prepare a input and label pair (\lambda \boldsymbol{x}_n + (1 - \lambda) \boldsymbol{x}_{n'},  \lambda \boldsymbol{y}_n + (1 - \lambda) \boldsymbol{y}_{n'}). The figure below is an example of a mixing up a cat input and a dog input, and corresponding labels. It is known augmenting training data like this improves classification performances. It is said this is partly due to machine learning models effectively learning decision boundaries. In classification ambiguous inputs are bottlenecks, so learning to giving ambiguous outputs to ambiguous inputs can enhance classification abilities.

*One-hot-encoded labels are called hard labels, and otherwise soft labels. Recent topics in deep learning, such as lottery hypothesis, knowledge distillation, imply that whether supervising labels are hard or not is important in deep learning. Hopefully I would like to explain why little by little in my articles.

6, Active learning

Active learning is about how to annotate data and get labeled data efficiently. Labels of data do not equally contribute to enhancing machine learning models, and labels actually have qualities. Even if you give apparently similar images with the same label to machine learning models during training, the models cannot learn so much from the pair of data. You need to efficiently dig data to know its distribution by giving labels to samples. I think a good metaphor is geological survey by excavating with some boring. In order to know substances or features of ground, some earth need to be sampled with boring. But you cannot freely penetrate everywhere mainly due to costs. They need to be sampled one by one due to uncertainty about the ground.

 

Similar approaches are often taken in machine learning or statistics, that is estimating distributions of data with a small size of samples is an important idea. A basic idea for doing that is you sample or annotate data which decreases uncertainty of your model the most. The figure simply exhibits the idea. We want to regress a data distribution with the red curve, and the cross marks can be sampled from the distribution. And the part filled with light blue shows uncertainty of the model to predict a value of y for a x. When you want to regress the data with as few samples as possible, data points should be sampled from the parts with great uncertainties. And by doing so, you can see that the data is regressed efficiently with few samples.

We have seen that modeling uncertainty is the key to active learning, and that can be applied to annotations of data in deep learning. An example of the process is displayed below, and in this case a deep neural network model (DNN model) is trained with some labeled data, and you give some signals for data annotations based on uncertainty of outputs of DNN models. And human annotators prioritize giving labels to the data. Such uncertainly can be estimated by using entropy of outputs or modeling data distributions.

 

But when you get a certain amount of labels, the situation will be the same as semi-supervised learning, which I will explain next. That is, you might be already able to make the most of the labels so far with the help of unlabeled data. You should consider stopping labeling and start labeling depending on situations. And importantly, starting naively annotating data might become a quick solution rather than thinking about how to make uses of limited labels if extracting data itself is easy and does not cost so much. “Shut up and annotate!” could be often the best practice in practice. And annotations would be an effective way for exploratory data analysis (EDA), so I recommend you to immediately start annotating about 10 random samples at any rate.

7, Dealing with lack of labels in a single domain

In many cases, data themselves are easily available, and only annotations costs matter. The following two topics consider such cases, and again only one domain is considered. But by the end of this article you would see that other techniques covered in this article have a lot of analogies with topics introduced here.

Semi-supervised learning

Semi-supervised learning is a type of supervised learning where only limited labels are available in one domain. This is important in because many of other techniques in this article can be seen as semi-supervised learning from certain points of views. The figure below shows an intuition on semi-supervised learning in a case of classification task. In this case, original data distribution have two clusters of circles and triangles and a clear border can be drawn between them. But only with limited labeled data, decision boundaries would be ambiguous. However in fact, with a help of unlabeled data in dotted lines, machine learning model might be able to recognize two clusters with a help of unlabeled data. In other words, unlabeled data help models learn distribution of data. this might be natural as clusters of data can be estimated with unsupervised learning.

*As I have already mentioned, active learning could soon shift to semi-supervised learning, and it might be worth trying it before finishing labeling. But suspending labeling and resuming it later might not be efficient. At any rate you need to be flexible depending on situations.

Semi-supervised learning is applicable to several tasks, not only classification. I explained that normal supervised learning is adjusting parameters \boldsymbol{\theta} of a model f(\boldsymbol{\theta}) so that it minimize loss function L(\boldsymbol{\theta}, \mathcal{D}_{\text{L}}) for a labeled dataset \mathcal{D}_{\text{L}}. In semi-supervised learning, we assume that usually a bigger unsupervised dataset \mathcal{D}_{\text{UL}} is available in the same domain. And semi-supervised learning optimize \boldsymbol{\theta} by jointly minimizing L(\boldsymbol{\theta}, \mathcal{D}_{\text{L}}) + L'(\boldsymbol{\theta}, \mathcal{D}_{\text{UL}}) after designing a loss function L'(\boldsymbol{\theta}, \mathcal{D}_{\text{UL}}) for the unlabeled dataset. There are following 3 major ways of semi-supervised learning depending on how you design a L'(\boldsymbol{\theta}, \mathcal{D}_{\text{UL}}).

  • Consistency regularization: adding slight changes to data \boldsymbol{x}_{\text{UL}} in \mathcal{D}_{\text{UL}} and get \boldsymbol{x}'_{\text{UL}}. And training f(\boldsymbol{\theta}) so that f(\boldsymbol{\theta}, \boldsymbol{x}_{\text{UL}}) and f(\boldsymbol{\theta}, \boldsymbol{x}'_{\text{UL}}) give out a consistent output.
  • Pseudo label: after training f(\boldsymbol{\theta}) with \mathcal{D}_{\text{L}}, using some estimations f(\boldsymbol{\theta}, \boldsymbol{x}_{\text{UL}}) as labels of \mathcal{D}_{\text{UL}} .
  • Entropy minimization: encouraging outputs f(\boldsymbol{\theta}, \boldsymbol{x}_{\text{UL}}) to have smaller entropy.

More or less similar ideas show up in different transfer learning techniques, so it would be effective to learn the three semi-supervised learning ideas above.

Self-supervised learning

Self-supervised learning is often counted as unsupervised learning. Both unsupervised and self-supervised learning do not need label data, but especially when labels generated by processing themselves, that is often called self-supervised learning. A representative case of using self-supervised learning is auto-encoder. Simpler labels can be generated from input data themselves with elementary data processing. For example in a case of image processing, by rotating an input image 0, 90, 180, 270 degrees respectively, a classification task of estimating rotation degrees can be made. Another case is estimating the original input image after some simple image processing (for example colorization).  These simple tasks generated solely from an input is called pretext task. And in a case of image processing, deep learning models can be prompted to learn image features .

Source: https://atcold.github.io/pytorch-Deep-Learning/en/week10/10-1/

Pretext tasks are applicable also to other fields for example NLP. A very simple task is hiding a part of an input sentence, and let neural networks estimate the blank word. And this is a basic idea of how to train BERTs, famous pre-trained NLP models. BERT models are trained this way with a huge and very general corpus without any specific topics. By doing so BERT model can already learn to detect some clusters of meanings in texts, as I visualize in the next section. But if you fine-tune BERT models with labeled texts with very specific topics, that often fails to achieve satisfying performance. In that case, the BERT models have to “get used to” the new dataset. In that case, BERT can “get used to” the new dataset by applying self-supervised learning on the new dataset. This tutorial of Huggingface demonstrates this with an example of adjusting a BERT model trained with Wikipedia to the IMDb dataset.

In the case above, the BERT model is fine-tuned with relatively lots of unlabeled data and after that trained with fewer labels. As a whole this can be seen as semi-supervised learning ,with fewer labels of the IMBb dataset and more unlabeled data. Also the ideas of pretext tasks, which prompt models to give consistent outputs given preprocessed inputs, have some analogies with consistency regularization in semi-supervised learning.

*The Huggingface tutorial says, they fine-tune a pre-trained BERT model trained in a self-supervised way to adjus it, and they call it “domain adaptation.” As you can see from the statement, distinctions of topics covered in this article can be just ambiguous.

8, Dealing with lack of data or labels over several domains

Another approach for tackling label or data shortage is taking advantages of other domains, which are usually larger and have enough labels. And such techniques is called transfer learning as I mentioned. It seems like transfer learning in business refers to “fine-tuning” explained below, but in academic contexts it is often also said transfer learning is almost synonym to “domain adaptation.” At any rate, my point is it would be more important to have comprehensive view on the techniques rather than clearly distinguishing them.

Fine tuning

Fine tuning would be the easiest way of transfer learning, and at the same time it is very powerful. Even though I am going to introduce other technique of transfer learning, more often than not it turns out that fine tuning can compensate them. Here I will only explain what it is like to use fine-tuning. I would say using fine-tuning is easy like using instant coffee. Conventionally you needed to train your original model with your own data, and that is very affected by sizes of data you have. I would say, that was like making coffee or coffee cakes from coffee you made from beans. But by using pre-trained models already trained somewhere with huge datasets, you can use models which can already more or less recognize data. The idea was very normal already in the field of CV, and NLP got the same idea with the advent of BERT, or already with word embeddings. That is like people learned to use instant coffee instead of roasting and brewing coffee every time.

How such instant coffee is made depends on which type of deep learning is used on a huge dataset. Backbone CNN is usually trained on ImageNet dataset with supervised learning of a classification task. In case of BERT, it is trained with a huge corpus with a pretext task of estimating blank words of input sentences, which is classified to self-supervised learning. Let me more practically what the “coffee syrup” means. Machine learning is at any rate just mapping of tensors or vectors. In CV, an input images as a tensor is converted into a a vector or a tensor, and tasks like image classification are conducted with the converted tensor or vector. In case of an NLP task, usually a sequence of vectors is converted to a vector or another sequence of vectors. And these resulting tensors of vectors from models are the very “coffee syrup” I am talking about. An important point is, fine-tuning also considers transfer learning between different tasks. Backbone CNNs are usually trained with classification, BERT with self-supervised learning, but the there are a variety of final tasks. They are called downstream tasks. In other words, you don’t necessarily drink instant coffee as coffee.

 

The two figures below are visualizations what the “instant coffee syrup” means. I processed random N images in a dataset with a pre-trained backbone CNN, and I got corresponding D dimensional vectors, that is a N\times D tensor. And I applied t-SNE to reduce its dimension from D to 2 and got a N\times 2 tensor.  The figure below shows arrangements of input images in the 2 dimensional space. As you can see, semantically similar images get closer.

Just as well, if you process random texts with BERT and apply a dimension reduction, you get a visualization like below. As well as the figure above, texts in similar topic get closer.

To make it catchy I expressed them as “coffee syrup” but this is a kind of how so-called AI sees data. Images and texts are just vectors or tensors on computer, and AI process another set of tensors of vectors in spaces which make sense to them.

Fine-tuning is quite easy. You have only to train a pre-trained model you downloaded just like normal supervised learning with your dataset. And when you train CV models with backbone CNN, the backbone is almost automatically downloaded. You have to be careful about some points, for example you have to set learning rate smaller. Let me avoid too detailed points in this article. Hopefully in the future, I’d like to write about more practical fine-tuning tips.

Domain adaptation

Domain adaptation is another family of techniques to make uses of knowledge gained in one domain in another domain. Domain adaptation is a Domain adaptation is these days often used as almost a synonym of transfer learning. But papers on domain adaptation usually assume to handle the same tasks both in a source and a target domain. So I would say domain adaptation is a subfield of transfer learning. Domain adaptation is more of how to tackle deterioration of machine learning performances when trained models are applied in different domains. Based on how much labels are available in each domain, domain adaptation is classified to several types. And unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where labels are available only in a source domain, is considered as the most challenging and studied well.

*Another explanation I often hear about domain adaptation is, when a models trained on a dataset is trained on another data, domain adaptation can be used to mitigate decreases in performance. I think in this context, performance of the model on the source domain is not discussed. When you apply some retraining with a new dataset, performance of the model on the source domain often drastically decrease. This is called catastrophic forgetting, and techniques like continuous learning are studied to tackle this problem. I have not really seen continuous learning in contexts of domain adaptation, but I thin these are related.

There several approaches in domain adaptation, and one frequently used approach is using adversarial loss. As we saw with the example of getting “coffee syrup,” data is first mapped into a certain space, and this is often called feature extraction. And outputs with the feature extractor are processed are processed more to give task-specific results with some networks. Often in domain adaptation, we put a domain discriminator network right after the feature extractor. And the domain discriminator classifies whether the features extracted come from the source or target domain. The feature extractor tries to extract features the domain have in common, and the domain discriminator tries to distinguish them, and two networks compete. In this way, the feature extractor and the domain discriminator form generative adversarial network (GAN), and the feature extractor learns to extract features that are hard to distinguish their domains. Feature extractor is trained so that it extract domain invariant features, for example edges and silhouette.

As well as in other transfer learning techniques, one ultimate goal of UDA is training a deep learning model only with synthetic labeled data, for example CGI, and apply the model on a totally unlabeled dataset. Converting a source domain to look like a target domain with Cycle GAN is an often used approach in domain adaptation. In domain adaptation a source domain is supposed to be easier to annotate. The figure below is an example of converting a black and white cell images  to colored images.

*You could easily try converting data with Cycle GAN by preparing two datasets, and I made the converted data by myself. But you need at least one GPU to try that.

However some people insist that usefulness of UDA is very questionable. In the first place, if you do not have any labels on the target domain, that means you cannot evaluate anything qualitatively on the dataset of interest. And if you can prepare some of evaluation data or labels, applying other techniques like fine-tuning might be enough.

Meta learning and few-shot learning

One simple way to explain meta learning is that, it is a machine learning technique teach models to learn efficiently. We can also say that it is a transfer learning case where target domains are unknown.  A famous meta learning method is Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML). MAML is used to get an ideal parameter \boldsymbol{\theta} which can be quickly and effectively used to new tasks. Like in the figure below, \boldsymbol{\theta} reaches the generally convenient parameter shown as the black dot. And the parameter can quickly reach the parameters \theta_{i}^{\ast}, which effective for each task.

Another interesting application of meta learning is few-shot learning. Few-shot learning trains a classification model to learn to acquire classification ability based only on a very few samples. By letting the models learn classification tasks over many episodes, the model learn comes to learn efficiently from limited data samples at a test phase. The figure below shows a case of few-shot learning, where a model learns some episodes of 3-class classifications with only 4 samples per class. Few-shot learning attempts to enable human-level flexibility of perception. MAML is known to be effective also for few-shot learning.

However, studies these days do also show that fine tuning pre-trained models with a few sample data show competitive results to those by few-shot learning. Similar things can be said about large language models like GPT. Chat GPT or GPT-3/GPT-4 for example can be fine-tuned with small extra training samples, and the logic behind is different from meta learning. Fine-tuning pre-trained models rather might be closer to human learning. Humans can effectively learn new topics based on what they have experienced so far. Thus again here, fine-tuning models can be an easier and realistic solution.

I have explained an overview of machine learning techniques for handling lack of data, and as you might have noticed, fine-tuning models could be enough in many cases. I am not sure how much other transfer learning technique would be widely as useful as fine-tuning at a business level. At least, I hope this article would be a rough guideline for machine learning tasks with small sizes of data or labels. And if you have a chance to work on very unique data with very few labels, you wouldn’t be able to rely so much on only naive fine tuning of pre-trained models. In that case, you tasks have your own problem, and you would have to be careful about your EDA, data cleaning, and labeling. In that case you should consider some techniques introduced here. Hopefully someday I would like to write more detailed tutorials with each transfer learning technique. And I hope you would be able to apply a variety of transfer learning locally, not only relying on huge resources of gigantic entities.  And that would lead to a more secure future, I guess.

Cloud Data Platform for Shopfloor Management

How Cloud Data Platforms improve Shopfloor Management

In the era of Industry 4.0, linking data from MES (Manufacturing Execution System) with that from ERP, CRM and PLM systems plays an important role in creating integrated monitoring and control of business processes.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems contain information about finance, supplier management, human resources and other operational processes, while CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems provide data about customer relationships, marketing and sales activities. PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) systems contain information about products, development, design and engineering.

By linking this data with the data from MES, companies can obtain a more complete picture of their business operations and thus achieve better monitoring and control of their business processes. Of central importance here are the OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) KPIs that are so important in production, as well as the key figures from financial controlling, such as contribution margins. The fusion of data in a central platform enables smooth analysis to optimize processes and increase business efficiency in the world of Industry 4.0 using methods from business intelligence, process mining and data science. Companies also significantly increase their enterprise value with the linking of this data, thanks to the data and information transparency gained.

Cloud Data Platform for shopfloor management and data sources such like MES, ERP, PLM and machine data.

Cloud Data Platform for shopfloor management and data sources such like MES, ERP, PLM and machine data. Copyright by DATANOMIQ.

If the data sources are additionally expanded to include the machines of production and logistics, much more in-depth analyses for error detection and prevention as well as for optimizing the factory in its dynamic environment become possible. The machine sensor data can be monitored directly in real time via respective data pipelines (real-time stream analytics) or brought into an overall picture of aggregated key figures (reporting). The readers of this data are not only people, but also individual machines or entire production plants that can react to this data.

As a central data architecture there are dozens of analytical applications which can be fed with data:

OEE key figures for Shopfloor reporting
Process Mining (e.g. material flow analysis) for manufacturing and supply chain.
Detection of anomalies on the shopfloor or on individual machines.
Predictive maintenance for individual machines or entire production lines.

This solution scales completely automatically in terms of both performance and cost. It looks beyond individual problems since it offers universal and flexible scope for action. In other words, it will result in a “god mode” for the management being able to drill-down from a specific client project to insights into single machines involved into each project.

Are you interested in scalable data architectures for your shopfloor management? Or would you like to discuss a specific problem with us? Or maybe you are interested in an individual data strategy? Then get in touch with me! 🙂

3 Types of Preventative Maintenance for Data Centers

Image Source: source unsplash.com

Downtime for a data center can be extraordinarily costly — potentially leading to lost revenue, lost customers and a damaged reputation. Preventative maintenance (PM) helps keep essential data center equipment running for as long as possible (while also making potential issues easier to spot).

However, there are many strategies for preventative maintenance that a data center can use, and not every strategy will be right for every center.

These are 3 types of preventative maintenance that businesses can use to maximize data center uptime and extend the lifespan of key equipment.

What Is Preventative Maintenance?

With preventative maintenance, an asset owner performs regularly scheduled maintenance activities in order to prevent future failures, downtime or unplanned repairs. Regardless of industry, preventative maintenance tasks always have a few characteristics in common:

  1. The maintenance is systematic, meaning it is done according to a pre-established plan or method.
  2. The maintenance is regular, meaning it occurs at predetermined intervals.
  3. The maintenance is preventative, meaning that it is intended to prevent failures and unplanned repairs.

Any effective PM strategy requires coordination, documentation and scheduling. Managers will need to gather information on asset performance, develop a maintenance strategy and ensure that maintenance is being both properly performed and occurring at regular intervals.

Common examples of maintenance tasks in a data center include the physical inspection of servers, the review of server logs and software updates.

1. Time-Based/Calendar-Based Preventative Maintenance

Calendar-based maintenance occurs at a specific time, based on a calendar interval. For example, a data center may schedule a regular visual inspection of server vents to occur daily, weekly, or monthly. The same data center may also schedule bi-monthly backups of key digital assets.

Intervals are generally determined based on the maintenance task being performed and a combination of historical performance data and industry best practices.

A data center may determine its inspection schedule based on recommendations from business partners, experience with past failures and data on equipment performance that can show when equipment performance begins to degrade without maintenance or inspections.

These intervals will be a part of the data center’s overall maintenance plan and should be regularly reviewed to ensure that maintenance isn’t occurring too often or too infrequently.

Particularly intensive maintenance tasks — anything that requires a great deal of time, requires the disassembly or important equipment or requires that servers be taken offline — may need to be scheduled less frequently to balance the benefits of PM against the potential costs, like downtime.

2. Usage-Based Preventative Maintenance

With a usage-based PM strategy, maintenance tasks occur based on how frequently equipment is used. Instead of occurring automatically once enough time has passed, usage-based tasks only trigger when an asset has been online for long enough or experienced enough exposure to certain environmental conditions.

Usage-based PM is most useful for assets that are not used continuously. These assets may not degrade as quickly as assets that are used regularly or always online.

Some time-based maintenance may still be necessary for assets that otherwise benefit from usage-based maintenance. Components or equipment kept in storage can degrade over time due to environmental conditions like dust, UV or moisture. Inspecting these assets regularly can help businesses ensure that they are not degrading while not in use.

3. Predictive Maintenance (PdM)

A novel approach to improving preventative maintenance, predictive maintenance uses AI algorithms and big data analysis to forecast when maintenance will be necessary.

The algorithm uses historical asset performance data and real-time monitoring to see failure coming, allowing the asset owner to preemptively schedule maintenance in response to potential downtime. Common sources of real-time monitoring data include built-in equipment sensors, IoT monitoring devices and logging software.

Predictive maintenance can allow asset owners to minimize maintenance costs, reduce downtime and extend the lifespan of their assets.

Specific savings will vary from data center to data center, but the Department of Energy estimates that businesses can save between 8% to 12% on maintenance expenses by switching from PM to PdM. The same business would also cut downtime by 35% to 45%.

Using Preventative Maintenance in Data Centers

PM can be an invaluable tool for data center owners wanting to minimize downtime and maximize the lifespan of key assets.

Time-based PM or predictive maintenance will likely be most useful for assets that are online most of the time. Usage-based PM can be useful for assets that are used less frequently (or spend a great deal of time ideal or in storage).

Four essential ideas for making reinforcement learning and dynamic programming more effective

This is the third article of the series My elaborate study notes on reinforcement learning.

1, Some excuses for writing another article on the same topic

In the last article I explained policy iteration and value iteration of dynamic programming (DP) because DP is the foundation of reinforcement learning (RL). And in fact this article is a kind of a duplicate of the last one. Even though I also tried my best on the last article, I would say it was for superficial understanding of how those algorithms are implemented. I think that was not enough for the following two reasons. The first reason is that what I explained in the last article was virtually just about how to follow pseudocode of those algorithms like other study materials. I tried to explain them with a simple example and some diagrams. But in practice it is not realistic to think about such diagrams all the time. Also writing down Bellman equations every time is exhausting. Thus I would like to introduce Bellman operators, powerful tools for denoting Bellman equations briefly. Bellman operators would help you learn RL at an easier and more abstract level.

The second reason is that relations of values and policies are important points in many of RL algorithms. And simply, one article is not enough to realize this fact. In the last article I explained that policy iteration of DP separately and interactively updates a value and a policy. These procedures can be seen in many RL algorithms. Especially a family of algorithms named actor critic methods use this structure more explicitly. In the algorithms “actor” is in charge of a policy and a “critic” is in charge of a value. Just as the “critic” gives some feedback to the “actor” and the “actor” update his acting style, the value gives some signals to the policy for updating itself. Some people say RL algorithms are generally about how to design those “actors” and “critics.” In some cases actors can be very influential, but in other cases the other side is more powerful. In order to be more conscious about these interactive relations of policies and values, I have to dig the ideas behind policy iteration and value iteration, but with simpler notations.

Even though this article shares a lot with the last one, without pinning down the points I am going to explain, your study of RL could be just a repetition of following pseudocode of each algorithm. But instead I would rather prefer to make more organic links between the algorithms while studying RL. This article might be tiresome to read since it is mainly theoretical sides of DP or RL. But I would like you to patiently read through this to more effectively learn upcoming RL algorithms, and I did my best to explain them again in graphical ways.

2, RL and plannings as tree structures

Some tree structures have appeared so far in my article, but some readers might be still confused how to look at this. I must admit I lacked enough explanations on them. Thus I am going to review Bellman equation and give overall instructions on how to see my graphs. I am trying to discover effective and intuitive ways of showing DP or RL ideas. If there is something unclear of if you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.

I got inspiration from Backup diagrams of Bellman equations introduced in the book by Barto and Sutton when I started making the graphs in this article series. The back up diagrams are basic units of tree structures in RL, and they are composed of white nodes showing states s and black nodes showing actions a. And when an agent goes from a node a to the next state s', it gets a corresponding reward r. As I explained in the second article, a value of a state s is calculated by considering all possible actions and corresponding next states s', and resulting rewards r, starting from s. And the backup diagram shows the essence of how a value of s is calculated.

*Please let me call this figure a backup diagram of “Bellman-equation-like recurrence relation,” instead of Bellman equation. Bellman equation holds only when v_{\pi}(s) is known, and v_{\pi}(s) is usually calculated from the recurrence relation. We are going to see this fact in the rest part of this article, making uses of Bellman operators.

Let’s again take a look at the definition of v_{\pi}(s), a value of a state s for a policy \pi. v_{\pi}(s) is defined as an expectation of a sum of upcoming rewards R_t, given that the state at the time step t is s. (Capital letters are random variables and small letters are their realized values.)

v_{\pi} (s)\doteq \mathbb{E}_{\pi} [ G_t | S_t =s ] =\mathbb{E}_{\pi} [ R_{t+1} + \gamma R_{t+2} + \gamma ^2 R_{t+3} + \cdots + \gamma ^{T-t -1} R_{T} |S_t =s]

*To be exact, we need to take the limit of T like T \to \infty. But the number T is limited in practical discussions, so please don’t care so much about very exact definitions of value functions in my article series.

But considering all the combinations of actions and corresponding rewards are not realistic, thus Bellman equation is defined recursively as follows.

v_{\pi} (s)= \mathbb{E}_{\pi} [ R_{t+1} + \gamma v_{\pi}(S_{t+1}) | S_t =s ]

But when you want to calculate v_{\pi} (s) at the left side, v_{\pi} (s) at the right side is supposed to be unknown, so we use the following recurrence relation.

v_{k+1} (s)\doteq \mathbb{E}_{\pi} [ R_{t+1} + \gamma v_{k}(S_{t+1}) | S_t =s ]

And the operation of calculating an expectation with \mathbb{E}_{\pi}, namely a probabilistic sum of future rewards is defined as follows.

v_{k+1} (s) = \mathbb{E}_{\pi} [R_{t+1} + \gamma v_k (S_{t+1}) | S_t = s] \doteq \sum_a {\pi(a|s)} \sum_{s', r} {p(s', r|s, a)[r + \gamma v_k(s')]}

\pi(a|s) are policies, and p(s', r|s, a) are probabilities of transitions. Policies are probabilities of taking an action a given an agent being in a state s. But agents cannot necessarily move do that based on their policies. Some randomness or uncertainty of movements are taken into consideration, and they are modeled as probabilities of transitions. In my article, I would like you to see the equation above as a sum of branch(s, a) weighted by \pi(a|s) or a sum of twig(r, s') weighted by \pi(a|s), p(s' | s, a). “Branches” and “twigs” are terms which I coined.

*Even though especially values of branch(s, a) are important when you actually implement DP, they are not explicitly defined with certain functions in most study materials on DP.

I think what makes the backup diagram confusing at the first glance is that nodes of states in white have two layers, a layer s and the one of s'. But the node s is included in the nodes of s'. Let’s take an example of calculating the Bellman-equation-like recurrence relations with a grid map environment. The transitions on the backup diagram should be first seen as below to avoid confusion. Even though the original backup diagrams have only one root node and have three layers, in actual models of environments transitions of agents are modeled as arows going back and forth between white and black nodes.

But in DP values of states, namely white nodes have to be updated with older values. That is why the original backup diagrams have three layers. For exmple, the value of a value v_{k+1}(9) is calculated like in the figure below, using values of v_{k}(s'). As I explained earlier, the value of the state 9 is a sum of branch(s, a), weighted by \pi(\rightarrow | 9), \pi(\downarrow | 9), \pi(\leftarrow | 9), \pi(\uparrow | 9). And I showed the weight as strength of purple color of the arrows. r_a, r_b, r_c, r_d are corresponding rewards of each transition. And importantly, the Bellman-equation-like operation, whish is a part of DP, is conducted inside the agent. The agent does not have to actually move, and that is what planning is all about.

And DP, or more exactly policy evaluation, calculating the expectation over all the states, repeatedly. An important fact is, arrows in the backup diagram are pointing backward compared to the direction of value functions being updated, from v_{k}(s) to v_{k+1}(s). I tried to show the idea that values v_{k}(s) are backed up to calculate v_{k+1}(s). In my article series, with the right side of the figure below, I make it a rule to show the ideas that a model of an environment is known and it is updated recursively.

3, Types of policies

As I said in the first article, the ultimate purpose of DP or RL is finding the optimal policies. With optimal policies agents are the most likely to maximize rewards they get in environments. And policies \pi determine the values of states as value functions v_{\pi}(s). Or policies can be obtained from value functions. This structure of interactively updating values and policies is called general policy iteration (GPI) in the book by Barto and Sutton.

Source: Richard S. Sutton, Andrew G. Barto, “Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction,” MIT Press, (2018)

However I have been using the term “a policy” without exactly defining it. There are several types of policies, and distinguishing them is more or less important in the next sections. But I would not like you to think too much about that. In conclusion, only very limited types of policies are mainly discussed in RL. Only \Pi ^{\text{S}}, \Pi ^{\text{SD}} in the figure below are of interest when you learn RL as a beginner. I am going to explain what each set of policies means one by one.

In fact we have been discussing a set of policies \Pi ^{\text{S}}, which mean probabilistic Markov policies. Remember that in the first article I explained Markov decision processes can be described like diagrams of daily routines. For example, the diagrams below are my daily routines. The indexes t denote days. In either of states “Home,” “Lab,” and “Starbucks,” I take an action to another state. The numbers in black are probabilities of taking the actions, and those in orange are rewards of taking the actions. I also explained that the ultimate purpose of planning with DP is to find the optimal policy in this state transition diagram.

Before explaining each type of sequences of policies, let me formulate probabilistic Markov policies at first. A set of probabilistic Markov policies is defined as follows.
\Pi \doteq \biggl\{ \pi : \mathcal{A}\times\mathcal{S} \rightarrow [0, 1]: \sum_{a \in \mathcal{A}}{\pi (a|s) =1, \forall s \in \mathcal{S} } \biggr\}
This means \pi (a|s) maps any combinations of an action a\in\mathcal{A} and a state s \in\mathcal{S} to a probability. The diagram above means you choose a policy \pi from the set \Pi, and you use the policy every time step t, I mean every day. A repetitive sequence of the same probabilistic Markov policy \pi is defined as \boldsymbol{\pi}^{\text{s}} \doteq \{\pi, \pi, \dots \} \in \boldsymbol{\Pi} ^{\text{S}}. And a set of such stationary Markov policy sequences is denoted as \boldsymbol{\Pi} ^{\text{S}}.

*As I formulated in the last articles, policies are different from probabilities of transitions. Even if you take take an action probabilistically, the action cannot necessarily be finished. Thus probabilities of transitions depend on combinations of policies and the agents or the environments.

But when I just want to focus on works like a robot, I give up living my life. I abandon efforts of giving even the slightest variations to my life, and I just deterministically take next actions every day. In this case, we can say the policies are stationary and deterministic. The set of such policies is defined as below. \pi ^{\text{d}} are called deterministic policies.\Pi ^\text{d} \doteq \bigl\{ \pi ^\text{d} : \mathcal{A}\rightarrow \mathcal{S} \bigr\}

I think it is normal policies change from day to day, even if people also have only options of “Home,” “Lab,” or “Starbucks.” These cases are normal Markov policies, and you choose a policy \pi from \Pi every time step.

And the resulting sequences of policies and the set of the sequences are defined as \boldsymbol{\pi}^{\text{m}} \doteq \{\pi_0, \pi_1, \dots \} \in \boldsymbol{\Pi} ^{\text{M}}, \quad \pi_t \in \Pi.

In real world, an assumption of Markov decision process is quite unrealistic because your strategies constantly change depending on what you have done or gained so far. Possibilities of going to a Starbucks depend on what you have done in the week so far. You might order a cup of frappucino as a little something for your exhausting working days. There might be some communications on what you order then with clerks. And such experiences would affect your behaviors of going to Starbucks again. Such general and realistic policies are called history-dependent policies.

*Going to Starbucks everyday like a Markov decision process and deterministically ordering a cupt of hot black coffee is supposed to be unrealistic. Even if clerks start heating a mug as soon as I enter the shop.

In history-dependent cases, your policies depend on your states, actions, and rewards so far. In this case you take actions based on history-dependent policies \pi _{t}^{\text{h}}. However as I said, only \Pi ^{\text{S}}, \Pi ^{\text{SD}} are important in my articles. And history-dependent policies are discussed only in partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), which this article series is not going to cover. Thus you have only to take a brief look at how history-dependent ones are defined.

History-dependent policies are the types of the most general policies. In order to formulate history-dependent policies, we first have to formulate histories. Histories h_t \in \mathcal{H}_t in the context of DP or RL are defined as follows.

h_t \doteq \{s_0, a_0, r_0, \dots , s_{t-1}, a_{t-1}, r_{t}, s_t\}

Given the histories which I have defined, a history dependent policy is defined as follows.

\pi_{t}^{\text{h}}(a|h_t) \doteq \text{Pr}(A=a | H_t = h_t)

This means a probability of taking an action a given a history h_t. It might be more understandable with the graphical model below, which I showed also in the first article. In the graphical model, H_t is a random variable, and h_t is its realized value.


A set of history-dependent policies is defined as follows.

\Pi _{t}^{\text{h}} \doteq \biggl\{ \pi _{t}^{h} : \mathcal{A}\times\mathcal{H}_t \rightarrow [0, 1]: \sum_{a \in \mathcal{A}}{\pi_{t}^{\text{h}} (a|h_{t}) =1 } \biggr\}

And a set of sequences of history-dependent policies is \boldsymbol{\pi}^{\text{h}} \doteq \{\pi^{\text{h}}_0, \pi^{\text{h}}_1, \dots \} \in \boldsymbol{\Pi} ^{\text{H}}, \quad \pi_{t}^{\text{h}} \in \Pi_{t}^{\text{h}}.

In fact I have not defined the optimal value function v_{\ast}(s) or \pi_{\ast} in my article series yet. I must admit it was not good to discuss DP without even defining the important ideas. But now that we have learnt types of policies, it should be less confusing to introduce their more precise definitions now. The optimal value function v_{\ast}: \mathcal{S} \mapsto \mathbb{R} is defined as the maximum value functions for all states s, with respect to any types of sequences of policies \boldsymbol{\pi}.

v_{\ast} \doteq \max_{\boldsymbol{\pi}\in \boldsymbol{\Pi}^{\text{H}}}{v_{\boldsymbol{\pi}(s)}}, \quad \forall s \mathbb{R}

And the optimal policy is defined as the policy which satisfies the equation below.

v_{\ast}(s) = v_{\pi ^{\ast}}(s), \quad \forall s \in \mathcal{S}

The optimal value function is optimal with respect to all the types of sequences of policies, as you can see from the definition. However in fact, it is known that the optimal policy is a deterministic Markov policy \pi ^\text{d} \in \Pi ^\text{d}. That means, in the example graphical models I displayed, you just have to deterministically go back and forth between the lab and the home in order to maximize value function, never stopping by at a Starbucks. Also you do not have to change your plans depending on days.

And when all the values of the states are maximized, you can easily calculate the optimal deterministic policy of your everyday routine. Thus in DP, you first need to maximize the values of the states. I am going to explain this fact of DP more precisely in the next section. Combined with some other important mathematical features of DP, you will have clearer vision on what DP is doing.

*I might have to precisely explain how v_{\boldsymbol{\pi}}(s) is defined. But to make things easier for now, let me skip ore precise formulations. Value functions are defined as expectations of rewards with respect to a single policy or a sequence of policies. You have only to keep it in mind that v_{\boldsymbol{\pi}}(s) is a value function resulting from taking actions based on \boldsymbol{\pi}. And v_{\pi}(s), which we have been mainly discussing, is a value function based on only a single policy \pi.

*Please keep it in mind that these diagrams are not anything like exaggeratedly simplified models for explaining RL. That is my life.

3, Key components of DP

*Even though notations on this article series are based on the book by Barto and Sutton, the discussions in this section are, based on a Japanese book named “Machine Learning Professional Series: Reinforcement Learning” by Tetsurou Morimura, which I call “the whale book.” There is a slight difference in how they calculate Bellman equations. In the book by Barto and Sutton, expectations are calculated also with respect to rewards r, but not in the whale book. I think discussions in the whale book can be extended to the cases in the book by Barto and Sutton, but just in case please bear that in mind.

In order to make organic links between the RL algorithms you are going to encounter, I think you should realize DP algorithms you have learned in the last article are composed of some essential ideas about DP. As I stressed in the first article, RL is equal to solving planning problems, including DP, by sampling data through trial-and-error-like behaviors of agents. Thus in other words, you approximate DP-like calculations with batch data or online data. In order to see how to approximate such DP-like calculations, you have to know more about features of those calculations. Those features are derived from some mathematical propositions about DP. But effortlessly introducing them one by one would be just confusing, so I tired extracting some essences. And the figures below demonstrate the ideas.

The figures above express the following facts about DP:

  1. DP is a repetition of Bellman-equation-like operations, and they can be simply denoted with Bellman operators \mathsf{B}_{\pi} or \mathsf{B}_{\ast}.
  2. The value function for a policy \pi is calculated by solving a Bellman equation, but in practice you approximately solve it by repeatedly using Bellman operators.
  3. There exists an optimal policy \pi ^{\ast} \in \Pi ^{\text{d}}, which is deterministic. And it is an optimal policy if and only if it satisfies the Bellman expectation equation v^{\ast}(s) = (\mathsf{B}_{\pi ^{\ast}} v^{\ast})(s), \quad \forall s \in \mathcal{S}, with the optimal value function v^{\ast}(s).
  4. With a better deterministic policy, you get a better value function. And eventually both the value function and the policy become optimal.

Let’s take a close look at what each of them means.

(1) Bellman operator

In the last article, I explained the Bellman equation and recurrence relations derived from it. And they are the basic ideas leading to various RL algorithms. The Bellman equation itself is not so complicated, and I showed its derivation in the last article. You just have to be careful about variables in calculation of expectations. However writing the equations or recurrence relations every time would be tiresome and confusing. And in practice we need to apply the recurrence relation many times. In order to avoid writing down the Bellman equation every time, let me introduce a powerful notation for simplifying the calculations: I am going to discuss RL making uses of Bellman operators from now on.

First of all, a Bellman expectation operator \mathsf{B}_{\pi}: \mathbb{R}^{\mathcal{S}} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{\mathcal{S}}, or rather an application of a Bellman expectation operator on any state functions v: \mathcal{S}\rightarrow \mathbb{R} is defined as below.

(\mathsf{B}_{\pi} (v))(s) \doteq \sum_{a}{\pi (a|s)} \sum_{s'}{p(s'| s, a) \biggl[r + \gamma v (s') \biggr]}, \quad \forall s \in \mathcal{S}

For simplicity, I am going to denote the left side of the equation as (\mathsf{B}_{\pi} (v)) (s)=\mathsf{B}_{\pi} (v) \doteq \mathsf{B}_{\pi} v. In the last article I explained that when v_{0}(s) is an arbitrarily initialized value function, a sequence of value functions (v_{0}(s), v_{1}(s), \dots, v_{k}(s), \dots) converge to v_{\pi}(s) for a fixed probabilistic policy \pi, by repeatedly applying the recurrence relation below.

v_{k+1} = \sum_{a}{\pi (a|s)} \sum_{s'}{p(s'| s, a) \biggl[r + \gamma v_{k} (s') \biggr]}

With the Bellman expectation operator, the recurrence relation above is written as follows.

v_{k+1} = \mathsf{B}_{\pi} v_{k}

Thus v_{k} is obtained by applying \mathsf{B}_{\pi} to v_{0} k times in total. Such operation is denoted as follows.

v_{k} = (\mathsf{B}_{\pi}\dots (\mathsf{B}_{\pi} v_{0})\dots) \doteq \mathsf{B}_{\pi} \dots \mathsf{B}_{\pi} v_{0} \doteq \mathsf{B}^k_{\pi} v_{0}

As I have just mentioned, \mathsf{B}^k_{\pi} v_{0} converges to v_{\pi}(s), thus the following equation holds.

\lim_{k \rightarrow \infty} \mathsf{B}^k_{\pi} v_{0} = v_{\pi}(s)

I have to admit I am merely talking about how to change notations of the discussions in the last article, but introducing Bellman operators makes it much easier to learn or explain DP or RL as the figure below shows.

Just as well, a Bellman optimality operator \mathsf{B}_{\ast}: \mathbb{R}^{\mathcal{S}} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{\mathcal{S}} is defined as follows.

(\mathsf{B}_{\ast} v)(s) \doteq \max_{a} \sum_{s'}{p(s' | s, a) \biggl[r + \gamma v(s') \biggr]}, \quad \forall s \in \mathcal{S}

Also the notation with a Bellman optimality operators can be simplified as (\mathsf{B}_{\ast} v)(s) \doteq \mathsf{B}_{\ast} v. With a Bellman optimality operator, you can get a recurrence relation v_{k+1} = \mathsf{B}_{\ast} v_{k}. Multiple applications of Bellman optimality operators can be written down as below.

v_{k} = (\mathsf{B}_{\ast}\dots (\mathsf{B}_{\ast} v_{0})\dots) \doteq \mathsf{B}_{\ast} \dots \mathsf{B}_{\ast} v_{0} \doteq \mathsf{B}^k_{\ast} v_{0}

Please keep it in mind that this operator does not depend on policies \pi. And an important fact is that any initial value function v_0 converges to the optimal value function v_{\ast}.

\lim_{k \rightarrow \infty} \mathsf{B}^k_{\ast} v_{0} = v_{\ast}(s)

Thus any initial value functions converge to the the optimal value function by repeatedly applying Bellman optimality operators. This is almost equal to value iteration algorithm, which I explained in the last article. And notations of value iteration can be also simplified by introducing the Bellman optimality operator like in the figure below.

Again, I would like you to pay attention to how value iteration works. The optimal value function v_{\ast}(s) is supposed to be maximum with respect to any sequences of policies \boldsymbol{\pi}, from its definition. However the optimal value function v_{\ast}(s) can be obtained with a single bellman optimality operator \mathsf{B}_{\ast} , never caring about policies. Obtaining the optimal value function is crucial in DP problems as I explain in the next topic. And at least one way to do that is guaranteed with uses of a \mathsf{B}_{\ast}.

*We have seen a case of applying the same Bellman expectation operator on a fixed policy \pi, but you can use different Bellman operators on different policies varying from time steps to time steps. To be more concrete, assume that you have a sequence of Markov policies \boldsymbol{\pi} = \{ \pi_{0},\pi_{1}, \dots, \pi_{k-1} \}\in \boldsymbol{\Pi} ^{\text{M}}. If you apply Bellman operators of the policies one by one in an order of \pi_{k-1}, \pi_{k-2}, \dots, \pi_{k-1} on a state function v, the resulting state function is calculated as below.

\mathsf{B}_{\pi_0}(\mathsf{B}_{\pi_1}\dots (\mathsf{B}_{\pi_{k-1}} v)\dots) \doteq \mathsf{B}_{\pi_0}\mathsf{B}_{\pi_1} \dots \mathsf{B}_{\pi_{k-1}} v \doteq \mathsf{B}^k_{\boldsymbol{\pi}}

When \boldsymbol{\pi} = \{ \pi_{0},\pi_{1}, \dots, \pi_{k-1} \}, we can also discuss convergence of v_{\boldsymbol{\pi}}, but that is just confusing. Please let me know if you are interested.

(2) Policy evaluation

Policy evaluation is in short calculating v_{\pi}, the value function for a policy \pi. And in theory it can be calculated by solving a Bellman expectation equation, which I have already introduced.

v(s) = \sum_{a}{\pi (a|s)} \sum_{s'}{p(s'| s, a) \biggl[r + \gamma v (s') \biggr]}

Using a Bellman operator, which I have introduced in the last topic, the equation above can be written v(s) = \mathsf{B}_{\pi} v(s). But whichever the notation is, the equation holds when the value function v(s) is v_{\pi}(s). You have already seen the major way of how to calculate v_{\pi} in (1), or also in the last article. You have only to multiply the same Belman expectation operator \mathsf{B}_{\pi} to any initial value funtions v_{initial}(s).

This process can be seen in this way: any initial value functions v_{initial}(s) little by little converge to v_{\pi}(s) as the same Bellman expectation operator \mathsf{B}_{\pi} is applied. And when a v_{initial}(s) converges to v_{\pi}(s), the value function does not change anymore because the value function already satisfies a Bellman expectation equation v(s) = \mathsf{B}_{\pi} v(s). In other words v_{\pi}(s) = \mathsf{B}^k_{\pi} v_{\pi}(s), and the v_{\pi}(s) is called the fixed point of \mathsf{B}_{\pi}. The figure below is the image of how any initial value functions converge to the fixed point unique to a certain policy \pi. Also Bellman optimality operators \mathsf{B}_{\ast} also have their fixed points because any initial value functions converge to v_{\ast}(s) by repeatedly applying \mathsf{B}_{\ast}.

I am actually just saying the same facts as in the topic (1) in another way. But I would like you to keep it in mind that the fixed point of \mathsf{B}_{\pi} is more of a “local” fixed point. On the other hand the fixed point of \mathsf{B}_{\ast} is more like “global.” Ultimately the global one is ultimately important, and the fixed point v_{\ast} can be directly reached only with the Bellman optimality operator \mathsf{B}_{\ast}. But you can also start with finding local fixed points, and it is known that the local fixed points also converge to the global one. In fact, the former case of corresponds to policy iteration, and the latter case to value iteration. At any rate, the goal for now is to find the optimal value function v_{\ast}. Once the value function is optimal, the optimal policy can be automatically obtained, and I am going to explain why in the next two topics.

(3) Existence of the optimal policy

In the first place, does the optimal policy really exist? The answer is yes, and moreover it is a stationary and deterministic policy \pi ^{\text{d}} \in \Pi^{\text{SD}}. And also, you can judge whether a policy is optimal by a Bellman expectation equation below.

v_{\ast}(s) = (\mathsf{B}_{\pi^{\ast} } v_{\ast})(s), \quad \forall s \in \mathcal{S}

In other words, the optimal value function v_{\ast}(s) has to be already obtained to judge if a policy is optimal. And the resulting optimal policy is calculated as follows.

\pi^{\text{d}}_{\ast}(s) = \text{argmax}_{a\in \matchal{A}} \sum_{s'}{p(s' | s, a) \biggl[r + \gamma v_{\ast}(s') \biggr]}, \quad \forall s \in \mathcal{S}

Let’s take an example of the state transition diagram in the last section. I added some transitions from nodes to themselves and corresponding scores. And all values of the states are initialized as v_{init.}. After some calculations, v_{init.} is optimized to v_{\ast}. And finally the optimal policy can be obtained from the equation I have just mentioned. And the conclusion is “Go to the lab wherever you are to maximize score.”


The calculation above is finding an action a which maximizes b(s, a)\doteq\sum_{s'}{p(s' | s, a) \biggl[r + \gamma v_{\ast}(s') \biggr]} = r + \gamma \sum_{s'}{p(s' | s, a) v_{\ast}(s') }. Let me call the part b(s, a) ” a value of a branch,” and finding the optimal deterministic policy is equal to choosing the maximum branch for all s. A branch corresponds to a pair of a state s, a and all the all the states s'.


*We can comprehend applications of Bellman expectation operators as probabilistically reweighting branches with policies \pi(a|s).

*The states s and s' are basically the same. They are just different in uses of indexes for referring them. That might be a confusing point of understanding Bellman equations.

Let’s see how values actually converge to the optimal values and how branches b(s, a). I implemented value iteration of the Starbucks-lab-home transition diagram and visuzlied them with Graphviz. I initialized all the states as 0, and after some iterations they converged to the optimal values. The numbers in each node are values of the sates. And the numbers next to each edge are corresponding values of branches b(a, b). After you get the optimal value, if you choose the direction with the maximum branch at each state, you get the optimal deterministic policy. And that means “Just go to the lab, not Starbucks.”

*Discussing and visualizing “branches” of Bellman equations are not normal in other study materials. But I just thought it would be better to see how they change.

(4) Policy improvement

Policy improvement means a very simple fact: in policy iteration algorithm, with a better policy, you get a better value function. That is all. In policy iteration, a policy is regarded as optimal as long as it does not updated anymore. But as far as I could see so far, there is one confusing fact. Even after a policy converges, value functions still can be updated. But from the definition, an optimal value function is determined with the optimal value function. Such facts can be seen in some of DP implementation, including grid map implementation I introduced in the last article.


Thus I am not sure if it is legitimate to say whether the policy is optimal even before getting the optimal value function. At any rate, this is my “elaborate study note,” so I conversely ask for some help to more professional someones if they come across with my series. Please forgive me for shifting to the next article, without making things clear.

4, Viewing DP algorithms in a more simple and abstract way

We have covered the four important topics for a better understanding of DP algorithms. Making use of these ideas, pseudocode of DP algorithms which I introduced in the last article can be rewritten in a more simple and abstract way. Rather than following pseudocode of DP algorithms, I would like you to see them this way: policy iteration is a repetation of finding the fixed point of a Bellman operator \mathsf{B}_{\pi}, which is a local fixed point, and updating the policy. Even if the policy converge, values have not necessarily converged to the optimal values.


When it comes to value iteration: value iteration is finding the fixed point of \mathsf{B}_{\ast}, which is global, and getting the deterministic and optimal policy.

I have written about DP in as many as two articles. But I would say that was inevitable for laying more or less solid foundation of learning RL. The last article was too superficial and ordinary, but on the other hand this one is too abstract to introduce at first. Now that I have explained essential theoretical parts of DP, I can finally move to topics unique to RL. We have been thinking the case of plannings where the models of the environemnt is known, but they are what agents have to estimate with “trial and errors.” The term “trial and errors” might have been too abstract to you when you read about RL so far. But after reading my articles, you can instead say that is a matter of how to approximate Bellman operators with batch or online data taken by agents, rather than ambiguously saying “trial and erros.” In the next article, I am going to talk about “temporal differences,” which makes RL different from other fields and can be used as data samples to approximate Bellman operators.

* I make study materials on machine learning, sponsored by DATANOMIQ. I do my best to make my content as straightforward but as precise as possible. I include all of my reference sources. If you notice any mistakes in my materials, including grammatical errors, please let me know (email: yasuto.tamura@datanomiq.de). And if you have any advice for making my materials more understandable to learners, I would appreciate hearing it.

Coffee Shop Location Predictor

As part of this article, we will explore the main steps involved in predicting the best location for a coffee shop in Vancouver. We will also take into consideration that the coffee shop is near a transit station, and has no Starbucks near it. Well, while at it, let us also add an extra feature where we make sure the crime in the area is lower.

Introduction

In this article, we will highlight the main steps involved to predict a location for a coffee shop in Vancouver. We also want to make sure that the coffee shop is near a transit station, and has no Starbucks near it. As an added feature, we will make sure that the crime concentration in the area is low, and the entire program should be implemented in Python. So let’s walk through the steps.

Steps Required

  • Get crime history for the last two years
  • Get locations of all transit stations and Starbucks in Vancouver
  • Check all the transit stations that do not have any Starbucks near them
  • Get all the data regarding crimes near the filtered transit stations
  • Create a grid of all possible coordinates around the transit station
  • Check crime around each created coordinate and display the top 5 locations.

Gathering Data

This covers the first two steps required to get data from the internet, both manually and automatically.

Getting all Crime History

We can get crime history for the past 14 years in Vancouver from here. This data is in raw crime.csv format, so we have to process it and filter out useless data. We then write this processed information on the crime_processed.csv file.

Note: There are 530,653 records of crime in this file

In this program, we will just use the type and coordinate of the crime. There are many crime types, but we have classified them into three major categories namely;

Theft (red), Break and Enter (orange) and Mischief (green)

These all crimes can be plotted on Graph as displayed below.

This may seem very congested and full, so let’s see a closeup image for future references.

Getting Locations of all Rapid Transit Stations

We can get the coordinates of all Transit Stations in Vancouver from here. This dataset has all coordinates of rapid transit stations in three transit lines in Vancouver. There are a total of 23 of them in Vancouver, we can then use it for further processing.

Getting Locations of all Starbucks

The Starbucks data is present here, we can scrape it easily and get the locations of all the Starbucks in Vancouver. We just need the Starbucks that is near transit stations, so we’ll filter out the rest. There are a total 24 Starbucks in Vancouver, and 10 of them are near Transit Stations.

Note: Other than the coordinates of Transit Stations and Starbucks, we also need coordinates and type of the crime.

Transit Stations with no Starbucks

As we have all the data required, now moving to the next step. We need to get to the transit Station locations that have no Starbucks near them. For that we can create an area of particular radius around each Transit Station. Then check all Starbucks locations with respect to them, whether they are within that area or not.

If none of the Starbucks are within that particular Transit Station’s area, we can append it to a list. At the end, we have a list of all Transit locations with no Starbucks near them. There are a total of 6 Transit Stations with no Starbucks near them.

Crime near Transit Stations

Now lets filter out all crime records and get just what we are interested in, which means the crime near Transit stations. For that we will plot an area of specific radius around each of them to see the crimes. These are more than 110,000 crime records.

Crime near located Transit Stations

Now that we have all the Transit Stations that don’t have any Starbucks near them and also the crime near all Transit Stations. So, let’s use this information and get crime near the located Transit Stations. These are about 44,000 crime records.

This may seem correct at first glance, but the points are overlapping due to abundance, so we can create different lists of crimes based on their types.

Theft

Break and Enter

Mischief

Generating all possible coordinates

Now finally, we have all the prerequisites and let’s get to the main task at hand, predicting the best coordinate for the coffee shop.

There may be many approaches to solve this problem, but the one I used in this program is that I will create a grid of all possible locations (coordinates) in the area of 1 km radius around each located transit station.

Initially I generated 1 coordinate for every m, this resulted in 1000,000 coordinates in every km. This is a huge number, and for the 6 located Transit stations, it becomes 6 Million. It may not seem much at first glance because computers can handle such data in a few seconds.

But for location prediction we need to compare each coordinate with crime coordinates. As the algorithm has to check for ~7,000 Thefts, ~19,000 Break ins, and ~17,000 Mischiefs around each generated coordinate. Computing this would want the program to process an estimate of 432.4 Billion times. This sort of execution takes many hours on normal computers (sometimes days).

The solution to this is to create a coordinate for each 10 m area, this results about 10,000 coordinate per km. For the above mentioned number of crimes, the estimated processes will be several Billions. That would significantly reduce the time, but is still not less.

To control this, we can remove the duplicate values in crime coordinates and those which are too close to each other ~1m. Doing so, we are left with just 816 Thefts, 2,654 Break ins, and 8,234 Mischiefs around each generated coordinate.
The precision will not be affected much but the time and computational resources required will be reduced a lot.

 

Checking Crime near Generated coordinates

Now that we have all the locations, we will start some processing on it and check each coordinate against some constraints. That are respectively;

  1. Filter out Coordinates having Theft near 1 km
    We get 122,000 coordinates with no Thefts (Below merged 1000 to 1)
  2. Filter out Coordinates having Break Ins near 200m
    We get 8000 coordinates with no Thefts (Below merged 1000 to 1)
  3. Filter out Coordinates having Mischief near 200m
    We get 6000 coordinates with no Thefts (Below merged 1000 to 1)
    Now that we have 6 Coordinates of best locations that have passed through all the constraints, we will order them.To order them, we will check their distance from the nearest transit location. The nearest will be on top of the list as the best possible location, then the second and so on. The generated List is;

    1. -123.0419406741792, 49.24824259252004
    2. -123.05887151659479, 49.24327221040713
    3. -123.05287151659476, 49.24327221040713
    4. -123.04994067417924, 49.239242592520064
    5. -123.0419406741792, 49.239242592520064
    6. -123.0409406741792, 49.239242592520064

How can MindTrades help?

MindTrades Consulting Services, a leading marketing agency provides in-depth analysis and insights for the global IT sector including leading data integration brands such as Diyotta. From Cloud Migration, Big Data, Digital Transformation, Agile Deliver, Cyber Security, to Analytics- Mind trades provides published breakthrough ideas, and prompt content delivery. For more information, refer to mindtrades.com.

Code

https://github.com/Mindtrades-Consulting/Coffee-Shop-Location-Predictor

 

Multi-head attention mechanism: “queries”, “keys”, and “values,” over and over again

*A comment added on 04/05/2022: Thanks to a comment by Mr. Maier, I found a major mistake in my visualization. To be concrete, there is a mistake in expressing how to get each colored divided group of tokens by applying linear transformations. That corresponds to the section 3.2.2 in the paper “Attention Is All You Need.” There would be no big differences in the main point of this article, the relations of keys, queries, and values, but please bear that in your mind if you need Transformer at a practical work. Besides checking the implementation by Tensorflow, I will soon prepare a modified version of visualization. For further details, please see comments at the bottom of this article.

This is the third article of my article series named “Instructions on Transformer for people outside NLP field, but with examples of NLP.”

In the last article, I explained how attention mechanism works in simple seq2seq models with RNNs, and it basically calculates correspondences of the hidden state at every time step, with all the outputs of the encoder. However I would say the attention mechanisms of RNN seq2seq models use only one standard for comparing them. Using only one standard is not enough for understanding languages, especially when you learn a foreign language. You would sometimes find it difficult to explain how to translate a word in your language to another language. Even if a pair of languages are very similar to each other, translating them cannot be simple switching of vocabulary. Usually a single token in one language is related to several tokens in the other language, and vice versa. How they correspond to each other depends on several criteria, for example “what”, “who”, “when”, “where”, “why”, and “how”. It is easy to imagine that you should compare tokens with several criteria.

Transformer model was first introduced in the original paper named “Attention Is All You Need,” and from the title you can easily see that attention mechanism plays important roles in this model. When you learn about Transformer model, you will see the figure below, which is used in the original paper on Transformer.  This is the simplified overall structure of one layer of Transformer model, and you stack this layer N times. In one layer of Transformer, there are three multi-head attention, which are displayed as boxes in orange. These are the very parts which compare the tokens on several standards. I made the head article of this article series inspired by this multi-head attention mechanism.

The figure below is also from the original paper on Transfromer. If you can understand how multi-head attention mechanism works with the explanations in the paper, and if you have no troubles understanding the codes in the official Tensorflow tutorial, I have to say this article is not for you. However I bet that is not true of majority of people, and at least I need one article to clearly explain how multi-head attention works. Please keep it in mind that this article covers only the architectures of the two figures below. However multi-head attention mechanisms are crucial components of Transformer model, and throughout this article, you would not only see how they work but also get a little control over it at an implementation level.

1 Multi-head attention mechanism

When you learn Transformer model, I recommend you first to pay attention to multi-head attention. And when you learn multi-head attentions, before seeing what scaled dot-product attention is, you should understand the whole structure of multi-head attention, which is at the right side of the figure above. In order to calculate attentions with a “query”, as I said in the last article, “you compare the ‘query’ with the ‘keys’ and get scores/weights for the ‘values.’ Each score/weight is in short the relevance between the ‘query’ and each ‘key’. And you reweight the ‘values’ with the scores/weights, and take the summation of the reweighted ‘values’.” Sooner or later, you will notice I would be just repeating these phrases over and over again throughout this article, in several ways.

*Even if you are not sure what “reweighting” means in this context, please keep reading. I think you would little by little see what it means especially in the next section.

The overall process of calculating multi-head attention, displayed in the figure above, is as follows (Please just keep reading. Please do not think too much.): first you split the V: “values”, K: “keys”, and Q: “queries”, and second you transform those divided “values”, “keys”, and “queries” with densely connected layers (“Linear” in the figure). Next you calculate attention weights and reweight the “values” and take the summation of the reiweighted “values”, and you concatenate the resulting summations. At the end you pass the concatenated “values” through another densely connected layers. The mechanism of scaled dot-product attention is just a matter of how to concretely calculate those attentions and reweight the “values”.

*In the last article I briefly mentioned that “keys” and “queries” can be in the same language. They can even be the same sentence in the same language, and in this case the resulting attentions are called self-attentions, which we are mainly going to see. I think most people calculate “self-attentions” unconsciously when they speak. You constantly care about what “she”, “it” , “the”, or “that” refers to in you own sentence, and we can say self-attention is how these everyday processes is implemented.

Let’s see the whole process of calculating multi-head attention at a little abstract level. From now on, we consider an example of calculating multi-head self-attentions, where the input is a sentence “Anthony Hopkins admired Michael Bay as a great director.” In this example, the number of tokens is 9, and each token is encoded as a 512-dimensional embedding vector. And the number of heads is 8. In this case, as you can see in the figure below, the input sentence “Anthony Hopkins admired Michael Bay as a great director.” is implemented as a 9\times 512 matrix. You first split each token into 512/8=64 dimensional, 8 vectors in total, as I colored in the figure below. In other words, the input matrix is divided into 8 colored chunks, which are all 9\times 64 matrices, but each colored matrix expresses the same sentence. And you calculate self-attentions of the input sentence independently in the 8 heads, and you reweight the “values” according to the attentions/weights. After this, you stack the sum of the reweighted “values”  in each colored head, and you concatenate the stacked tokens of each colored head. The size of each colored chunk does not change even after reweighting the tokens. According to Ashish Vaswani, who invented Transformer model, each head compare “queries” and “keys” on each standard. If the a Transformer model has 4 layers with 8-head multi-head attention , at least its encoder has 4\times 8 = 32 heads, so the encoder learn the relations of tokens of the input on 32 different standards.

I think you now have rough insight into how you calculate multi-head attentions. In the next section I am going to explain the process of reweighting the tokens, that is, I am finally going to explain what those colorful lines in the head image of this article series are.

*Each head is randomly initialized, so they learn to compare tokens with different criteria. The standards might be straightforward like “what” or “who”, or maybe much more complicated. In attention mechanisms in deep learning, you do not need feature engineering for setting such standards.

2 Calculating attentions and reweighting “values”

If you have read the last article or if you understand attention mechanism to some extent, you should already know that attention mechanism calculates attentions, or relevance between “queries” and “keys.” In the last article, I showed the idea of weights as a histogram, and in that case the “query” was the hidden state of the decoder at every time step, whereas the “keys” were the outputs of the encoder. In this section, I am going to explain attention mechanism in a more abstract way, and we consider comparing more general “tokens”, rather than concrete outputs of certain networks. In this section each [ \cdots ] denotes a token, which is usually an embedding vector in practice.

Please remember this mantra of attention mechanism: “you compare the ‘query’ with the ‘keys’ and get scores/weights for the ‘values.’ Each score/weight is in short the relevance between the ‘query’ and each ‘key’. And you reweight the ‘values’ with the scores/weights, and take the summation of the reweighted ‘values’.” The figure below shows an overview of a case where “Michael” is a query. In this case you compare the query with the “keys”, that is, the input sentence “Anthony Hopkins admired Michael Bay as a great director.” and you get the histogram of attentions/weights. Importantly the sum of the weights 1. With the attentions you have just calculated, you can reweight the “values,” which also denote the same input sentence. After that you can finally take a summation of the reweighted values. And you use this summation.

*I have been repeating the phrase “reweighting ‘values’  with attentions,”  but you in practice calculate the sum of those reweighted “values.”

Assume that compared to the “query”  token “Michael”, the weights of the “key” tokens “Anthony”, “Hopkins”, “admired”, “Michael”, “Bay”, “as”, “a”, “great”, and “director.” are respectively 0.06, 0.09, 0.05, 0.25, 0.18, 0.06, 0.09, 0.06, 0.15. In this case the sum of the reweighted token is 0.06″Anthony” + 0.09″Hopkins” + 0.05″admired” + 0.25″Michael” + 0.18″Bay” + 0.06″as” + 0.09″a” + 0.06″great” 0.15″director.”, and this sum is the what wee actually use.

*Of course the tokens are embedding vectors in practice. You calculate the reweighted vector in actual implementation.

You repeat this process for all the “queries.”  As you can see in the figure below, you get summations of 9 pairs of reweighted “values” because you use every token of the input sentence “Anthony Hopkins admired Michael Bay as a great director.” as a “query.” You stack the sum of reweighted “values” like the matrix in purple in the figure below, and this is the output of a one head multi-head attention.

3 Scaled-dot product

This section is a only a matter of linear algebra. Maybe this is not even so sophisticated as linear algebra. You just have to do lots of Excel-like operations. A tutorial on Transformer by Jay Alammar is also a very nice study material to understand this topic with simpler examples. I tried my best so that you can clearly understand multi-head attention at a more mathematical level, and all you need to know in order to read this section is how to calculate products of matrices or vectors, which you would see in the first some pages of textbooks on linear algebra.

We have seen that in order to calculate multi-head attentions, we prepare 8 pairs of “queries”, “keys” , and “values”, which I showed in 8 different colors in the figure in the first section. We calculate attentions and reweight “values” independently in 8 different heads, and in each head the reweighted “values” are calculated with this very simple formula of scaled dot-product: Attention(\boldsymbol{Q}, \boldsymbol{K}, \boldsymbol{V}) =softmax(\frac{\boldsymbol{Q} \boldsymbol{K} ^T}{\sqrt{d}_k})\boldsymbol{V}. Let’s take an example of calculating a scaled dot-product in the blue head.

At the left side of the figure below is a figure from the original paper on Transformer, which explains one-head of multi-head attention. If you have read through this article so far, the figure at the right side would be more straightforward to understand. You divide the input sentence into 8 chunks of matrices, and you independently put those chunks into eight head. In one head, you convert the input matrix by three different fully connected layers, which is “Linear” in the figure below, and prepare three matrices Q, K, V, which are “queries”, “keys”, and “values” respectively.

*Whichever color attention heads are in, the processes are all the same.

*You divide \frac{\boldsymbol{Q}} {\boldsymbol{K}^T} by \sqrt{d}_k in the formula. According to the original paper, it is known that re-scaling \frac{\boldsymbol{Q} }{\boldsymbol{K}^T} by \sqrt{d}_k is found to be effective. I am not going to discuss why in this article.

As you can see in the figure below, calculating Attention(\boldsymbol{Q}, \boldsymbol{K}, \boldsymbol{V}) is virtually just multiplying three matrices with the same size (Only K is transposed though). The resulting 9\times 64 matrix is the output of the head.

softmax(\frac{\boldsymbol{Q} \boldsymbol{K} ^T}{\sqrt{d}_k}) is calculated like in the figure below. The softmax function regularize each row of the re-scaled product \frac{\boldsymbol{Q} \boldsymbol{K} ^T}{\sqrt{d}_k}, and the resulting 9\times 9 matrix is a kind a heat map of self-attentions.

The process of comparing one “query” with “keys” is done with simple multiplication of a vector and a matrix, as you can see in the figure below. You can get a histogram of attentions for each query, and the resulting 9 dimensional vector is a list of attentions/weights, which is a list of blue circles in the figure below. That means, in Transformer model, you can compare a “query” and a “key” only by calculating an inner product. After re-scaling the vectors by dividing them with \sqrt{d_k} and regularizing them with a softmax function, you stack those vectors, and the stacked vectors is the heat map of attentions.

You can reweight “values” with the heat map of self-attentions, with simple multiplication. It would be more straightforward if you consider a transposed scaled dot-product \boldsymbol{V}^T \cdot softmax(\frac{\boldsymbol{Q} \boldsymbol{K} ^T}{\sqrt{d}_k})^T. This also should be easy to understand if you know basics of linear algebra.

One column of the resulting matrix (\boldsymbol{V}^T \cdot softmax(\frac{\boldsymbol{Q} \boldsymbol{K} ^T}{\sqrt{d}_k})^T) can be calculated with a simple multiplication of a matrix and a vector, as you can see in the figure below. This corresponds to the process or “taking a summation of reweighted ‘values’,” which I have been repeating. And I would like you to remember that you got those weights (blue) circles by comparing a “query” with “keys.”

Again and again, let’s repeat the mantra of attention mechanism together: “you compare the ‘query’ with the ‘keys’ and get scores/weights for the ‘values.’ Each score/weight is in short the relevance between the ‘query’ and each ‘key’. And you reweight the ‘values’ with the scores/weights, and take the summation of the reweighted ‘values’.” If you have been patient enough to follow my explanations, I bet you have got a clear view on how multi-head attention mechanism works.

We have been seeing the case of the blue head, but you can do exactly the same procedures in every head, at the same time, and this is what enables parallelization of multi-head attention mechanism. You concatenate the outputs of all the heads, and you put the concatenated matrix through a fully connected layers.

If you are reading this article from the beginning, I think this section is also showing the same idea which I have repeated, and I bet more or less you no have clearer views on how multi-head attention mechanism works. In the next section we are going to see how this is implemented.

4 Tensorflow implementation of multi-head attention

Let’s see how multi-head attention is implemented in the Tensorflow official tutorial. If you have read through this article so far, this should not be so difficult. I also added codes for displaying heat maps of self attentions. With the codes in this Github page, you can display self-attention heat maps for any input sentences in English.

The multi-head attention mechanism is implemented as below. If you understand Python codes and Tensorflow to some extent, I think this part is relatively easy.  The multi-head attention part is implemented as a class because you need to train weights of some fully connected layers. Whereas, scaled dot-product is just a function.

*I am going to explain the create_padding_mask() and create_look_ahead_mask() functions in upcoming articles. You do not need them this time.

Let’s see a case of using multi-head attention mechanism on a (1, 9, 512) sized input tensor, just as we have been considering in throughout this article. The first axis of (1, 9, 512) corresponds to the batch size, so this tensor is virtually a (9, 512) sized tensor, and this means the input is composed of 9 512-dimensional vectors. In the results below, you can see how the shape of input tensor changes after each procedure of calculating multi-head attention. Also you can see that the output of the multi-head attention is the same as the input, and you get a 9\times 9 matrix of attention heat maps of each attention head.

I guess the most complicated part of this implementation above is the split_head() function, especially if you do not understand tensor arithmetic. This part corresponds to splitting the input tensor to 8 different colored matrices as in one of the figures above. If you cannot understand what is going on in the function, I recommend you to prepare a sample tensor as below.

This is just a simple (1, 9, 512) sized tensor with sequential integer elements. The first row (1, 2, …., 512) corresponds to the first input token, and (4097, 4098, … , 4608) to the last one. You should try converting this sample tensor to see how multi-head attention is implemented. For example you can try the operations below.

These operations correspond to splitting the input into 8 heads, whose sizes are all (9, 64). And the second axis of the resulting (1, 8, 9, 64) tensor corresponds to the index of the heads. Thus sample_sentence[0][0] corresponds to the first head, the blue 9\times 64 matrix. Some Tensorflow functions enable linear calculations in each attention head, independently as in the codes below.

Very importantly, we have been only considering the cases of calculating self attentions, where all “queries”, “keys”, and “values” come from the same sentence in the same language. However, as I showed in the last article, usually “queries” are in a different language from “keys” and “values” in translation tasks, and “keys” and “values” are in the same language. And as you can imagine, usualy “queries” have different number of tokens from “keys” or “values.” You also need to understand this case, which is not calculating self-attentions. If you have followed this article so far, this case is not that hard to you. Let’s briefly see an example where the input sentence in the source language is composed 9 tokens, on the other hand the output is composed 12 tokens.

As I mentioned, one of the outputs of each multi-head attention class is 9\times 9 matrix of attention heat maps, which I displayed as a matrix composed of blue circles in the last section. The the implementation in the Tensorflow official tutorial, I have added codes to display actual heat maps of any input sentences in English.

*If you want to try displaying them by yourself, download or just copy and paste codes in this Github page. Please maker “datasets” directory in the same directory as the code. Please download “spa-eng.zip” from this page, and unzip it. After that please put “spa.txt” on the “datasets” directory. Also, please download the “checkpoints_en_es” folder from this link, and place the folder in the same directory as the file in the Github page. In the upcoming articles, you would need similar processes to run my codes.

After running codes in the Github page, you can display heat maps of self attentions. Let’s input the sentence “Anthony Hopkins admired Michael Bay as a great director.” You would get a heat maps like this.

In fact, my toy implementation cannot handle proper nouns such as “Anthony” or “Michael.” Then let’s consider a simple input sentence “He admired her as a great director.” In each layer, you respectively get 8 self-attention heat maps.

I think we can see some tendencies in those heat maps. The heat maps in the early layers, which are close to the input, are blurry. And the distributions of the heat maps come to concentrate more or less diagonally. At the end, presumably they learn to pay attention to the start and the end of sentences.

You have finally finished reading this article. Congratulations.

You should be proud of having been patient, and you passed the most tiresome part of learning Transformer model. You must be ready for making a toy English-German translator in the upcoming articles. Also I am sure you have understood that Michael Bay is a great director, no matter what people say.

[References]

[1] Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, “Attention Is All You Need” (2017)

[2] “Transformer model for language understanding,” Tensorflow Core
https://www.tensorflow.org/overview

[3] “Neural machine translation with attention,” Tensorflow Core
https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/text/nmt_with_attention

[4] Jay Alammar, “The Illustrated Transformer,”
http://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/

[5] “Stanford CS224N: NLP with Deep Learning | Winter 2019 | Lecture 14 – Transformers and Self-Attention,” stanfordonline, (2019)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vcj8kSwBCY

[6]Tsuboi Yuuta, Unno Yuuya, Suzuki Jun, “Machine Learning Professional Series: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning,” (2017), pp. 91-94
坪井祐太、海野裕也、鈴木潤 著, 「機械学習プロフェッショナルシリーズ 深層学習による自然言語処理」, (2017), pp. 191-193

[7]”Stanford CS224N: NLP with Deep Learning | Winter 2019 | Lecture 8 – Translation, Seq2Seq, Attention”, stanfordonline, (2019)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXtpJxZBa2c

[8]Rosemary Rossi, “Anthony Hopkins Compares ‘Genius’ Michael Bay to Spielberg, Scorsese,” yahoo! entertainment, (2017)
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/anthony-hopkins-transformers-director-michael-bay-guy-genius-010058439.html

* I make study materials on machine learning, sponsored by DATANOMIQ. I do my best to make my content as straightforward but as precise as possible. I include all of my reference sources. If you notice any mistakes in my materials, including grammatical errors, please let me know (email: yasuto.tamura@datanomiq.de). And if you have any advice for making my materials more understandable to learners, I would appreciate hearing it.

Data Mining Process flow – Easy Understanding

1 Overview

Development of computer processing power, network and automated software completely change and give new concept of each business. And data mining play the vital part to solve, finding the hidden patterns and relationship from large dataset with business by using sophisticated data analysis tools like methodology, method, process flow etc.

On this paper, proposed a process flow followed CRISP-DM methodology and has six steps where data understanding does not considered.

Phase of new process flow given below:-

Phase 1: Involved with collection, outliner treatment, imputation, transformation, scaling, and partition dataset in to two sub-frames (Training and Testing). Here as an example for outliner treatment, imputation, transformation, scaling consider accordingly Z score, mean, One hot encoding and Min Max Scaler.

Phase 2: On this Phase training and testing data balance with same balancing algorithm but separately. As an example here SMOTE (synthetic minority oversampling technique) is considered.

Phase 3: This phase involved with reduction, selection, aggregation, extraction. But here for an example considering same feature reduction algorithm (LDA -Linear Discriminant analysis) on training and testing data set separately.

Phase 4: On this Phase Training data set again partition into two more set (Training and Validation).

Phase 5: This Phase considering several base algorithms as a base model like CNN, RNN, Random forest, MLP, Regression, Ensemble method. This phase also involve to find out best hyper parameter and sub-algorithm for each base algorithm. As an example on this paper consider two class classification problems and also consider Random forest (Included CART – Classification and Regression Tree and GINI index impurity) and MLP classifier (Included (Relu, Sigmoid, binary cross entropy, Adam – Adaptive Moment Estimation) as base algorithms.

Phase 6: First, Prediction with validation data then evaluates with Test dataset which is fully unknown for these (Random forest, MLP classifier) two base algorithms. Then calculate the confusion matrix, ROC, AUC to find the best base algorithm.

New method from phase 1 to phase 4 followed CRISP-DM methodology steps such as data collection, data preparation then phase 5 followed modelling and phase 6 followed evaluation and implementation steps.

Structure of proposed process flow for two class problem combined with algorithm and sub-algorithm display on figure – 1.

These articles mainly focus to describe all algorithms which are going to implementation for better understanding.

 

 

Data Mining Process Flow

Figure 1 – Data Mining Process Flow

2 Phase 1: Outlier treatment, Transform, Scaling, Imputation

This phase involved with outlier treatment, imputation, scaling, and transform data.

2.1 Outliner treatment: – Z score

Outlier is a data point which lies far from all other data point in a data set. Outlier need to treat because it may bias the entire result. Outlier treatment with Z score is a common technique.  Z score is a standard score in statistics.  Z score provides information about data value is smaller or grater then mean that means how many standard deviations away from the mean value. Z score equation display below:

Z = \frac{(x - \mu)}{\sigma}

Here x = data point
σ = Standard deviation
μ = mean value

Equation- 1 Z-Score

In a normal distribution Z score represent 68% data lies on +/- 1, 95% data point lies on +/- 2, 99.7% data point lies on +/- 3 standard deviation.

2.2 Imputation data: – mean

Imputation is a way to handle missing data by replacing substituted value. There are many imputation technique represent like mean, median, mode, k-nearest neighbours. Mean imputation is the technique to replacing missing information with mean value. On the mean imputation first calculate the particular features mean value and then replace the missing value with mean value. The next equation displays the mean calculation:

\mu = \frac{(\sum x)}{n}

Here x = value of each point
n = number of values
μ = mean value

Equation- 2 Mean

2.3 Transform: – One hot encoding

Encoding is a pre-processing technique which represents data in such a way that computer can understand.  For understanding of machine learning algorithm categorical columns convert to numerical columns, this process called categorical encoding. There are multiple way to handle categorical variable but most widely used techniques are label encoding and one host encoding. On label encoding give a numeric (integer number) for each category. Suppose there are 3 categories of foods like apples, orange, banana. When label encoding is used then 3 categories will get a numerical value like apples = 1, banana = 2 and orange = 3. But there is very high probability that machine learning model can capture the relationship in between categories such as apple < banana < orange or calculate average across categories like 1 +3 = 4 / 2 = 2 that means model can understand average of apple and orange together is banana which is not acceptable because model correlation calculation is wrong. For solving this problem one hot encoding appear. The following table displays the label encoding is transformed into one hot encoding.

Label Encoding and One-Hot-Encoding

Table- 1 Encoding example

On hot encoding categorical value split into columns and each column contains 0 or 1 according to columns placement.

2.4 Scaling data: – Min Max Scaler

Feature scaling method is standardized or normalization the independent variable that means it is used to scale the data in a particular range like -1 to +1 or depending on algorithm. Generally normalization used where data distribution does not follow Gaussian distribution and standardization used where data distribution follow Gaussian distribution. On standardization techniques transform data values are cantered around the mean and unit is standard deviation. Formula for standardization given below:

Standardization X = \frac{(X - \mu)}{\sigma}

Equation-3 Equations for Standardization

X represent the feature value, µ represent mean of the feature value and σ represent standard deviation of the feature value. Standardized data value does not restrict to a particular range.

Normalization techniques shifted and rescaled data value range between 0 and 1. Normalization techniques also called Min-Max scaling. Formula for normalization given below:

Normalization X = \frac{(X - X_{min})}{X_{max} - X_{min}}

Equation – 4 Equations for Normalization

Above X, Xmin, Xmax are accordingly feature values, feature minimum value and feature maximum value. On above formula when X is minimums then numerator will be 0 (  is 0) or if X is maximums then the numerator is equal to the denominator (  is 1). But when X data value between minimum and maximum then  is between 0 and 1. If ranges value of data does not normalized then bigger range can influence the result.

3 Phase 2: – Balance Data

3.1 SMOTE

SMOTE (synthetic minority oversampling technique) is an oversampling technique where synthetic observations are created based on existing minority observations. This technique operates in feature space instead of data space. Under SMOTE each minority class observation calculates k nearest neighbours and randomly chose the neighbours depending on over-sampling requirements. Suppose there are 4 data point on minority class and 10 data point on majority class. For this imbalance data set, balance by increasing minority class with synthetic data point.   SMOTE creating synthetic data point but it is necessary to consider k nearest neighbours first. If k = 3 then SMOTE consider 3 nearest neighbours. Figure-2 display SMOTE with k = 3 and x = x1, x2, x3, x4 data point denote minority class. And all circles represent majority class.

SMOTE Example

Figure- 2 SMOTE example

 

4 Phase 3: – Feature Reduction

4.1 LDA

LDA stands for Linear Discriminant analysis supervised technique are commonly used for classification problem.  On this feature reduction account continuous independent variable and output categorical variable. It is multivariate analysis technique. LDA analyse by comparing mean of the variables.  Main goal of LDA is differentiate classes in low dimension space. LDA is similar to PCA (Principal component analysis) but in addition LDA maximize the separation between multiple classes. LDA is a dimensionality reduction technique where creating synthetic feature from linear combination of original data set then discard less important feature. LDA calculate class variance, it maximize between class variance and minimize within class variance. Table-2 display the process steps of LDA.

LDA Process

Table- 2 LDA process

5 Phase 5: – Base Model

Here we consider two base model ensemble random forest and MLP classifier.

5.1 Random Forest

Random forest is an ensemble (Bagging) method where group of weak learner (decision tree) come together to form a strong leaner. Random forest is a supervised algorithm which is used for regression and classification problem. Random forests create several decisions tree for predictions and provide solution by voting (classification) or mean (regression) value. Working process of Random forest given below (Table -3).

Random Forest

Table-3 Random Forest process

When training a Random forest root node contains a sample of bootstrap dataset and the feature is as same as original dataset. Suppose the dataset is D and contain d record and m number of columns. From the dataset D random forest first randomly select sample of rows (d) with replacement and sample of features (n) and give it to the decision tree. Suppose Random forest created several decision trees like T1, T2, T3, T4 . . . Tn. Then randomly selected dataset D = d + n is given to the decision tree T1, T2, T3, T4 . . . Tn where D < D, m > n and d > d.  After taking the dataset decision tree give the prediction for binary classification 1 or 0 then aggregating the decision and select the majority voted result. Figure-3 describes the structure of random forest process.

Random Forest Process

Figure- 3 Random Forest process

On Random forest base learner Decision Tree grows complete depth where bias (properly train on training dataset) is low and variance is high (when implementing test data give big error) called overfitting. On Random forest using multiple decision trees where each Decision tree is high variance but when combining all decision trees with the respect of majority vote then high variance converted into low variance because using row and feature sampling with replacement and taking the majority vote where decision is not depend on one decision tree.

CART (Classification and Regression Tree) is binary segmentation technique. CART is a Gini’s impurity index based classical algorithm to split a dataset and build a decision tree. By splitting a selected dataset CART created two child nodes repeatedly and builds a tree until the data no longer be split. There are three steps CART algorithm follow:

  1. Find best split for each features. For each feature in binary split make two groups of the ordered classes. That means possibility of split for k classes is k-1. Find which split is maximized and contain best splits (one for each feature) result.
  2. Find the best split for nodes. From step 1 find the best one split (from all features) which maximized the splitting criterion.
  3. Split the best node from step 2 and repeat from step 1 until fulfil the stopping criterion.

 

For splitting criteria CART use GINI index impurity algorithm to calculate the purity of split in a decision tree. Gini impurity randomly classified the labels with the same distribution in the dataset. A Gini impurity of 0 (lowest) is the best possible impurity and it is achieve when everything is in a same class. Gini index varies from 0 to 1. 0 indicate the purity of class where only one class exits or all element under a specific class. 1 indicates that elements are randomly distributed across various classes. And 0.5 indicate equal elements distributed over classes. Gini index (GI) described by mathematically that sum of squared of probabilities of each class (pi) deducted from one (Equation-5).

Gini Impurities

Equation – 5 Gini impurities

Here (Equation-5) pi represent the probability (probability of p+ or yes and probability of p- or no) of distinct class with classified element. Suppose randomly selected feature (a1) which has 8 yes and 4 no. After the split right had side (b1 on equation-6) has 4 yes and 4 no and left had side (b2 on equation – 7) has 4 yes and 0 no. here b2 is a pure split (leaf node) because only one class yes is present. By using the GI (Gini index) formula for b1 and b2:-

Equation- 6 & 7 – Gini Impurity b1 & Gini Impurity b2

Here for b1 value 0.5 indicates that equal element (yes and no) distribute over classes which is not pure split. And b2 value 0 indicates pure split. On GINI impurity indicates that when probability (yes or no) increases GINI value also increases. Here 0 indicate pure split and .5 indicate equal split that means worst situation. After calculating the GINI index for b1 and b2 now calculate the reduction of impurity for data point a1. Here total yes 8 (b1 and b2 on Equation – 8) and total no 4 (b1) so total data is 12 on a1. Below display the weighted GINI index for feature a1:

Total data point on b1 with Gini index (m) = 8/12 * 0.5 = 0.3333

Total data point on b2 with Gini index (n) = 4/12 * 0 = 0

Weighted Gini index for feature a1 = m + n = 0.3333

Equation- 8 Gini Impurity b1 & b2

After computing the weighted Gini value for every feature on a dataset taking the highest value feature as first node and split accordingly in a decision tree. Gini is less costly to compute.

5.2 Multilayer Perceptron Classifier (MLP Classifier)

Multilayer perceptron classifier is a feedforward neural network utilizes supervised learning technique (backpropagation) for training. MLP Classifier combines with multiple perceptron (hidden) layers. For feedforward taking input send combining with weight bias and then activation function from one hidden layer output goes to other hidden and this process continuing until reached the output. Then output calculates the error with error algorithm. These errors send back with backpropagation for weight adjustment by decreasing the total error and process is repeated, this process is call epoch. Number of epoch is determined with the hyper-parameter and reduction rate of total error.

5.2.1 Back-Propagation

Backpropagation is supervised learning algorithm that is used to train neural network. A neural network consists of input layer, hidden layer and output layer and each layer consists of neuron. So a neural network is a circuit of neurons. Backpropagation is a method to train multilayer neural network the updating of the weights of neural network and is done in such a way so that the error observed can be reduced here, error is only observed in the output layer and that error is back propagated to the previous layers and previous layer is proportionally updated weight. Backpropagation maintain chain rule to update weight. Mainly three steps on backpropagation are (Table-4):

Step Process
Step 1 Forward Pass
Step 2 Backward Pass
Step 3 Sum of all values and calculate updated weight value with Chain – rules.

Table-4 Back-Propagation process

5.2.2 Forward pass/ Forward propagation

Forward propagation is the process where input layer send the input value with randomly selected weight and bias to connected neuron and inside neuron selected activation function combine them and forward to other connected neuron layer after layer then give an output with the help of output layer. Below (Figure-4) display the forward propagation.

Foreward Pass

Figure-4 Forward passes

Input layer take the input of X (X1, X2) combine with randomly selected weight for each connection and with fixed bias (different hidden layer has different bias) send it to first hidden layer where first multiply the input with corresponding weight and added all input with single bias then selected activation function (may different form other layer) combine all input and give output according to function and this process is going on until reach in output layer. Output layer give the output like Y (Y1, Y2) (here output is binary classification as an example) according to selected activation function.

5.2.3 Backward Pass

After calculating error (difference between Forward pass output and actual output) backward pass try to minimize the error with optimisation function by sending backward with proportionally distribution and maintain a chain rule. Backward pass distribution the error in such a way where weighted value is taking under consideration. Below (Figure-5) diagram display the Backward pass process.

Backward Pass

Figure-5 Backward passes

Backpropagation push back the error which is calculated with error function or loss function for update proportional distribution with the help of optimisation algorithm. Division of Optimisation algorithm given below on Figure – 6

Optimisation Algorithms

Figure -6 Division of Optimisation algorithms

Gradient decent calculate gradient and update value by increases or decreases opposite direction of gradients unit and try to find the minimal value. Gradient decent update just one time for whole dataset but stochastic gradient decent update on each training sample and it is faster than normal gradient decent. Gradient decent can be improve by tuning parameter like learning rate (0 to 1 mostly use 0.5). Adagrad use time step based parameter to compute learning rate for every parameter. Adam is Adaptive Moment Estimation. It calculates different parameter with different learning rate. It is faster and performance rate is higher than other optimization algorithm. On the other way Adam algorithm is squares the calculated exponential weighted moving average of gradient.

5.2.4 Chain – rules

Backpropagation maintain chain-rules to update weighted value. On chain-rules backpropagation find the derivative of error respect to any weight. Suppose E is output error. w is weight for input a and bias b and ac neuron output respect of activation function and summation of bias with weighted input (w*a) input to neuron is net. So partial derivative for error respect to weight is ∂E / ∂w display the process on figure-7.

Figure- 7 Partial derivative for error respect to weight

On the chain rules for backward pass to find (error respect to weight) ∂E / ∂w = ∂E / ∂ac * ∂ac / ∂net * ∂net / ∂w. here find to error respect to weight are error respect to output of activation function multiply by activation function output respect to input in a neuron multiply by input in a neuron respect to weight.

5.2.5 Activation function

Activation function is a function which takes the decision about neuron to activate or deactivate. If the activate function activate the neuron then it will give an output on the basis of input. Input in a activation function is sum of input multiply with corresponding weight and adding the layered bias.  The main function of a activate function is non-linearity output of a neuron.

Activation Function

Figure-8 Activation function

Figure – 8 display a neuron in a hidden layer. Here several input (1, 2, 3) with corresponding weight (w1, w2, w3) putting in a neuron input layer where layer bias add with summation of multiplication with input and weight. Equation-9 display the output of an activate function.

Output from activate function y = Activate function (Ʃ (weight * input) + bias)

y = f (Ʃ (w*x) +b)

Equation- 9 Activate function

There are many activation functions like linear function for regression problem, sigmoid function for binary classification problem where result either 0 or 1, Tanh function which is based on sigmoid function but mathematically shifted version and values line -1 to 1. RELU function is Rectified linear unit. RELU is less expensive to compute.

5.2.6 Sigmoid

Sigmoid is a squashing activate function where output range between 0 and 1. Sigmoidal name comes from Greek letter sigma which looks like letter S when graphed. Sigmoid function is a logistic type function, it mainly use in output layer in neural network. Sigmoid is non-linear, fixed output range (between 0 and 1), monotonic (never decrees or never increases) and continuously differentiated function. Sigmoid function is good at classification and output from sigmoid is nonlinear. But Sigmoid has a vanishing gradient problem because output variable is very less to change in input variable. Figure- 9 displays the output of a Sigmoid and derivative of Sigmoid. Here x is any number (positive or negative). On sigmoid function 1 is divided by exponential negative input with adding 1.

Sigmoid

Figure – 9 Sigmoid Functions

4.5.2.7 RELU

RELU stands for Rectified Linear Units it is simple, less expensive in computation and rectifies the gradient vanishing problem. RELU is nonlinear activation function. It gives output either positive (infinity) or 0. RELU has a dying problem because if neurons stop for responding to variation because of gradient is 0 or nothing has to change. Figure- 10 displays the output of an RELU and derivative of RELU. Here x is any positive input and if x is grater then 0 give the output as x or give output 0. RELU function gives the output maximum value of input, here max (0, x).

Relu Activation Function

Figure – 10 RELU Function

4.5.2.8 Cost / loss function (Binary Cross-Entropy)

Cost or loss function compare the predictive value (model outcome) with actual value and give a quantitative value which give the indication about how much good or bad the prediction is.

Cost Function

Figure- 11 Cost function work process

Figure-11 x1 and x2 are input in a activate function f(x) and output y1_out which is sum of weighted input added with bias going through activate function. After model output activate function compare the output with actual output and give a quantitative value which indicate how good or bad the prediction is.

There are many type of loss function but choosing of optimal loss function depends on the problem going to be solved such as regression or classification. For binary classification problem binary cross entropy is used to calculate cost. Equation-10 displays the binary cross entropy where y is actual binary value and yp predictive outcome range 0 and 1. And i is scalar vale range between 1 to model output size (N).

Binary Crossentropy

Equation-10 displays the binary cross entropy

6 Phase 6: – Evaluation

6.1 Confusion matrix

In a classification confusion matrix describe the performance of actual value against predictive value. Confusion Matrix does the performance measurement. So confusion matrix classifies and display predicted and actual value (Visa, S., Ramsay 2011).

Confusion Matrix

Table- 5 Confusion Matrix

Confusion Matrix (Table-5) combines with True Positive (TP), True Negative (TN), False Positive (FP), and False Negative (FN). True Positive is prediction positive and true. True Negative is prediction negative and that is true. False positive is prediction positive and it’s false. False negative is prediction negative and that is false. False positive is known as Type1 error and false negative is known as Type 2 error. Confusion matrix can able to calculate several list of rates which are given below on Table- 6.

Here    N = Total number of observation, TP = True Positive, TN = True Negative

FP = False Positive, FN = False Negative, Total Actual No (AN) = TN + FP,

Total Predictive Yes (PY) = FP + TP. Total Actual Yes (AY) = FN + TP

Rate

 

Description Mathematical Description
Accuracy Classifier, overall how often correctly identified  (TP+TN) / N
Misclassification Rate Classifier, overall how often wrongly identified (FP + FN) / N
True Positive Rate

(Sensitivity / Recall)

Classifier, how often predict correctly yes when it is actually yes.  TP / AY
False Positive Rate Classifier, how often predict wrongly yes when it is actually no.  FP / AN
True Negative Rate

(Specificity)

Classifier, how often predict correctly no when it is actually no.  TN / AN
Precision Classifier how often predict yes when it is correct.  TP / PY
Prevalence Yes conditions how often occur in a sample. AY / N

Table – 6 Confusion matrixes Calculation

From confusion matrix F1 score can be calculated because F1 score related to precision and recall. Higher F1 score is better. If precision or recall any one goes down F1 score also go down.

F1 = \frac{2 * Precision * Recall}{Precision + Recall}

4.6.2 ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curve

In statistics ROC is represent in a graph with plotting a curve which describe a binary classifiers performance as its differentiation threshold is varied. ROC (Equation-11) curve created true positive rate (TPR) against false positive rate (FPR). True positive rate also called as Sensitivity and False positive rate also known as Probability of false alarm. False positive rate also called as a probability of false alarm and it is calculated as 1 – Specificity.

True Positive Rate = \frac{True Positive}{True Positive + False Negative} = Recall or Sensivity

False Positive Rate = \frac{True Negative}{True Negative + False Positive} = 1 - Specificity

Equation- 11 ROC

So ROC (Receiver Operation Characteristic) curve allows visual representation between sensitivity and specificity associated with different values of the test result (Grzybowski, M. and Younger, J.G., 1997)

On ROC curve each point has different Threshold level. Below (Figure – 12) display the ROC curve. Higher the area curve covers is better that means high sensitivity and high specificity represent more accuracy. ROC curve also represent that if classifier predict more often true than it has more true positive and also more false positive. If classifier predict true less often then fewer false positive and also fewer true positive.

ROC Curve

ROC Curve

Figure – 12 ROC curve description

4.6.3 AUC (Area under Curve)

Area under curve (AUC) is the area surrounded by the ROC curve and AUC also represent the degree of separability that means how good the model to distinguished between classes. Higher the AUC value represents better the model performance to separate classes. AUC = 1 for perfect classifier, AUC = 0 represent worst classifier, and AUC = 0.5 means has no class separation capacity. Suppose AUC value is 0.6 that means 60% chance that model can classify positive and negative class.

Figure- 13 to Figure – 16 displays an example of AUC where green distribution curve for positive class and blue distribution curve for negative class. Here threshold or cut-off value is 0.5 and range between ‘0’ to ‘1’. True negative = TN, True Positive = TP, False Negative = FN, False Positive = FP, True positive rate = TPR (range 0 to 1), False positive rate = FPR (range 0 to 1).

On Figure – 13 left distribution curve where two class curves does not overlap that means both class are perfectly distinguished. So this is ideal position and AUC value is 1.  On the left side ROC also display that TPR for positive class is 100% occupied.

ROC distributions (perfectly distinguished

ROC distributions (perfectly distinguished

Figure – 14 two class overlap each other and raise false positive (Type 1), false negative (Type 2) errors. Here error could be minimize or maximize according to threshold. Suppose here AUC = 0.6, that means chance of a model to distinguish two classes is 60%. On ROC curve also display the curve occupied for positive class is 60%.

ROC distributions (class partly overlap distinguished)

ROC distributions (class partly overlap distinguished)

Figure- 15 displayed that positive and negative overlap each other. Here AUC value is 0.5 or near to 0.5. On this position classifier model does not able distinguish positive and negative classes. On left side ROC curve become straight that means TPR and FPR are equal.

ROC distributions (class fully overlap distinguished)

ROC distributions (class fully overlap distinguished)

Figure- 16 positive and negative class swap position and on this position AUC = 0. That means classified model predict positive as a negative and negative as a positive. On the left ROC curve display that curve on FPR side fully fitted.

ROC distributions (class swap position distinguished)

ROC distributions (class swap position distinguished)

7 Summaries

This paper describes a data mining process flow and related model and its algorithm with textual representation. One hot encoding create dummy variable for class features and min-max scaling scale the data in a single format. Balancing by SMOTE data where Euclidian distance calculates the distance in-between nearest neighbour to produce synthetic data under minority class. LDA reduce the distance inside class and maximise distance in-between class and for two class problem give a single dimension features which is less costly to calculate accuracy by base algorithm (random forest and MLP classifier).  Confusion matrix gives the accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity which is help to take a decision about base algorithm. AUC and ROC curve also represent true positive rate against false positive rate which indicate base algorithm performance.

Base algorithm Random forest using CART with GINI impurity for feature selection to spread the tree. Here CART is selected because of less costly to run. Random forest algorithm is using bootstrap dataset to grow trees, and aggregation using majority vote to select accuracy.

MLP classifier is a neural network algorithm using backpropagation chain-rule to reducing error. Here inside layers using RLU activation function. Output layers using Sigmoid activation function and binary cross entropy loss function calculate the loss which is back propagate with Adam optimizer to optimize weight and reduce loss.

References:

  1. Visa, S., Ramsay, B., Ralescu, A.L. and Van Der Knaap, E., 2011. Confusion Matrix-based Feature Selection. MAICS, 710, pp.120-127.
  2. Grzybowski, M. and Younger, J.G., 1997. Statistical methodology: III. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Academic Emergency Medicine, 4(8), pp.818-826.