Machine-Learning-Notes

Collection of my hand-written notes, lectures pdfs, and tips for applying ML in problem solving.
Resource are mostly from online course platforms like DataCamp, Coursera and Udacity.

Table of contents

• Machine Learning Notes
• Pratical Tips in Applying Machine Learning Algorithms
  • Feature pre-processing and feature generation
    • Feature preprocessing
    • Feature generation
  • Dealing with missing values
  • Feature extraction from text and images
    • Text features
    • Images
  • Improve performance of clustering (unsupervised learning)
  • Decide the number of clusters (unsupervised learning)
  • PCA: decide the number of principal components
  • Visualizing high dimential data using t-SNE
• Creation
• Last update
• Claim of rights

Machine Learning Notes

Hard-written notes and Lecture pdfs from Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng on Coursera.

• Week1: Linear regression with one variable

  • Machine learning defination
  • Supervised / Unsupervised Learning
  • Linear regression with one variable
  • Cost function, learning rate
  • Batch gradient descent

• Week2: Linear regression with multiple variables

  • Multivariable linear regression
  • Normal equation method
  • Vectorization

• Week3: Logistic Regressio and Regularization

  • Classification
  • Logistic regression: hypothesis representation, decision boundrary, cost function, gradient descent.
  • Optimization algorithms: Conjugate gradient, BFGS, L-BFGS
  • Multi-class classification: One-vs-All classification
  • Overfitting: reduce feature space; regularization.
  • Regularization and regularized linear/logistic regression, gradient descent

• Week4: Neural Networks: Representation

  • Nonlinear hypothesis
  • Motivation, representation
  • Forward propagation algorithm
  • Learning features: gate logic realization

• Week5: Neural Networks: Learning

  • Classification problem
  • Cost function
  • Back propagation algorithm
  • Gradient checking
  • Random initialization: symmetry breaking
  • Put it together

• Week6: Evaluate a Learning Algorithm

  • Decide what to try next
  • Evaluate a hypothesis: training / testing data spliting
  • Test error / Misclassification error
  • Model selection: chosse right degree of polynomial
  • Cross validation
  • Diagnositic of bias VS variance
  • Bias-Variance trade off: choose regularization parameter
  • Bias-Variance leanring curve
  • Debugging a learning algorithm
  • Neural networks and regularization
  • Machine learning system design: recommandations and examples
  • Error matrics for skewed classes: precission recall trade off, F score

• Week7: Support Vector Machines

  • Large margin classification
  • Cost function
  • Decision boundrary
  • Kernels and similarity function, Mercer's Theroem
  • Linear kernel, gaussian kernel, poly kernel, chi-square kernel, etc
  • Choosing the landmarks
  • SVM parameters and multi-class classification
  • Logistic regression VS SVMs

• Week8: Unsupervised Learning: Clustering, Dimentionality Reduction and PCA

  • Clustering and application
  • K-Means algorithm
  • Optimization objective
  • Random initialization
  • Choose the number of clusters
  • Dimentionality Reduction: data compression and visualization
  • Principal Componant Analysis: formulation, algorithm, reconstruction from compressed representation, advices

• Week9: Unsupervised Learning: Anormaly Detection and Recommender Systems

  • Density estimaiton
  • Algorithm
  • Building an anormaly detection system
  • Anormaly detection VS supervised learning
  • Chossing features: non-guassian feature transform, error analysis
  • Multi-variable gaussian distribution
  • Recommender systems: content-based recommendations
  • Recommender systems: Collaborative filtering
  • Low-rank matrix factorization
  • Recommender systems: mean normalization

• Week10: Large Scale Machine Learning: Stochastic Gradient Descent and Online Learning

  • STochastic gradient descent(SGD)
  • Mini-batch gradient descent
  • SGD Convergence problem
  • Online learning
  • Map-reduce and data parallism

• Week11: Application Example: Photo OCR

  • Photo OCR piplines
  • Sliding window detection
  • Artifical data synthesis
  • Ceiling Analysis

Pratical Tips in Applying Machine Learning Algorithms

In this section I'll summarize a few important points when applying machine learning in real coding precedure, such as the importance of standardize features in some situiation, as well as normalize samples in some other situations. These practical experience are from exercises on DataCamp, Coursera and Udacity. More summaries will be added as the learning goes.

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)

EDA helps to get comfortable with data and get intuitive of it.

Preliminary steps of EDA

• Get domain knowledge: helps to deeper understand of the problem
• Check if the data is intuitive: check if agrees with domain knowledge
• Understand how the data is generated: crucial to set up a proper validation

Visualization tools

• Explore individual features
  • Histogram
  • Plot (index vs value)
  • Statistics
• Explore feature relations
  • Pairs
    • Scatter plot, scatter matrix
    • Corrplot
  • Groups
    • Corrplot + clustering (rearrange cols and rows in corr-matrix to find feature groups)
    • plot(index vs feature statistics)

Feature cleaning

• Check duplicated cols / rows in both training and test set
• Check meaningless cols in both training and test set
• Check uncovered cols in test set by training set

Check for data leaks (coverd by later section)

Feature pre-processing and feature generation

Source: Coursera "How to win a data science competition: learn from to kagglers

Feature preprocessing

• Numeric feature

  • Tree based method doesn't depend on scaling
  • Non-tree based models hugely depend on scaling
  • Most often used preprocessing methods:
    • MinMaxScaler -> to [0, 1]
    • StandardScaler -> to 0 mean and 1 std
    • Rand -> set spaces between sorted values to be equal
    • np.log(1 + x) or np.sqrt(1 + x)
  • Consider outliers and and miss valuses (discussed below)

• Categorical and ordinal feature -Oridinal feature: categorical features that are sorted in some meaningful order.

  • One hot encoding: often used for non-tree based models
  • Label encoding: maps categories to numbers w/o extra numerical handling
  • Frequency encoding: maps categories to their appearing frequencies in the data
  • Label and frequency encoding are ofen used for tree based
  • Interation between categorical features: two individual categorical featureas A and B can be treated as a 2D feature, can help linear models and KNN

• Datetime features

  • Can generate features like: periodicity, time since, difference between date

• Cooridinates

  • Usually additional data will help
  • Can be used to generate new features like distances, raidus
  • Interesting to study centers of clusters
  • May consider rotated cooridinates or other reference frames

Feature generation

Feature generation is powered by:

• Prior knowledge
• Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)

Dealing with missing values

Source: Coursera "How to win a data science competition: learn from to kagglers
A few fact need to know about missing values:

• Missing values are usually labeled: NA, None, N/A
• Missing values can be hidden: -1 or sigularities
• Histgram can be helpful to find missing values

Be very careful when dealing missing values, miss handling can screw up the featue !
Usually, **avoid filling nans before feature generation **
Ways to deal with missing values

• Fillna approach
  • fill with numbers out of feature range, e.g. -1, -999, etc. Helpful for trees to treat missing values in a seperate way
  • mean, median. Can be beneficial to simple non-linear models and NN, but trees may suffer.
  • Reconstruct value:
    • In timeseries:
• isnull feature:
  • Create new feature column isnull to indicate value missing or not
  • Can help tree based models and NN, but adds extra data
• Xgboost can handle NaNs directly

Useful Resources:

• Preprocessing using Scikit-learn
• Discover feature engineering, how to engineer features and how to get good at it
• Quora: What are some best practices in feature engineering

Feature extraction from text and images

Text features

The underlying idea a text feature extraction is: Text --> Vectors
Preprocessing and post-processing can be helpful.

• Pre-processing

  • Lowercase
  • Lemmatization
  • Stemming
  • Stopwords

• Bag of words

• N-grams

• Embeddings (~ word2Vec)

• Post-processing

  • Usually needs post-processing for modles depend on scalings, e.g. KNN, non-tree numerical model, NN
  • Post-processing aim: boost importantce of more related features while decreasing less related features
  • Post-processing methods: Term-Frequency (TF), Inverse Document Frequency (iDF), TFiDF,

Images

Using pre-trained models is better than train the model when sample size is small. There are pre-trained models in Keras

Useful Resources:

• Imaging classification with a pre-trained deep neural network
• Introduction to Word Embedding Models with Word2Vec

Validation Strategies

Main cross-validation strategies:

• Holdout: if data is homogeneous(can findout by different fold's score in K-Fold CV), to save on computation power.
• KFold: large data sets
• Leave-One-Out (LOOCV): for small data sets

Stratification: preserve the same target distribution over different folds, is extremely useful / important when:

• Have small data set
• Un-even distributed categories
• Multi-class classfication problems

Also note that: Overfitting in training set doesn't necessary mean overfitting in test set.

Split strategies

Split should always try to mimic train-test split by the data provider !
Different splitting startegies can differ significantly, general split methods are:

• Random, rowwise: rows are indepedent
• Timewise: time moving window
• By id: clustering

Validation problems

Possible problems may encounter during the submission stage:

• LeaderBoard score is consistently higher / lower that validations score
• LeaderBoard score is not correlated with validation score at all

The reason roots in we didn't mimic train-test split of the data by the provider. In specific:

• Overfit
• We may already have quite different scores in Kfold CV
• too little data in public leaderboard
• incorrect train/test split
• train and test data are form different distributions --> Leader board probing, e.g. calc mean for the taining and test dataset, shift predictions by the mean difference.

Expect LeaderBoard shuffle

Reasons:

• Randomness
• Little amount of data
• Different public private test distributions

Data Leakadge

Data leaks are the mistakes that the provider included important unexpected information about the final target. It can even make the competition meaningless, one has to treat it in the right way, depend what one want to achieve.

There are different kinds of data leaks:

• Leaks in time seris

  • Split should be done on time: train/test may contain some future data that we are trying to predict

• Unexpected information

  • Meta data: e.g. image creation date
  • Information in IDs: may be hashing from the targeted value
  • Row order

Improve performance of clustering (unsupervised learning)

As known to all, clustering is a unsupervised learning method based on minimizing the total initia for clusters, with given the number of clusters. Importantly, one has to realize that there are two situations that could lead to poor performance by clustering method (e.g. KMeans) if not taken care of:

• Case 1: When many features are not on the same scale, e.g. 10 people v.s. 1000000 dollars.
• Case 2: When there is large variance between samples while only the trends are of interest, e.g. stock price of different companies over the years.

Reason that the above two case matters: the reason roots in "Larger variance makes bigger influence".

Solution to case 1: to reduce the impact of features with large variance, standardize the feature. Each feature is normalized to their standard deviation after substracting their mean, e.g. StandardScaler in sklearn.preprocessing.

Solution to case 2: this is not widely known, one needs to normalize samples. Each sample (i.e. each row of the data matrix) with at least one non zero component is rescaled independently of other samples so that its norm (l1 or l2) equals one. Note that this works for samples, compare to case 1 which works for features. e.g. Normalizer in sklearn.preprocessing.

The above solution could lead to huge imporvement for clustering.

Decide the number of clusters (unsupervised learning)

There are always the case when perforing clustering on samples but one doesn't know how many groups to cluster into, due to the nature of unsupervised learning. While there are two main methods that clustering can be perfomed, there are different ways to decide on the number of result clusters:

• KMeans: "elbow" on initia vs n_clusters plot, e.g. model.initia_ after fit model using sklearn.cluster.KMeans. Where initia is "Sum of squared distances of samples to their closest cluster center" (sklearn.cluster.KMeans).
• Hierarchical clustering: plot dendrogram and make decision on the maximum distance. e.g. use linkage, dendrogram and fcluster from scipy.cluster.hierarchical.

PCA: decide the number of principal components

When performing PCA for dimentionality reduction, one of the key steps is to make decision of the number of principal components. The underlie principle of PCA is that it rotates and shifts the feature space to find the principle axis which explains the maximal variance in data. Due to this feature, as similar to clustering, one has to take care of the variance in the feature space. Also note that PCA does not do feature selection as Lasso or tree model. The way to make decision on how many principal components is to make the bar plot of "explained variance" vs "pca feature", and choose the features that explains large portion of the variance. By doing this, one actually discovers the "intrinsic dimension of the data".

Visualizing high dimential data using t-SNE

High dimentional data is usually hard to visualize, expecially for unsupervised learning. PCA is on option, while another option t-SNE (t distrubuted stocastic neighbor embedding) can map high dementional data to 2D space while approximately preserves the nearness of data. e.g. using TSNE from sklearn.maniford.

Creation

2017.12.15 - 2018.05.05
NOTABILITY Version 7.2 by &copy Ginger Labs, Inc.

Last update

July. 01, 2018

Claim of rights

All original lecture content and slids copy rights belongs to Andrew Ng, the lecture notes and and summarization are based on the lecture contents and free to use and distribute according to GPL.