S3Dlib, Matplotlib, 3D rendering – spheres in front of a surface

Recently, I needed a certain type of 3D-illustration for a post series about cosmology. I wanted to show a 2-dimensional manifold above a mesh grid with respective coordinate lines on the surface. In front of the surface I wanted to place some opaque spheres. Such illustrations are often used in physics to demonstrate the effect of some objects on a physical quantity – e.g. of spherical bodies on the gravitational potential or on a component of the metric tensor of space-time.

The simple problem to get a correct rendering of objects along a defined line of view upon a 3D scene posed a problem for Matplotlib’s 3D renderer for multiple objects in a 3D axis frame (created by ax = plt.axes(projection=’3d’)). The occlusion of objects was displayed wrongly for most view ports and viewing angles.

In this post, I briefly want to outline how this problem can be solved with the help of S3Dlib. As a beginner regarding the use of S3Dlib, I had to overcome some problems there, too. So, this small exercise with some options of S3Dlib might be interesting for some readers which want to use Python and Matplotlib for rendering simple 3D scenes.

The following plot shows what I wanted to achieve:

Correct rendering of two spheres in front of a surface by S3Dlib
Correct rendering of two spheres in front of a surface by S3Dlib
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Matplotlib, Jupyter and updating multiple interactive plots

For experiments in Machine Learning [ML] it is quite useful to see the development of some characteristic quantities during optimization processes for algorithms – e.g. the behaviour of the cost function during the training of Artificial Neural Networks. Beginners in Python the look for an option to continuously update plots by interactively changing or extending data from a running Python code.

Does Matplotlib offer an option for interactively updating plots? In a Jupyter notebook? Yes, it does. It is even possible to update multiple plot areas simultanously. The magic (meta) commands are “%matplotlib notebook” and “matplotlib.pyplot.ion()”.

The following code for a Jupyter cell demonstrates the basic principles. I hope it is useful for other ML- and Python beginners as me.

# Tests for dynamic plot updates
#-------------------------------
%matplotlib notebook
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import time

x = np.linspace(0, 10*np.pi, 100)
y = np.sin(x)

# The really important command for interactive plot updating
plt.ion()

# sizing of the plots figure sizes 
fig_size = plt.rcParams["figure.figsize"]
fig_size[0] = 8
fig_size[1] = 3

# Two figures 
# -----------
fig1 = plt.figure(1)
fig2 = plt.figure(2)

# first figure with two plot-areas with axes 
# --------------------------------------------
ax1_1 = fig1.add_subplot(121)
ax1_2 = fig1.add_subplot(122)

fig1.canvas.draw()

# second figure with just one plot area with axes
# -------------------------------------------------
ax2 = fig2.add_subplot(121)
line1, = ax2.plot(x, y, 'b-')
fig2.canvas.draw()

z= 32
b = np.zeros([1])
c = np.zeros([1])
c[0] = 1000

for i in range(z):
    # update data 
    phase = np.pi / z * i 
    line1.set_ydata(np.sin(0.5 * x + phase))
    b = np.append(b, [i**2])
    c = np.append(c, [1000.0 - i**2])
    
    # re-plot area 1 of fig1  
    ax1_1.clear()
    ax1_1.set_xlim (0, 100)
    ax1_1.set_ylim (0, 1000)
    ax1_1.plot(b)
    
    # re-plot area 2 of fig1  
    ax1_2.clear()
    ax1_2.set_xlim (0, 100)
    ax1_2.set_ylim (0, 1000)
    ax1_2.plot(c)
    
    # redraw fig 1 
    fig1.canvas.draw()

    # redraw fig 2 with updated data  
    fig2.canvas.draw()
    
    time.sleep(0.1)

As you see clearly we defined two different “figures” to be plotted – fig1 and fig2. The first figure ist horizontally splitted into two plotting areas with axes “ax1_1” and “ax1_2”. Such a plotting area is created via the “fig1.add_subplot()” function and suitable parameters. The second figure contains only one plotting area “ax2”.

Then we update data for the plots within a loop witrh a timer of 0.1 secs. We clear the respective areas, redefine the axes and perform the plot for the updated data via the function “plt.figure.canvas.draw()”.

In our case we see two parabolas develop in the upper figure; the lower figure shows a sinus-wave moving slowly from the right to the left.

The following plots show screenshots of the output in a Jupyter notebook in th emiddle of the loop and at its end:

You see that we can deal with 3 plots at the same time. Try it yourself!

Hint:
There is small problem with the plot sizing when you have used the zoom-functionality of Chrome, Chromium or Firefox. You should work with interactive plots with the browser-zoom set to 100%.

Linux, OpenBlas and Numpy matrix multiplications – avoid using all processor cores

Recently, I tested the propagation methods of a small Python3/Numpy class for a multilayer perceptron [MLP]. I unexpectedly ran into a performance problem with OpenBlas.

The problem had to do with the required vectorized matrix operations for forward propagation – in my case through an artificial neural network [ANN] with 4 layers. In a first approach I used 784, 100, 50, 10 neurons in 4 consecutive layers of the MLP. The weight matrices had corresponding dimensions.

The performance problem was caused by extensive multi-threading; it showed a strong dependency on mini-batch sizes and on basic matrix dimensions related to the neuron numbers per layer:

  • For the given relatively small number of neurons per layer and for mini-batch sizes above a critical value (N > 255) OpenBlas suddenly occupied all processor cores with a 100% work load. This had a disastrous impact on performance.
  • For neuron numbers as 784, 300, 140, 10 OpenBlas used all processor cores with a 100% work load right from the beginning, i.e. even for small batch sizes. With a seemingly bad performance over all batch sizes – but decreasing somewhat with large batch sizes.

This problem has been discussed elsewhere with respect to the matrix dimensions relevant for the core multiplication and summation operations – i.e. the neuron numbers per layer. However, the vectorizing aspect of matrix multiplications is interesting, too:

One can imagine that splitting the operations for multiple independent test samples is in principle ideal for multi-threading. So, using as many processor cores as possible (in my case 8) does not look like a wrong decision of OpenBlas at first.

Then I noticed that for mini-batch sizes “N” below a certain number (N < 250) the system only seemed to use up to 3-4 cores; so there remained plenty of CPU capacity left for other tasks. Performance for N < 250 was better by at least a factor of 2 compared to a situation with an only slightly bigger batch size (N ≥ 260). I got the impression that OpenBLAS under certain conditions just decides to use as many threads as possible – which no good outcome.

In the last years I sometimes had to work with optimizing multi-threaded database operations on Linux systems. I often got the impression that you have to be careful and leave some CPU resources free for other tasks and to avoid heavy context switching. In addition bottlenecks appeared due to the concurrent access of may processes to the CPU cache. (RAM limitations were an additional factor; but this should not be the case for my Python program.) Furthermore, one should not forget that Python/Numpy experiments on Jupyter notebooks require additional resources to handle the web page output and page update on the browser. And Linux itself also requires some free resources.

So, I wanted to find out whether reducing the number of threads – or available cores – for Numpy and OpenBlas would be helpful in the sense of an overall gain in performance.

All data shown below were gathered on a desktop system with some background activity due to several open browsers, clementine and pulse-audio as active audio components, an open mail client (kontact), an open LXC container, open Eclipse with Pydev and open ssh connections. Program tests were performed with the help of Jupyter notebooks. Typical background CPU consumption looks like this on Ksysguard:

Most of the consumption is due to audio. Small spikes on one CPU core due to the investigation of incoming mails were possible – but always below 20%.

Basics

One of
the core ingredients to get an ANN running are matrix operations. More precisely: multiplications of 2-dim Numpy matrices (weight matrices) with input vectors. The dimensions of the weight matrices reflect the node-numbers of consecutive ANN-layers. The dimension of the input vector depends on the node number of the lower of two neighbor layers.

However, we perform such matrix operations NOT sequentially sample for sample of a collection of training data – we do it vectorized for so called mini-batches consisting of between 50 and 600000 individual samples of training data. Instead of operating with a matrix on just one feature vector of one training sample we use matrix multiplications whereby the second matrix often comprises many vectors of data samples.

I have described such multiplications already in a previous blog article; see Numpy matrix multiplication for layers of simple feed forward ANNs.

In the most simple case of an MLP with e.g.

  • an input layer of 784 nodes (suitable for the MNIST dataset),
  • one hidden layer with 100 nodes,
  • another hidden layer with 50 nodes
  • and an output layer of 10 nodes (fitting again the MNIST dataset)

and “mini”-batches of different sizes (between 20 and 20000). An input vector to the first hidden layer has a dimension of 100, so the weight matrix creating this input vector from the “output” of the MLP’s input layer has a shape of 784×100. Multiplication and summation in this case is done over the dimension covering 784 features. When we work with mini-batches we want to do these operations in parallel for as many elements of a mini-batch as possible.

All in all we have to perform 3 matrix operations

(784×100) matrix on (784)-vector, (100×50) matrix on (100)-vector, (50×10) matrix on (50) vector

on our example ANN with 4 layers. However, we collect the data for N mini-batch samples in an array. This leads to Numpy matrix multiplications of the kind

(784×100) matrix on an (784, N)-array, (100×50) matrix on an (100, N)-array, (50×10) matrix on an (50, N)-array.

Thus, we deal with matrix multiplications of two 2-dim matrices. Linear algebra libraries should optimize such operations for different kinds of processors.

The reaction of OpenBlas to an MLP with 4 layers comprising 784, 100, 50, 10 nodes

On my Linux system Python/Numpy use the openblas-library. This is confirmed by the output of command “np.__config__.show()”:

openblas_info:
    libraries = ['openblas', 'openblas']
    library_dirs = ['/usr/local/lib']
    language = c
    define_macros = [('HAVE_CBLAS', None)]
blas_opt_info:
    libraries = ['openblas', 'openblas']
    library_dirs = ['/usr/local/lib']
    language = c
    define_macros = [('HAVE_CBLAS', None)]
openblas_lapack_info:
    libraries = ['openblas', 'openblas']
    library_dirs = ['/usr/local/lib']
    language = c
    define_macros = [('HAVE_CBLAS', None)]
lapack_opt_info:
    libraries = ['openblas', 'openblas']
    library_dirs = ['/usr/local/lib']
    language = c
    define_macros = [('HAVE_CBLAS', None)]

and by

(ml1) myself@mytux:/projekte/GIT/ai/ml1/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/numpy/core> ldd  _multiarray_umath.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so
        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffe8bddf000)
        libopenblasp-r0-2ecf47d5.3.7.dev.so => /projekte/GIT/ai/ml1/lib/python3.6/site-packages/numpy/core/./../.libs/libopenblasp-r0-2ecf47d5.3.7.dev.so (0x00007fdd9d15f000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x00007fdd9ce27000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007fdd9cc09000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007fdd9c84f000)
        /lib64/ld-
linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fdd9f4e8000)
        libgfortran-ed201abd.so.3.0.0 => /projekte/GIT/ai/ml1/lib/python3.6/site-packages/numpy/core/./../.libs/libgfortran-ed201abd.so.3.0.0 (0x00007fdd9c555000)

In all tests discussed below I performed a series of calculations for different batch sizes

N = 50, 100, 200, 250, 260, 500, 2000, 10000, 20000

and repeated the full forward propagation 30 times (corresponding to 30 epochs in a full training series – but here without cost calculation and weight adjustment. I just did forward propagation.)

In a first experiment, I did not artificially limit the number of cores to be used. Measured response times in seconds are indicated in the following plot:

Runtime for a free number of cores to use and different batch-sizes N

We see that something dramatic happens between a batch size of 250 and 260. Below you see the plots for CPU core consumption for N=50, N=200, N=250, N=260 and N=2000.

N=50:

N=200:

N=250:

N=260:

N=2000:

The plots indicate that everything goes well up to N=250. Up to this point around 4 cores are used – leaving 4 cores relatively free. After N=260 OpenBlas decides to use all 8 cores with a load of 100% – and performance suffers by more than a factor of 2.

This result support the idea to look for an optimum of the number of cores “C” to use.

The reaction of OpenBlas to an MLP with layers comprising 784, 300, 140, 10 nodes

For a MLP with neuron numbers (784, 300, 140, 10) I got the red curve for response time in the plot below. The second curve shows what performance is possible with just using 4 cores:

Note the significantly higher response times. We also see again that something strange happens at the change of the batch-size from 250 to 260.

The 100% CPU
consumption even for a batch-size of only 50 is shown below:

Though different from the first test case also these plots indicate that – somewhat paradoxically – reducing the number of CPU cores available to OpenBlas could have a performance enhancing effect.

Limiting the number of available cores to OpenBlas

A bit of Internet research shows that one can limit the number of cores to use by OpenBlas e.g. via an environment variable for the shell, in which we start a Jupyter notebook. The relevant command to limit the number of cores “C” to 3 is :

export OPENBLAS_NUM_THREADS=3

Below you find plots for the response times required for the batch sizes N listed above and core numbers of

C=1, C=2, C=3, C=4, C=5, C=6, C=7, C=8 :

For C=5 I did 2 different runs; the different results for C=5 show that the system reacts rather sensitively. It changes its behavior for larger core number drastically.

We also find an overall minimum of the response time:
The overall optimum occurs for 400 < N < 500 for C=1, 2, 3, 4 – with the minimum region being broadest for C=3. The absolute minimum is reached on my CPU for C=4.

We understand from the plots above that the number of cores to use become hyper-parameters for the tuning of the performance of ANNs – at least as long as a standard multicore-CPU is used.

CPU-consumption

CPU consumption for N=50 and C=2 looks like:

For comparison see the CPU consumption for N=20000 and C=4:

CPU consumption for N=20000 and C=6:

We see that between C=5 and C=6 CPU resources get heavily consumed; there are almost no reserves left in the Linux system for C ≥ 6.

Dependency on the size of the weight-matrices and the node numbers

For a full view on the situation I also looked at the response time variation with node numbers for a given number of CPU cores.

For C=4 and node number cases

  • 784, 300, 140, 10
  • 784, 200, 100, 10
  • 784, 100, 50, 10
  • 784, 50, 20, 10

I got the following results:

There is some broad variation with the weight-matrix size; the bigger the weight-matrix the longer the calculation time. This is, of course, to be expected. Note that the variation with the batch-size number is relatively smooth – with an optimum around 400.

Now, look at the same plot for C=6:

Note that the response time is significantly bigger in all cases compared to the previous situation with C=4. In cases of a large matrix by around 36% for N=2000. Also the variation with batch-size is more pronounced.

Still, even with 6 cores you do not get factors between 1.4 and 2.0 as compared to the case of C=8 (see above)!

Conclusion

As I do not know what the authors of OpenBlas are doing exactly, I refrain from technically understanding and interpreting the causes of the data shown above.

However, some consequences seem to be clear:

  • It is a bad idea to provide all CPU cores to OpenBlas – which unfortunately is the default.
  • The data above indicate that using only 4 out of 8 core threads is reasonable to get an optimum performance for vectorized matrix multiplications on my CPU.
  • Not leaving at least 2 CPU cores free for other tasks is punished by significant performance losses.
  • When leaving the decision of how many cores to use to OpenBlas a critical batch-size may exist for which the performance suddenly breaks down due to heavy multi-threading.

Whenever you deal with ANN or MLP simulations on a standard CPU (not GPU!) you should absolutely care about how many cores and related threads you want to offer to OpenBlas. As far as I understood from some Internet articles the number of cores to be used can be not only be controlled by Linux (shell) environment variables but also by os-commands in a Python program. You should perform tests to find optimum values for your CPU.

Links

stackoverflow: numpy-suddenly-uses-all-cpus

stackoverflow: run-openblas-on-multicore

stackoverflow: multiprocessing-pool-makes-numpy-matrix-multiplication-slower

scicomp: why-isnt-my-matrix-vector-multiplication-scaling/1729

Setting the number of threads via Python
stackoverflow:
set-max-number-of-threads-at-runtime-on-numpy-openblas

codereview.stackexchange: better-way-to-set-number-of-threads-used-by-numpy

 

Numpy matrix multiplication for layers of simple feed forward ANNs

I move a small step forward on my trials as a beginner in machine learning. This is once again going to be an article from which experts on “Artificial Neural networks” [ANNs] will learn nothing new. But some of my readers may also be newbies both to Python, to numpy and to ANNs. For them this article may be helpful.

I shall have a brief look at some matrix (or array) operations which constitute important parts of the information propagation on ANNs. How would such operations look like in Python with Numpy? One should have a clear understanding of the so called “dot”-operation between multidimensional arrays in this context. Such operations can be performed highly optimized on GPUs – and whole sets of data samples can be handled in form of vectorized code instructions. I will try to explain this in form of matrix terms required to simulate information transport between some layers of a very simple network.

Propagation operations on ANNs

Basic Artificial Neural Networks consist of layers with neurons. Each layer has a defined number of neurons. Each neuron is connected with all neurons of the next layer (receiving neurons). The output “O(k, L)” of a neuron N(k,L) of Layer “L” to a neuron N(m,L+1) is multiplied by some “weight” W[(m, L+1),(k, L),].

The contributions of all neurons on layer “L” to N(m, L+1) are summed up. The result is then transformed by some local “activation” function and afterwards presented by N(m, L+1) as output which shall be transported to the neurons of layer L+2. The succession of such operations is called “propagation“.

At the core of propagation we, therefore, find operations which we can express in the following form :

Input vector at N(m, L+1) : I(m, L+1) = SUM(over_all_k) [ W[(m, L+1), (k, L)] * O(k, L) ]
Output vector at N(m, L+1) : O(m, L+1) = f_act( I(m, L+1) )

To make things simpler: Let us set f_act = 1. Then we get

O(m, L+1) = SUM(over all k) [ W[(m, L+1), (k,N)] * O(k, L) ]

The SUM is basically a matrix operations on vector O(k, L). If output vectors were always given by singular values in “k” rows (!) then we could write

O(L+1) = W(L, L+1) * O(L) )

Batches and numerical optimization of the matrix operations for propagation

In the past I have programmed gas flow simulations in exploding stars in Fortran/C and simulated cascaded production networks for Supply Chains in PHP. There, you work with deep and complicated layer structures, too. Therefore I felt well prepared for writing a small program to set up a simple artificial neural network with some hidden layers.

Something, you will find in literature (e.g. in the book of S. Rashka, “Python machine Learning”, 2016, PACKT Publishing] are remarks on batch based training. Rashka e.g. rightfully claims in his discussion of an example code that the use of mini-batches of input data sets is advantageous (see chapter 12, page 379 in the book mentioned above):

“Mini-batch learning has the advantage over online learning that we can make use of our vectorized implementations to improve computational efficiency.”

I swallowed this remark first without much thinking. As a physicist I had used highly optimized libraries for Linear Algebra operation on supercomputers with vector registers already 35 years ago. Ok, numpy can perform a matrix operation on some vector very fast, especially on GPUs – so what?

But when I tried to follow the basic line of programming of
Rashka for an ANN in Python, I suddenly found that I did not fully understand what the code was doing whilst handling batches of input data sets. The reason was that I had not at all grasped the full implications of the quoted remark. It indicated not just the acceleration of a matrix operation on one input vector; no, instead, it indicated that we could and should perform matrix operations in parallel on all input vectors given by a full series of many different data sets in a mini-batch collection.

So, we then want to perform an optimized matrix operation on another matrix of at least 2 dimensions. When you think about it, you will quickly understand that any kind of operation of one n-dim matrix on another matrix with more and different dimensions must be defined very precisely to avoid misunderstandings and miscalculations.

To make things simple:
Let us take a (3,5)-matrix A and a (10,3)-matrix B. What should a “dot“-like operation A * B mean in this case? Would it be suitable at all, regarding the matrix element arrangements in rows and columns?

I studied the numpy documentation on “numpy.dot(A, B)”. See e.g. here. Ooops, not fully trivial: “If A is an N-D array and B is an M-D array (where M>=2), it is a sum product over the last axis of A and the second-to-last axis of B”. The matrices must obviously be arranged in a suitable way ….

So, I decided to performing some simple matrix experiments to get a clear understanding. I assumed a fictitious ANN of three layers and some direct propagation between the layers. What does propagation mean in such a case, how is it expressed in matrix operation terms in Python and what does batch-handling mean in this context?

Three simple layers and a batch of input data sets

The following graphics shows my simple network:

Our batch has 10 data sets of test data for our ANN. Each data set describes 3 properties; thus the input layer “L1” has 3 nodes. Our “hidden” layer “L2” shall have 5 nodes and our output layer “L3” only 2 nodes.

Weight matrices and propagation operations

Now, let us define some simple matrices with input vectors for transportation and weight-matrices for the layer-connections with Python. All activation functions shall in our simple example just perform a multiplication by 1.

The input to layer “L1” – i.e. a batch of 10 data sets – shall be given by a matrix of 10 lines (dimension 1) and 3 columns (dimension 2)

import numpy as np
import scipy
import time 

A1 = np.ones((10,3))
A1[:,1] *= 2
A1[:,2] *= 4
print("\nMatrix of input vectors to layer L1:\n")
print(A1)


print("\nMatrix of input vectors to layer 1:\n")
print(A1)

Matrix of input vectors to layer 1:

Matrix of input vectors to layer L1:

[[1. 2. 4.]
 [1. 2. 4.]
 [1. 2. 4.]
 [1. 2. 4.]
 [1. 2. 4.]
 [1. 2. 4.]
 [1. 2. 4.]
 [1. 2. 4.]
 [1. 2. 4.]
 [1. 2. 4.]]

We now define the weight matrixW1” for transport between layer L1 and layer L2 as:

W1= np.random.randint(1, 10, 5*3)
W1 = w1.reshape(5,3)
print("\nMatrix of weights W1(L1, L2) :\n")
print(W1)

Matrix of weights W1(L1, L2) :

[[3 8 5]
 [4 9 7]
 [4 1 3]
 [8 8 4]
 [3 1 9]]


We set the first dimension to the number of nodes in the target layer (L2) and the second dimension to
the number of nodes in the lower preceding layer (here: L1). Expressed in the shape notation for an array “(dimension 1, dimension 2, …) “:

Shape of W : (dim 1, dim 2) = (node number of target layer, node number of preceding layer)

If we now tried a numpy “dot”-operation for our matrices

A2 = np.dot(W1, A1)

we would get an error:

ValueError: shapes (5,3) and (10,3) not aligned: 3 (dim 1) != 10 (dim 0)

Well, this is actually consistent with the numpy documentation: The last dimension of “W1” should be consistent with the second to last (=first) dimension of “strong>A1“.

What we need to do here is to transpose the matrix of our input vectors for our multiple data sets:

A1 = np.transpose(A1)
print("\nMatrix of output vectors of layer 1 to layer 2:\n")
print(A1)

Matrix of output vectors of layer 1 to layer 2:

[[1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1.]
 [2. 2. 2. 2. 2. 2. 2. 2. 2. 2.]
 [4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4.]]

Then

A2 = np.dot(W1, A1)
print("\n\nA2:\n")
print(A2)

A2:

[[39. 39. 39. 39. 39. 39. 39. 39. 39. 39.]
 [50. 50. 50. 50. 50. 50. 50. 50. 50. 50.]
 [18. 18. 18. 18. 18. 18. 18. 18. 18. 18.]
 [40. 40. 40. 40. 40. 40. 40. 40. 40. 40.]
 [41. 41. 41. 41. 41. 41. 41. 41. 41. 41.]]

Now, we need a weight matrix W2 between layer L1 and layer L2:

W2= np.random.randint(1, 3, 2*5)
W2 = W2.reshape(2,5)
print("\n\nW2:\n")
print(W2)

W2:
[[2 2 1 2 2]
 [2 2 2 2 1]]

We followed the same policy – and used the number of nodes in target layer L2 as the first dimension of the weight array.

Now, do we have to to anything with array A2, if we want to use it as an input for the next matrix operation ?

A3 = np.dot(W2, A2)

No, we do not need to change anything! “A2” has the required form, already. The second to last dimension in “A2” is 5 in our example – as is the last dimension in “W2“!

So, the following will work directly :

A3 = np.dot(W2, A2)
print("\n\nA3:\n")
print(A3)

A3:

[[358. 358. 358. 358. 358. 358. 358. 358. 358. 358.]
 [335. 335. 335. 335. 335. 335. 335. 335. 335. 335.]]

You can try out our complete “propagation” code in a Jupyter notebook cell.

import numpy as np
import scipy
import time 

A1 = np.ones((10,3))
A1[:,1] *= 2
A1[:,2] *= 4
print("\nMatrix of input vectors to layer L1:\n")
print(A1)


W1= np.random.randint(1, 10, 5*3)
W1 = W1.reshape(5,3)
print("\nMatrix of weights W1(L1, L2) :\n")
print(W1)

A1 = np.transpose(A1)
print("\nMatrix of output vectors of layer L1 to layer L2:\n")
print(A1)

A2 = np.dot(W1, A1)
print("\n\nA2:\n")
print(A2)

W2= np.random.randint(1, 3, 2*5)
W2 = W2.reshape(2,5)
print("\n\nW2:\n")
print(W2)

A3 = np.dot(W2, A2)
print("\n\nA3:\n")
print(A3)

Conclusion

The first thing we learned is that matrix operations on simple vectors can be extended to a set of vectors, i.e. a matrix. In the case of ANNs one dimension of such an (numpy) array would cover the number of data sets of a typical input mini-batch. The other dimension would cover the “properties” of the input data.

The second thing we saw is that the input matrix to an ANN often must be transposed to work together with weight matrices, if such matrices follow the policy that the first dimension is given by the number of cells in the target layer and the second dimension by the number of nodes of the
preceding layer.

The weighted input to the first target layer is then given by a matrix “dot”-operation on the transposed input matrix. The outcome is a matrix where the first dimension is defined by the number of nodes of the target layer and the second dimension the number of data sets. This has already the correct form for a further propagation to the next layer. Note that the application of an activation function to each of the matrix elements would not change the required arrangement of matrix data!

After the input layer we, therefore, can just continue to directly apply weight matrices to output matrices by a numpy-“dot”-operation. The weight matrix structure just should reflect our shape policy of

(dim1, dim2) = (node number of target layer, node number of preceding layer)

.

In the next articles we shall use these insights to build a Python class for the setup and training of a simple ANN with one or two hidden layers for the analysis of the famous MNIST dataset.

The moons dataset and decision surface graphics in a Jupyter environment – V – a class for plots and some experiments

We proceed with our exercises on the moons dataset. This series of articles is intended for readers which – as me – are relatively new both to Python and Machine Learning. By working with examples we try to extend our knowledge about the tools “Juypter notebooks” and “Eclipse/PyDev” for setting up experiments which require plots for an interpretation.

We have so far used a Jupyter notebook to perform some initial experiments for creating and displaying a decision surface between the moons dataset clusters with an algorithm called “LinearSVC”. If you followed everything I described in the last articles

The moons dataset and decision surface graphics in a Jupyter environment – I
The moons dataset and decision surface graphics in a Jupyter environment – II – contourplots
The moons dataset and decision surface graphics in a Jupyter environment – III – Scatter-plots and LinearSVC
The moons dataset and decision surface graphics in a Jupyter environment – IV – plotting the decision surface

you may now have gathered around 20 different cells with code. Part of the cells’ code was used to learn some basics about contour and scatter plots. This code is now irrelevant for further experiments. Time to consolidate our plotting knowledge.

In the last article I promised to put plot-related code into a Python class. The class itself can become a part of a Python module – which we in turn can import into the code of Jupyter notebook. By doing this we can reduce the number of cells in a notebook drastically. The importing of external classes is thus helpful for concentrating on “real” data analysis experiments with different learning and predicting algorithms and/or a variation of their parameters.

I assume that you have some basic knowledge on how classes are build in Python. If not please see an introductory book on Python 3.

A class for plotting simple decision surfaces in a 2-dimensional space

In the articles

Eclipse, PyDev, virtualenv and graphical output of matplotlib on KDE – I
Eclipse, PyDev, virtualenv and graphical output of matplotlib on KDE – II
Eclipse, PyDev, virtualenv and graphical output of matplotlib on KDE – III

I had shown how to set up Eclipse PyDev to be used in the context of a Python virtual environment. In our special environment “ml1” used by our Jupyter notebook “moons1.ipynb” we have the following directory structure:

“ml1” has a sub-directory “mynotebooks” which contains notebook files as our “moons1.ipynb”. To provide a place for other general code there we open up a directory “mycode“. In it we create a file “myplots.py” for a module
myplots“, which shall comprise our own Python classes for plotting.

We distribute the code discussed in the last 2 articles of this series into methods of a class “MyDecisionPlot“; we put the following code into our file “myplots.py” with the Pydev editor.

'''
Created on 15.07.2019
Module to gather classes for plotting
@author: rmo
'''
import numpy as np
import sys
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.colors import ListedColormap
import matplotlib.patches as mpat 
#from matplotlib import ticker, cm
#from mpl_toolkits import mplot3d

class MyDecisionPlot():
    '''
    This class allows for 
    1) decision surfaces in 2D (x1,x2) planes 
    2) plotting scatter data of datapoints 
    '''


    def __init__(self, X, y, predictor = None, ax_x_delta=1.0, ax_y_delta=1.0, 
                 mesh_res=0.01, alpha=0.4, bcontour=1, bscatter=1, 
                 figs_x1=12.0, figs_x2=8.0, 
                 x1_lbl='x1', x2_lbl='x2',   
                 legend_loc='upper right'
                 ):
        '''
        Constructor of MyDecisionPlot
        Input: 
            X: Input array (2D) for learning- and predictor-algorithm as VSM 
            y: result data for learning- and predictor-algorithm
            ax_x_delta, ax_y_delta : delta for extension of both axis beyond the given X, y-data
            mesh_res: resolution of the mesh spanned in the (x1,x2)-plane (x_max-x_min) * mesh_res
            alpha:  transparency  of contours 
            bcontour: 0: Do not plot contour areas 1: plot contour areas 
            bscatter: 0: Do not plot scatter points of the input data sample 1: Plot scatter plot of the input data sample 
            figs_x1: plot size in x1 direction 
            figs_x2: plot size in x2 direction 
            x1_lbl, x2_lbl : axes lables 
            legend_loc : position of a legend
        Ouptut:
            Internal: self._mesh_points (mesh points created) 
            External: Plots - shoukd cone up automatically in Jupyter notebooks 
        '''
        
                
        # initiate some internal variables 
        self._x1_min = 0.0
        self._x1_max = 1.0
        self._x2_min = 0.0
        self._x2_max = 1.0
        
        # Alternatives to resize plots 
        # 1: just resize figure  2: resize plus create subplots() [figure + axes] 
        self._plot_resize_alternative = 2 
                
        # X (x1,x2)-Input array 
        self.__X = X
        self.__y = y 
        self._Z  = None
        
        # predictor = algorithm to create y-values for new (x1,x2)-data points 
        self._predictor = predictor 
        
        # meshdata
        self._resolution = mesh_res   # resolution of the mesh 
        self.__ax_x_delta = ax_x_delta 
        self.__ax_y_delta = ax_y_delta
        self._alpha = alpha
        self._bscatter = bscatter
        self._bcontour = bcontour 
        
        self._xm1 = None
        self._xm2 = None
        self._mesh_points = None 
        
        # set marker array and define colormap 
        self._markers = ('s', 'x', 'o', '^', 'v')
        self._colors = ('red', 'blue', 'lightgreen', 'gray', 'cyan')
        self._cmap = ListedColormap(self._colors[:len(np.unique(y))])
        
        self._x1_lbl = x1_lbl
        self._x2_lbl = x2_lbl
        self._legend_loc = legend_loc
        
        # Plot-sizing
        self._figs_x1 = figs_x1
        self._figs_x2 = figs_x2
        self._fig = None
        self._ax  = None 
                # alternative 2 does resizing and (!) subplots() 
        self.initiate_and_resize_plot(self._plot_resize_alternative) 
               
        
r
        # create mesh in x1, x2 - direction with mesh_res resolution 
        # meshpoint-array will be creted with right dimension for plotting data 
        self.create_mesh()
        # Array meshpoints should exist now 
        
        if(self._bcontour == 1):
            try:
                if self._predictor == None:
                    raise ValueError
            except ValueError:
                print ("You must provide an algorithm = 'predictor' as parameter")
                #sys.exit(0)   
                sys.exit()   
            
            self.make_contourplot()
        else:
            if (self._bscatter == 1):
                self.make_scatter_plot() 


    # method to create a dense mesh in the (x1,x2)-plane 
    def create_mesh(self):
        '''
        Method to create a dense mesh in an (x1,x2) plane 
        Input: x1, x2-data are constructed from array self.__X
        Output: A suitable array of meshpoints is written to self._mesh_points()
        '''
        try:
            self._x1_min = self.__X[:, 0].min()
            self._x1_max = self.__X[:, 0].max()
        except ValueError: # as e: 
            print ("cannot determine x1_min = X[:,0].min() or x1_max = X[:,0].max()")
        try:
            self._x2_min = self.__X[:, 1].min()
            self._x2_max = self.__X[:, 1].max()
        except ValueError: # as e: 
            print ("cannot determine x2_min =X[:,1].min()) or x2_max = X[:,1].max()")
            
        self._x1_min, self._x1_max = self._x1_min - self.__ax_x_delta, self._x1_max + self.__ax_x_delta
        self._x2_min, self._x2_max = self._x2_min - self.__ax_x_delta, self._x2_max + self.__ax_x_delta
        
        #create mesh data (x1, x2) 
        self._xm1, self._xm2 = np.meshgrid( np.arange(self._x1_min, self._x1_max, self._resolution), 
                                            np.arange(self._x2_min, self._x2_max, self._resolution))
        
        #print (self._xm1)
        # for hasattr the variable cannot be provate ! 
        #print ("xm1 is there: ", hasattr(self,'_xm1' ) )
                          
        # ordering and transposing of the mesh-matrix   
        # for understanding the structure and transpose requirements see linux-blog.anracom.con          
        self._mesh_points = np.array([self._xm1.ravel(), self._xm2.ravel()]).T
        
        try:
            if( hasattr(self, '_mesh_points') == False ):
                raise ValueError
        except ValueError:
            print("The required array mesh_points has not been created!")
            exit

    # -------------
    # Some helper functions to change valus on the fly if necessary 
              
    def set_mesh_res(self, new_mesh_res): 
        self._resolution = new_mesh_res
        
    def change_predictor(self, new_predictor):
        self._predictor = new_predictor
        
    def change_alpha(self, new_alpha):    
        self._alpha = new_alpha
    
    def change_figs(self, new_figs_x1, new_figs_x2):    
        self._figs_x1 = new_figs_x1
        self._figs_x2 = new_figs_x2
    
    
    # -------------
    # method to get subplots and resize the figure       
    # -------------
    def initiate_and_resize_plot(self, alternative=2 ):
        
        # Alternative 1 to resize plots - works afte rimports to Jupyter notebooks, too
        if alternative == 1:
            self._fig_size = plt.rcParams["figure.figsize"]
            self._fig_size[0] = self._figs_x1
            self._fig_size[1] = self._figs_x2
            plt.rcParams["figure.figsize"] = self._fig_size
        
        # Not working for sizing if plain subplots() is used 
        #plt.figure(figsize=(self._figs_x1 , self._figs_x2))
        #self._fig, self._ax = plt.subplots()
        # instead you have to 
put the figsize-parameter into the subplots() function 
        
        # Alternative 2 for resizing plots and using subplots()
        # we use this alternative as we may need the axes later for 3D plots 
        if alternative == 2:
            self._fig, self._ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(self._figs_x1 , self._figs_x2))
    
    
    # ***********************************************
    
    # -------------
    # method to create contour plots      
    # -------------
    def make_contourplot(self):
        '''
        Method to create a contourplot based on a dense mesh of points in an (x1,x2) plane 
        and a predictor algorithm which allows for value calculations
        '''
        
        try:
            if( not hasattr(self, '_mesh_points') ):
                raise ValueError
        except ValueError:
            print("The required array mesh_points has not been created!")
            exit
        
        # Predict values for all meshpoints 
        try:
            self._Z = self._predictor.predict(self._mesh_points)
        except AttributeError: 
            print("method predictor.predict() does not exist") 
        
        #reshape     
        self._Z = self._Z.reshape(self._xm1.shape)
        #print (self._Z)
        
        # make the plot
        plt.contourf(self._xm1, self._xm2, self._Z, alpha=self._alpha, cmap=self._cmap)     
        
        # create a scatter-plot of data sample as well 
        if (self._bscatter == 1):
            self.make_scatter_plot()
            
        self.make_plot_legend()
        
           
                 
    # -------------
    # method to create a scatter plot of the data sample 
    # -------------
    def make_scatter_plot(self):
        alpha2 = self._alpha + 0.4 
        if (alpha2 > 1.0 ):
            alpha2 = 1.0
        for idx, yv in enumerate(np.unique(self.__y)): 
            plt.scatter(x=self.__X[self.__y==yv, 0], y=self.__X[self.__y==yv, 1], 
                        alpha=alpha2, c=[self._cmap(idx)], marker=self._markers[idx], label=yv)
        
        if self._bscatter == 0:
            self._bscatter = 1
        
        self.make_plot_legend()
          
        
    # -------------
    # method to add a legend  
    # -------------
    def make_plot_legend(self):
        plt.xlim(self._x1_min, self._x1_max)
        plt.ylim(self._x2_min, self._x2_max)
        plt.xlabel(self._x1_lbl)
        plt.ylabel(self._x2_lbl)
        
        # we have two cases 
        #     a) for a scatter plot we have array values where the legend is taken from automatically
        #     b) For apure contourplot we need to prepare a legend with "patches" (kind og labels) used by pyplot.legend() 
        if (self._bscatter == 1):
            plt.legend(loc=self._legend_loc)
        else:
            red_patch  = mpat.Patch(color='red',  label='0', alpha=0.4)
            blue_patch = mpat.Patch(color='blue', label='1', alpha=0.4)
            plt.legend(handles=[red_patch, blue_patch], loc=self._legend_loc)

    

 
This certainly is no masterpiece of superior code design; so you may change it. However, the code is good enough for our present purposes.

Note that we have to import basic Python modules into the namespace of this module. This is conventionally done at the top of the file.

Note also the 2 alternatives offered for resizing a plot! Both work also for “inline” plotting in a Jupyter environment; see the text below.

Using the module “myplots” in a Jupyter notebook

In a terminal we move to our example directory “/projekte/GIT/ai/ml1” and start our virtual Python environment:

myself@mytux: /projekte/GIT/ai/ml1> source bin/activate    
(ml1) myself@mytux:/projekte/GIT/ai/ml1> 
jupyter notebook
[I 11:46:14.687 NotebookApp] Writing notebook server cookie secret to /run/user/1999/jupyter/notebook_cookie_secret
[I 11:46:15.942 NotebookApp] Serving notebooks from local directory: /projekte/GIT/ai/ml1
[I 11:46:15.942 NotebookApp] The Jupyter Notebook is running at:
....
....

We then open our old notebook “moons1” and save it under the name “moons2”:

We delete all old cells. Then we change the first cell of our new notebook to the following contents:

import imp
%matplotlib inline
from mycode import myplots

from sklearn.datasets import make_moons
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
from sklearn.preprocessing import PolynomialFeatures
from sklearn.svm import LinearSVC
from sklearn.svm import SVC

You see that we imported the “myplots” module from the “package” directory “mycode”. The Jupyter notebook will find the path to “mycode” as long as we have opened the notebook on a higher directory level. Which we did … see above.

Note the statement with a so called “magic command” for our notebook:

%matplotlib inline

There are many other “magic commands” and parameters which you can study at
Ipython magic commands

The command “%matplotlib inline” informs the notebook to show plots created by any imported modules “inline”, i.e. in the visual context of the affected cell. This specific magic directive should be issued before matplotlib/pyplot is imported into any of the external python modules which we in turn import into the cell code.

A call of plt.show() in our class’s method “make_contourplot()” is no longer necessary afterwards.

If we, however, want to resize the plots in comparison to Jupyter standard values we have to control this by parameters of our plot class. Such parameters are offered already in the interface of the class; but they can be changed by a method “change_figs(new_figs_x1, new_figs_x2)), too.

In a second cell of our new notebook we now prepare the moon data set

X, y = make_moons(noise=0.1, random_state=5)

Further cells will be used for quick individual experiments with the moons dataset. E.g.:

imp.reload(myplots)
X, y = make_moons(noise=0.1, random_state=5)

# contour plot of the moons data - with scatter plot / training with LinearSVC 
polynomial_degree = 3
max_iterations = 6000
polynomial_svm_clf = Pipeline([
  ("poly_features", PolynomialFeatures(degree=polynomial_degree)),
  ("scaler", StandardScaler()),
  ("svm_clf", LinearSVC(C=18, loss="hinge", max_iter=max_iterations))
])
#training
polynomial_svm_clf.fit(X, y)

#plotting 
MyPlt = myplots.MyDecisionPlot(X, y, polynomial_svm_clf, bcontour = 1, bscatter=1 )

The last type of cell just handles the setup and training of our specific algorithm “LinearSVC” and delegates plotting to our class.

Testing the new notebook

A test of the 3 cells in their order gives

All well! This is exactly what we hoped to achieve.

Three experiments with a varying polynomial degree

As we now have a simple and compact cell template for experiments we add three
further cells where we vary the degree of the polynomials for LinearSVC. Below we show the results for degree 6, 7 and for comparison also for a degree of 2.

On a modern computer it should take almost no time to produce the results. (We shall learn how to measure CPU-time in the next article).

We understand that we at least need a polynomial of degree 3 to separate the data reasonably. However, polynomials with an even degree (>= 4) separate the 2 data regions very differently compared to polynomials with an uneven degree (>=3) in outer areas of the (x1,x2)-plane (where no training data were placed):

Depending on the polynomial degree our Linear SVC algorithm obviously extrapolates in different ways to regions without such data. And we have no clue which of the polynomials is the better choice …

This poses a warning for the use of AI in general:

We should be extremely careful to trust predictions of any AI algorithm in parameter regions for which the algorithm must extrapolate – as long as we have no real data points available there to discriminate between multiple solutions that all work equally well in regions with given training data.

Would general modules be imported twice in a Jupyter cell – via the import of an external module, which itself includes import statements, and a direct import statement in a Jupyter cell?

The question posed in the headline is an interesting one for me as a Python beginner. Coming from other programming languages I get a bit nervous when I see the possibility for import statements referring to a specific module both in another already imported module and by a direct import statement afterwards in a Jupyter cell. E.g. we import numpy indirectly via our “myplots” module, but we could and sometimes must import it in addition directly in our Jupyter cell.

Note that we must make the general modules as numpy, matplotlib, etc. available in the namespace environment of our private module “myplots”. Otherwise the functions cannot be used there. The Jupyter cell, however, corresponds to an independent namespace environment. So, an import may indeed be required there, too, if we plan to handle numpy arrays via code in such a cell.

Reading a bit about the Python import logic on the Internet reveals that a double import or overwriting should not take place; instead an already imported piece of code only gets multiple references in the various specific namespaces of different code environments.

We can test this with the following code in a Jupyter cell:

Note that numpy is also imported by our “myplots”. However, the length of the list produced by sys.modules.keys(), which enumerates all possible module reference points (including imports) does not change.

Reloading modules in Jupyter cells

What if we in the
course of or experiments need to change the code of our imported module? Then we need to reload the module in a Jupyter cell before we run it again. In our case (Python 3!) this can be done by the command

imp.reload(myplots)

As the code of our first cell reveals, the general package “imp” must have been imported before we can use its reload-function.

Conclusion

We saw that it is easy to use our own modules with Python class code, which we created in an Eclipse/PyDev environment, in a Jupyter notebook. We just use Python’s standard import mechanism in Jupyter cells to get access to our classes. We applied this to a module with a simple class for preparing decision surface plots based on contour and scatter plot routines of matplotlib. We imported the module in a new Jupyter notebook.

Plots created by our imported class-methods were displayed correctly within the cell environment as soon as we used the magic directive “%matplotlib inline” within our notebook.

In addition we used our new notebook with its compact cell structure for some quick experiments: We set different values for the polynomial degree parameter of our LinearSVC algorithm. We saw that the results of algorithms should be interpreted with caution if the predictions refer to data points in regions of the representation or feature space which were not at all covered by the data sets for training.

The prediction results (= extrapolations) of even one and the same algorithm with different parameters may deviate strongly in such regions – and we may not have any reliable indications to decide which of the predictions and their basic parameter setting are better.

In the next article of this series

The moons dataset and decision surface graphics in a Jupyter environment – VI – Kernel-based SVC algorithms

we shall have a look at what kind of decision surface some other SVM algorithms than LinearSVC create for the moons dataset. In addition shall briefly discuss kernel based algorithms.