Tag Archives: Machine Learning

Autoencoders, latent space and the curse of high dimensionality – I

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Recently, I had to give a presentation about standard Autoencoders (AEs) and related use cases. Whilst preparing examples I stumbled across a well-known problem: The AE solved tasks as to reconstruct faces hidden in extreme noisy or leaky input images perfectly. But the reconstruction of human faces from arbitrarily chosen points in the so called “latent space” of a standard Autoencoder did not work well.

In this series of posts I want to discuss this problem a bit as it illustrates why we need Variational Autoencoders for a systematic creation of faces with varying features from points and clusters in the latent space. But the problem also raises some fundamental and interesting questions

  • about a certain “blindness” of neural networks during training in general, and
  • about the way we save or conserve the knowledge which a neural network has gained about patterns in input data during training.

This post requires experience with the architecture and principles of Autoencoders.

Note, 02/14/2023: I have revised and edited this post to get consistent with new insights from extended experiments with AEs and VAEs.

Standard tasks for conventional Autoencoders

For preparing my talk I worked with relatively simple Autoencoders. I used Convolutional Neural Networks [CNNs] with just 4 convolutional layers to create the Encoder and Decoder parts of the Autoencoder. As typical applications I chose the following:

  • Effective image compression and reconstruction by using a latent space of relatively low dimensionality. The trained AEs were able to compress input images into latent vectors with only few components and reconstruct the original image from the compressed format.
  • Denoising of images where the original data were obscured by the superposition of statistical noise and/or statistically dropped pixels. (This is my favorite task for AEs which they solve astonishingly well.)
  • Recolorization of images: The trained AE in this case transforms images with only gray pixels into colorful images.

Such challenges for AEs are discussed in standard ML literature. In a first approach I applied my Autoencoders to the usual MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets. For the task of recolorization I used the Cifar 10 dataset. But a bit later I turned to the Celeb A dataset with images of celebrity faces. Just to make all of the tasks a bit more challenging.

Standard Autoencoders and low dimensions of the latent space for (Fashion) MNIST and Cifar10 data

My Autoencoders excelled in all the tasks named above – both for MNIST, CELEB A and, regarding recolorization, CIFAR 10.

Regarding MNIST and MNIST/Fashion 4-layer CNNs for the Encoder and Decoder are almost an overkill. For MNIST the dimension z_dim of the latent space can be chosen to be pretty small:

z_dim = 12 gives a really good reconstruction quality of (test) images compressed to minimum information in the latent space. z_dim=4 still gave an acceptable quality and even with z_dim = 2 most of test images were reconstructed well enough. The same was true for the reconstruction of images superimposed with heavy statistical noise – such that the human eye could no longer guess the original information. For Fashion MNIST a dimension number 20 < z_dim < 40 gave good results. Also for recolorization the results were very plausible. I shall present the results in other blog posts in the future.

Face reconstructions of (noisy) Celeb A images require a relative high dimension of the latent space

Then I turned to the Celeb A dataset. By the way: I got interested in Celeb A when reading the books of David Foster on “Generative Deep Learning” and of Tariq Rashi “Make Your First GANs with PyTorch” (see the complete references in the last section of this post).

The Celeb A data set contains images of around 200,000 faces with varying contours, hairdos and very different, in-homogeneous backgrounds. And the faces are displayed from very different viewing angles.

For a good performance of image reconstruction in all of the named use cases one needs to raise the number of dimensions of the latent space significantly. Instead of 12 dimensions of the latent space as for MNIST we now talk about 200 up to 1200 dimensions for CELEB A – depending on the task the AE gets trained for and, of course, on the quality expectations. For reconstruction of normal images and for the reconstruction of clear images from noisy input images higher numbers of dimensions z_dim ≥ 512 gave visibly better results.

Actually, the impressive quality for the reconstruction of test images of faces, which were almost totally obscured by the superimposition of statistical noise or the statistical removal of pixels after a self-supervised training on around 100,000 images surprised me. (Totalitarian states and security agencies certainly are happy about the superb face reconstruction capabilities of even simple AEs.) Part of the explanation, of course, is that 20% un-obscured or un-blurred pixels out of 30,000 pixels still means 6,000 clear pixels. Obviously enough for the AE to choose the right pattern superposition to compose a plausible clear image.

Note that we are not talking about overfitting here – the Autoencoder handled test images, i.e. images which it had never seen before, very well. AEs based on CNNs just seem to extract and use patterns characteristic for faces extremely effectively.

But how is the target space of the Encoder, i.e. the latent space, filled for Celeb A data? Do all points in the latent space give us images with well recognizable faces in the end?

Face reconstruction after a training based on Celeb A images

To answer the last question I trained an AE with 100,000 images of Celeb A for the reconstruction task named above. The dimension of the latent space was chosen to be z_dim = 200 for the results presented below. (Actually, I used a VAE with a tiny amount of KL loss by a factor of 1.e-6 smaller than the standard Binary Cross-Entropy loss for reconstruction – to get at least a minimum confinement of the z-points in the latent space. But the results are basically similar to those of a pure AE.)

My somewhat reworked and centered Celeb A images had a dimension of 96×96 pixels. So the original feature space had a number of dimensions of 27,648 (almost 30000). The challenge was to reproduce the original images from latent data points created of test images presented to the Encoder. To be more precise:

After a certain number of training epochs we feed the Encoder (with fixed weights) with test images the AE has never seen before. Then we get the components of the vectors from the origin to the resulting points in the latent space (z-points). After feeding these data into the Decoder we expect the reproduction of images close to the test input images.

With a balanced training controlled by an Adam optimizer I already got a good resemblance after 10 epochs. The reproduction got better and very acceptable also with respect to tiny details after 25 epochs for my AE. Due to possible copyright and personal rights violations I do not dare to present the results for general Celeb A images in a public blog. But you can write me a mail if you are interested.

Most of the data points in the latent space were created in a region of 0 < |x_i| < 20 with x_i meaning one of the vector components of a z-point in the latent space. I will provide more data on the z-point distribution produced by the Encoder in later posts of this mini-series.

Face reconstruction from randomly chosen points in the latent space

Then I selected arbitrary data points in the latent space with randomly chosen and uniformly distributed components 0 < |x_i| < boundary. The values for boundary were systematically enlarged.

Note that most of the resulting points will have a tendency to be located in outer regions of the multidimensional cube with an extension in each direction given by boundary. This is due to the big chance that one of the components will get a relatively high value.

Then I fed these arbitrary z-points into the Decoder. Below you see the results after 10 training epochs of the AE; I selected only 10 of 100 data points created for each value of boundary (the images all look more or less the same regarding the absence or blurring of clear face contours):

boundary = 0.5

boundary = 2.5

boundary = 5.0

boundary = 8.0

boundary = 10.0

boundary = 15.0

boundary = 20.0

boundary = 30.0

boundary = 50

This is more a collection of face hallucinations than of usable face images. (Interesting for artists, maybe? Seriously meant …).

So, most of the points in the latent space of an Autoencoder do NOT represent reasonable faces. Sometimes our random selection came close to a region in latent space where the result do resemble a face. See e.g. the central image for boundary=10.

From the images above it becomes clear that some arbitrary path inside the latent space will contain more points which do NOT give you a reasonable face reproduction than points that result in plausible face images – despite a successful training of the Autoencoder.

This result supports the impression that the latent space of well trained Autoencoders is almost unusable for creative purposes. It also raises the interesting question of what the distribution of “meaningful points” in the latent space really looks like. I do not know whether this has been investigated in depth at all. Some links to publications which prove a certain scientific interest in this question are given in the last section of this posts.

I also want to comment on an article published in the Quanta Magazine lately. See “Self-Taught AI Shows Similarities to How the Brain Works”. This article refers to “masked” Autoencoders and self-supervised learning. Reconstructing masked images, i.e. images with a superposition of a mask hiding/blurring pixels with a reasonably equipped Autoencoder indeed works very well. Regarding this point I totally agree. Also with the term “self-supervised learning”.

But to suggest that an Autoencoder with this (rather basic) capability reflects methods of the human brain is in my opinion a massive exaggeration. On the contrary, in my opinion an AE reflects a dumbness regarding the storage and usage of otherwise well extracted feature patterns. This is due to its construction and the nature of its mapping of image contents to the latent space. A child can, after some teaching, draw characteristic features of human faces – out of nothing on a plain white piece of paper. The Decoder part of a standard Autoencoder (in some contrast to a GAN) can not – at least not without help to pick a meaningful point in latent space. And this difference is a major one, in my opinion.

A first interpretation – the curse of many dimensions of the latent space

I think the reason why arbitrary points in the multi-dimensional latent space cannot be mapped to images with recognizable faces is yet another effect of the so called “curse of high dimensionality”. But this time also related to the latent space.

A normal Autoencoder (i.e. one without the Kullback-Leibler loss) uses the latent space in its vast extension to produce points where typical properties (features) of faces and background are encoded in a most unique way for each of the input pictures. But the distinct volume filled by such points is a pretty small one – compared to the extensions of the high dimensional latent space. The volume of data points resulting from a mapping-transformation of arbitrary points in the original feature space to points of the latent space is of course much bigger than the volume of points which correspond to images showing typical human faces.

This is due to the fact that there are many more images with arbitrary pixel values already in the original feature space of the input images (with lets say 30000 dimensions for 100×100 color pixels) than images with reasonable values for faces in front of some background. The points in the feature space which correspond to reasonable images of faces (right colors and dominant pixel values for face features), is certainly small compared to the extension of the original feature space. Therefore: If you pick a random point in latent space – even within a confined (but multidimensional) volume around the origin – the chance that this point lies outside the particular volume of points which make sense regarding face reproduction is big. I guess that for z_dim > 200 the probability is pretty close to 1.

In addition: As the mapping algorithm of a neural Encoder network as e.g. CNNs is highly non-linear it is difficult to say how the boundary hyperplanes of mapping areas for faces look like. Complicated – but due to the enormous number of original images with arbitrary pixel values – we can safely guess that they enclose a rather small volume.

The manifold of data points in the z-space giving us recognizable faces in front of a reasonably separated background may follow a curved and wiggly “path” through the latent space. In principal there could even be isolated unconnected regions separated by areas of “chaotic reconstructions”.

I think this kind of argumentation line holds for standard Autoencoders and variational Autoencoders with a very small KL loss in comparison to the reconstruction loss (BCE (binary cross-entropy) or MSE).

Why do Variational Autoencoders [VAEs] help?

The fist point is: VAEs reduce the total occupied volume of the latent space. Due to mu-related term in the Kullback-Leibler loss the whole distribution of z-points gets condensed into a limited volume around the origin of the latent space.

The second reason is that the distribution of meaningful points are smeared out by the logvar-term of the Kullback-Leibler loss.

Both effects enforce overlapping regions of meaningful standard Gaussian-like z-point distributions in the latent space. So VAEs significantly increase the probability to hit a meaningful z-point in latent space – if you chose points around the origin within a distance of “1” per coordinate (or vector component).

The total distance of a point and its vector in z-space has to be measured with some norm, e.g. the Euclidian one. Actually we should get meaningful reconstructions around a multidimensional sphere of radius “16”. Why this is reasonable will be discussed in forthcoming posts.

Please, also look at the series on the technical realization of VAEs in this blog. The last posts there prove the effects of the KL-loss experimentally for Celeb A data. Below you find a selection of images created from randomly chosen points in the latent space of a Variational Autoencoder with z_dim=200 after 10 epochs.

Conclusion

Enough for today. Whilst standard Autoencoders solve certain tasks very well, they seem to produce very specific data distributions in the latent space for CelebA images: Only certain regions seem to be suitable for the reconstruction of “meaningful” images with human faces.

This problem may have its origin already in the feature space of the original images. Also there only a small minority of points represents humanly interpretable face images. This becomes obvious when you look at the vast amount of possible pixel values in a feature space of lets say 96x96x3 = 27,648. Each of these dimension can get a value between 0 and 255. This gives us more than 7 million combinations. Only a tiny fraction of these possible images will show reasonable faces in the center with a reasonably structured background around.

From a first experiment the chance of hitting a data point in latent space which gives you a meaningful image seems to be small. This result appears to be a variant of the curse of high dimensionality – this time including the latent space.

In a forthcoming post
Autoencoders, latent space and the curse of high dimensionality – II – a view on fragments and filaments of the latent space for CelebA images
we will investigate the z-point distribution in latent space with a variety of tools. And find that this distribution is fragmented and that the z-points for CelebA images are arranged in certain regions of the latent space. In addition we will get indications that the distribution contains filament-like structures.

Links

https://towardsdatascience.com/ exploring-the-latent-space-of-your-convnet-classifier-b6eb862e9e55

Felix Leeb, Stefan Bauer, Michel Besserve,Bernhard Schölkopf, “Exploring the Latent Space of Autoencoders with
Interventional Assays”, 2022,
https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.16091v2 // https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.16091.pdf
https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/ handle/10539/33094?show=full
https://www.elucidate.ai/post/ exploring-deep-latent-spaces

Books:
T. Rashid, “GANs mit PyTorch selbst programmieren”, 2020, O’Reilly, dpunkt.verlag, Heidelberg, ISBN 978-3-96009-147-9
D. Foster, “Generatives Deep Learning”, 2019, O’Reilly, dpunkt.verlag, Heidelberg, ISBN 978-3-96009-128-8

 

Variational Autoencoder with Tensorflow – VII – KL loss via model.add_loss()

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I continue my series on options regarding the treatment of the Kullback-Leibler divergence as a loss [KL loss] in Variational Autoencoder [VAE] setups.

Variational Autoencoder with Tensorflow – I – some basics
Variational Autoencoder with Tensorflow – II – an Autoencoder with binary-crossentropy loss
Variational Autoencoder with Tensorflow – III – problems with the KL loss and eager execution
Variational Autoencoder with Tensorflow – IV – simple rules to avoid problems with eager execution
Variational Autoencoder with Tensorflow – V – a customized Encoder layer for the KL loss
Variational Autoencoder with Tensorflow – VI – KL loss via tensor transfer and multiple output

Our objective is to find solutions which avoid potential problems with the eager execution mode of present Tensorflow 2 implementations. Popular recipes of some teaching books on ML may lead to non-working codes in present TF2 environments. We have already looked at two working alternatives.

In the last post we transferred the “mu” and “log_var” tensors from the Encoder to the Decoder and fed some Keras standard loss functions with these tensors. These functions could in turn be inserted into the model.compile() statement. The approach was a bit complex because it involved multi-input-output model definitions for the Encoder and Decoder.

The present article will discuss a third and lighter approach – namely using the Keras add_loss() mechanism on the level of a Keras model, i.e. model.add_loss().

The advantage of this function is that its parameter interface is not reduced to the form of standardized Keras cost function interfaces which I used in my last post. This gives us flexibility. A solution based on model.add_loss() is also easy to understand and realize on the programming level. It is, however, an approach which may under certain conditions reduce performance by roughly a factor between 1.3 and 1.5 – which is significant. I admit that I have not yet understood what the reasons are. But the concrete solution version I present below works well.

The strategy

The way how to use Keras’ add_loss() functionality is described in the Keras documentation. I quote from this part of TF2’s documentation about the use of add_loss():

This method can also be called directly on a Functional Model during construction. In this case, any loss Tensors passed to this Model must be symbolic and be able to be traced back to the model’s Inputs. These losses become part of the model’s topology and are tracked in get_config.

The documentation also contains a simple example. The strategy is to first define a full VAE model with standard mu and log_var layers in the Encoder part – and afterwards add the KL-loss to this model. This is depicted in the following graphics:

We implement this strategy below via the Python class for a VAE setup which we have used already in the last 4 posts of this series. We control the Keras model setup and the layer construction by the parameter “solution_type”, which I have introduced in my last post.

Cosmetic changes to the Encoder/Decoder parts and the model creation

The class method _build_enc(self, …) can remain as it was defined in the last post. We just have to change the condition for the layer setup as follows:

Change to _build_enc(self, …)

... # see other posts 
...
        # The Encoder Model 
        # ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
        # With extra KL layer or with vae.add_loss()
        if solution_type == 0 or solution_type == 2: 
            self.encoder = Model(self._encoder_input, self._encoder_output)
        
        # Transfer solution => Multiple outputs 
        if solution_type == 1: 
            self.encoder = Model(inputs=self._encoder_input, outputs=[self._encoder_output, self.mu, self.log_var], name="encoder")

Something similar holds for the Decoder part _build_decoder(…):

Change to _build_dec(self, …)

... # see other posts 
...
        # The Decoder model 
        # solution_type == 0/2: Just the decoded input 
        if self.solution_type == 0 or self.solution_type == 2: 
            self.decoder = Model(self._decoder_inp_z, self._decoder_output)
        
        # solution_type == 1: The decoded tensor plus the transferred tensors mu and log_var a for the variational distribution 
        if self.solution_type == 1: 
            self.decoder = Model([self._decoder_inp_z, self._dec_inp_mu, self._dec_inp_var_log], 
                                 [self._decoder_output, self._dec_mu, self._dec_var_log], name="decoder")

A similar change is done regarding the model definition in the method _build_VAE(self):

Change to _build_VAE(self)

        solution_type = self.solution_type
        
        if solution_type == 0 or solution_type == 2:
            model_input  = self._encoder_input
            model_output = self.decoder(self._encoder_output)
            self.model = Model(model_input, model_output, name="vae")

... # see other posts 
...

 

Changes to the method compile_myVAE(self, learning_rate)

More interesting is a function which we add inside the method compile_myVAE(self, learning_rate, …).

Changes to compile_myVAE(self, learning_rate):

    # Function to compile the full VAE
    # ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 
    def compile_myVAE(self, learning_rate):

        # Optimizer
        # ~~~~~~~~~ 
        optimizer = Adam(learning_rate=learning_rate)
        # save the learning rate for possible intermediate output to files 
        self.learning_rate = learning_rate
        
        # Parameter "fact" will be used by the cost functions defined below to scale the KL loss relative to the BCE loss 
        fact = self.fact
        
        # Function for solution_type == 1
        # ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
        @tf.function
        def mu_loss(y_true, y_pred):
            loss_mux = fact * tf.reduce_mean(tf.square(y_pred))
            return loss_mux
        
        @tf.function
        def logvar_loss(y_true, y_pred):
            loss_varx = -fact * tf.reduce_mean(1 + y_pred - tf.exp(y_pred))    
            return loss_varx

        # Function for solution_type == 2 
        # ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
        # We follow an approach described at  
        # https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/keras/layers/Layer
        # NOTE: We can NOT use @tf.function here 
        def get_kl_loss(mu, log_var):
            kl_loss = -fact * tf.reduce_mean(1 + log_var - tf.square(mu) - tf.exp(log_var))
            return kl_loss

        # Required operations for solution_type==2 => model.add_loss()
        # ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
        res_kl = get_kl_loss(mu=self.mu, log_var=self.log_var)
        if self.solution_type == 2: 
            self.model.add_loss(res_kl)    
            self.model.add_metric(res_kl, name='kl', aggregation='mean')
        
        # Model compilation 
        # ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
        if self.solution_type == 0 or self.solution_type == 2: 
            self.model.compile(optimizer=optimizer, loss="binary_crossentropy",
                               metrics=[tf.keras.metrics.BinaryCrossentropy(name='bce')])
        
        if self.solution_type == 1: 
            self.model.compile(optimizer=optimizer
                               , loss={'vae_out_main':'binary_crossentropy', 'vae_out_mu':mu_loss, 'vae_out_var':logvar_loss} 
                               #, metrics={'vae_out_main':tf.keras.metrics.BinaryCrossentropy(name='bce'), 'vae_out_mu':mu_loss, 'vae_out_var': logvar_loss }
                               )

I have supplemented function get_kl_loss(mu, log_var). We explicitly provide the tensors “self.mu” and “self.log_var” via the function’s interface and thus follow one of our basic rules for the Keras add_loss()-functionality (see post IV).
Note that this is a MUST to get a working solution for eager execution mode!

Interestingly, the flexibility of model.add_loss() has a price, too. We can NOT use a @tf.function indicator here – in contrast to the standard cost functions which we used in the last post.

Note also that I have added some metrics to get detailed information about the size of the crossentropy-loss and the KL-loss during training!

Cosmetic change to the method for training

Eventually we must include solution_type==2 in method train_myVAE(self, x_train, batch_size, …)

Changes to train_myVAE(self, x_train, batch_size,…)

... # see other posts 
...
        if self.solution_type == 0 or self.solution_type == 2: 
            self.model.fit(     
                x_train
                , x_train
                , batch_size = batch_size
                , shuffle = True
                , epochs = epochs
                , initial_epoch = initial_epoch
            )
        
        if self.solution_type == 1: 
            self.model.fit(     
                x_train
#               Working  
#                , [x_train, t_mu, t_logvar] # we provide some dummy tensors here  
                # by dict: 
                , {'vae_out_main': x_train, 'vae_out_mu': t_mu, 'vae_out_var':t_logvar}
                , batch_size = batch_size
                , shuffle = True
                , epochs = epochs
                , initial_epoch = initial_epoch
                #, verbose=1
                , callbacks=[MyPrinterCallback()]
            )

Some results

We can use a slightly adapted version of the Jupyter notebook cells discussed in post V

Cell 6:

from my_AE_code.models.MyVAE_2 import MyVariationalAutoencoder

z_dim         = 12
solution_type = 2
fact          = 6.5e-4

vae = MyVariationalAutoencoder(
    input_dim = (28,28,1)
    , encoder_conv_filters = [32,64,128]
    , encoder_conv_kernel_size = [3,3,3]
    , encoder_conv_strides = [1,2,2]
    , decoder_conv_t_filters = [64,32,1]
    , decoder_conv_t_kernel_size = [3,3,3]
    , decoder_conv_t_strides = [2,2,1]
    , z_dim = z_dim
    , solution_type = solution_type  
    , act   = 0
    , fact  = fact
)

Cell 11:

BATCH_SIZE = 256
EPOCHS = 37
PRINT_EVERY_N_BATCHES = 100
INITIAL_EPOCH = 0

if solution_type == 2: 
    vae.train_myVAE(     
        x_train[0:60000]
        , batch_size = BATCH_SIZE
        , epochs = EPOCHS
        , initial_epoch = INITIAL_EPOCH
    )

Note that I have changed the BATCH_SIZE to 256 this time; the performance got a bit better then on my old Nvidia 960 GTX: 

Epoch 3/37
235/235 [==============================] - 10s 44ms/step - loss: 0.1135 - bce: 0.1091 - kl: 0.0044
Epoch 4/37
235/235 [==============================] - 10s 44ms/step - loss: 0.1114 - bce: 0.1070 - kl: 0.0044
Epoch 5/37
235/235 [==============================] - 10s 44ms/step - loss: 0.1098 - bce: 0.1055 - kl: 0.0044
Epoch 6/37
235/235 [==============================] - 10s 43ms/step - loss: 0.1085 - bce: 0.1041 - kl: 0.0044

This is comparable to data we got for our previous solution approaches. But see an additional section on performance below.

Some results

As in the last posts I show some results for the MNIST data without many comments. The first plot proves the reconstruction abilities of the VAE for a dimension z-dim=12 of the latent space.

MNIST with z-dim=12 and fact=6.5e-4

For z_dim=2 we get a reasonable data point distribution in the latent space due to the KL loss, but the reconstruction ability suffers, of course:

MNIST with z-dim=2 and fact=6.5e-4 – train data distribution in the z-space

For a dimension of z_dim=2 of the latent space and MNIST data we get the following reconstruction chart for data points in a region around the latent space’s origin


 

A strange performance problem when no class is used

I also tested a version of the approach with model.add_loss() without encapsulating everything in a class. But with the same definition of the Encoder, the Decoder, the model, etc. But all variables as e.g. mu, log_var were directly kept as data of and in the Jupyter notebook. Then a call 

n_epochs      = 3
batch_size    = 128
initial_epoch = 0
vae.fit( x_train[0:60000], 
         x_train[0:60000],   # entscheidend ! 
         batch_size=batch_size,
         shuffle=True, 
         epochs = n_epochs, 
         initial_epoch = initial_epoch 
       )

reduced the performance by a factor of 1.5. I have experimented quite a while. But I have no clue at the moment why this happens and how the effect can be avoided. I assume some strange data handling or data transfer between the Jupyter notebook and the graphics card. I can provide details if some developer is interested.

But as one should encapsulate functionality in classes anyway I have not put efforts in a detail analysis.

Conclusion

In this article we have studied an approach to handle the Kullback-Leibler loss via the model.add_loss() functionality of Keras. We supplemented our growing class for a VAE with respective methods. All in all the approach is almost more convenient as the solution based on a special layer and layer.add_loss(); see post V.

However, there seems to exist some strange performance problem when you avoid a reasonable encapsulation in a class and do the modell setup directly in Jupyter cells and for Jupyter variables.

In the next post
Variational Autoencoder with Tensorflow – VIII – TF 2 GradientTape(), KL loss and metrics
I shall have a look at the solution approach recommended by F. Chollet.

Links

We must provide tensors explicitly to model.add_loss()
https://towardsdatascience.com/shared-models-and-custom-losses-in-tensorflow-2-keras-6776ecb3b3a9

 
Ceterum censeo: The worst fascist, war criminal and killer living today, who must be isolated, be denazified and imprisoned, is the Putler. Long live a free and democratic Ukraine!
 

KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – V – cluster based classification of the MNIST dataset

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In this series about KMeans

KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – I – Cluster analysis of the WIFI example
KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – II – PCA in combination with KMeans for the WIFI-example
KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – III – KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI-example
KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – IV – KMeans on PCA transformed data

we have so far studied the application of KMeans to the WIFI dataset of the UCI Irvine. We now apply the Kmeans clustering algorithm to the MNIST dataset – also in an extended form, namely as a classifier. The MNIST dataset – a collection of 28x28px images of handwritten numbers – has already been discussed in other sections of this blog and is well documented on the Internet. I, therefore, do not describe its basic properties in this post. A typical image of the collection is

Load MNIST – dimensionality of the feature space and scaling of the data

Due to the ease of use, I loaded the MNIST data samples via TF2 and the included Keras interface. Otherwise TF2 was not used for the following experiments. Instead the clustering algorithms were taken from “sklearn”.

Each MNIST image can be transformed into a one-dimensional array with dimension 784 (= 28 * 28). This means the MNIST feature space has a dimension of 784 – which is much more than the seven dimensions we dealt with when analyzing the WIFI data in the last post. All MNIST samples were shuffled for individual runs.

Scaling of MNIST data for clustering?

A good question is whether we should scale or normalize the sample data for clustering – and if so by what formula. I could not answer this question directly; instead I tested multiple methods. Previous experience with PCA and MNIST indicated that Sklearn’s “Normalizer” would be helpful, but I did not take this as granted.

A simple scaling method is to just divide the pixel values by 255. This brings all 784 data array elements of each image into the value range [0,1]. Note that this scaling does not change relative length differences of the sample vectors in the feature space. Neither does it shift or change the width of the data distribution around its mean value. Other methods would be to standardize the data or to normalize them, e.g. by using respective algorithms from Scikit-Learn. Using either method in combination with a cluster analysis corresponds to a theory about the cluster distribution in the feature space. Normalization would mean that we assume that the clusters do not so much depend on the vector length in the feature space but mainly on the angle of the sample vectors. We shall later see what kind of scaling helps when we classify the MNIST data based on clusters.

In a first approach we leave the data as they are, i.e. unscaled.

Parameters for clustering

All the following cluster calculations were done on 3 out of 8 available (hyperthreaded) CPU cores. For Kmeans and MiniBatchKMeans we used

n_init       = 100       # number of initial cluster configurations to test 
max_iter     = 100       # maximum number of iterations  
tol          = 1.e-4     # final deviation of subsequent results (= stop condition)  
random_state = 2         # a random state nmber for repeatable runs
mb_size      = 200       # size of minibatches (for MiniBatchKMeans)

The number of clusters “num_clus” was defined individually for each run.

Analysis by KMeans? Too expensive …

A naive approach to perform an elbow analysis, as we did for the WIFI-data, would be to apply KMeans of Sklearn directly to the MNIST data. But a test run on the CPU shows that such an endeavor would cost too much time. With 3 CPU cores and only a very limited number of clusters and iterations

n_init   = 10      # only a few initial configurations
max_iter = 50 
tol      = 1.e-3  
num_clus = 25      # only a few clusters

a KMeans fit() run applied to 60,000 training samples [len(X_train) => 60,000]

kmeans.fit(X_train)

requires around 42 secs. For 200 clusters the cluster analysis requires around 214 secs. Doing an elbow analysis would therefore require many hours of computational time.
To overcome this problem I had to use MiniBatchKMeans. It is by factors > 80 faster.

Elbow analysis with the help of MiniBatchKmeans

When we use the following setting for MiniBatchKMeans

n_init = 50 # only a few initial configurations
max_iter = 100
tol = 1.e-4
mb_size = 200

I could perform an elbow analysis for all cluster-numbers 1 < k <= 250 in less than 20 minutes. The following graphics shows the resulting intertia curve vs. cluster number:

The “elbow” is not very pronounced. But I would say that by using a cluster number around 200 we are on the safe side. By the way: The shape of the curve does not change very much when we apply Sklearn’s Normalizer to the MNIST data ahead of the cluster analysis.

Classifying unscaled data with the help of clusters

We now perform a prediction of our adapted cluster algorithm regarding the cluster membership for the training data and for k=225 clusters: 

n_clu    = 225
mb_size  = 200
max_iter = 120
n_init   = 100
tol      = 1.e-4

Based on the resulting data we afterward apply the same type of algorithm which we used for the WIFI data to construct a “classifier” based on clusters and a respective predictor function (see the last post of this series).

The data distribution for the 10 different digits of the training set was:

class 0 :  5905
class 1 :  6721
class 2 :  6031
class 3 :  6082
class 4 :  5845
class 5 :  5412
class 6 :  5917
class 7 :  6266
class 8 :  5860
class 9 :  5961

How good is the cluster membership of a sample for a digit class defined?
Well, out of 225 clusters there were only around 15 for which I got an “error” above 40%, i.e. for which the relative fraction of data samples deviating from the dominant class of the cluster was above 40%. For the vast majority of clusters, however, samples of one specific digit class dominated the clusters members by more than 90%.

The resulting confusion matrix of our new “cluster classifier” for the (unscaled) MNIST data looks like

[[5695    4   37   21    7   57   51   15   15    3]
 [   0 6609   33   21   11    2   15   17    2   11]
 [  62   45 5523  120   14   10   27  107  116    7]
 [  11   43  114 5362   15  153    8   60  267   49]
 [   5   60   62    2 4752    3   59   63    5  834]
 [  54   18  103  777   25 4158  126    9  110   32]
 [  49   20   56    4    6   38 5736    0    8    0]
 [   5   57   96    2   86    1    0 5774    7  238]
 [  30   76  109  416   51  152   39   35 4864   88]
 [  25   20   37   84  706   14    6  381   46 4642]]

This confusion matrix comes at no surprise: The digits “4”, “5”, “8”, “9” are somewhat error prone. Actually, everybody familiar with MNIST images knows that sometimes “4”s and “9”s can be mixed up even by the human eye. The same is true for handwritten “5”s, “8”s and “3”s.

Another representation of the confusion matrix is:

The calculation for the matrix elements was done in a standard way – the sum over percentages in a row gives 100% (the slight deviation in the matrix is due to rounding). I.e. we look at erors of the type TN (True Negatives).

The confusion matrix for the remaining 10,000 test data samples is:

The relative errors we get for our classifier when applied to the train and test data is

rel_err_train = 0.115 ,
rel_err_test = 0.112

All for unscaled MNIST data. Taking into account the crudeness of the whole approach this is a rather convincing result. It proves that it is worth the effort to perform a cluster analysis on high dimensional data:

  • It provides a first impression whether the data are structured in the feature space such that we can find relatively good separable clusters with dominant members belonging to just one class.
  • It also shows that a cluster based classification for many datasets cannot reach accuracy levels of CNNs, but that it may still deliver good results. Without any supervised training …

The second point also proves that the distance of the data points to the various cluster centers contains valuable information about the class membership. So, a MLP or CNN based classification could be performed on transformed MNIST data, namely distance vectors of sample datapoints to the different cluster centers. This corresponds to a dimension reduction of the classification problem. Actually, in a different part of this blog, I have already shown that such an approach delivers accuracy values beyond 98%.

For MNIST we can say that the samples define a relatively well separable cluster structure in the feature space. The granularity required to resolve classes sufficiently well means a clsuter number of around 200 < k < 250. Then we get an accuracy close to 90% for cluster based classification.

t-SNE representation of the MNIST data

Can we somehow confirm this finding about a good cluster-class-relation independently? Well, in a limited way. The t-SNE algorithm, which can be used to “project” multidimensional data onto a 2-dimensional plane, respects the vicinity of vectors in the original feature space whilst deriving a 2-dim representation. So, a rather well structured t-SNE diagram is an indication of clustering in the feature space. And indeed for 10,000 randomly selected samples of the (shufffled) training data we get:

The colorization was done by classes, i.e. digits. We see a relatively good separation of major “clusters” with data points belonging to a specific class. But we also can identify multiple problem zones, where data points belonging to different classes are intermixed. This explains the confusion matrix. It also explains why we need so many fine-grained clusters to get a reasonable resolution regarding a reliable class-cluster-relation.

Classifying scaled and normalized MNIST data with the help of clusters

Can we improve the accuracy of our cluster based classification a bit? This would, e.g., require some transformation which leads to a better cluster separation. To see the effect of two different scalers I tried the “Normalizer” and then also the “StandardScaler” of Sklearn. Actually, they work in opposite direction regarding accuracy:

The “Normalizer” improves accuracy by more than 1.5%, while the “Standardizer” reduces it by almost the same amount.

I only discuss results for “Normalization” below. The confusion matrix for the training data becomes:

and for the test data:

The relative error for the test data is

Error for trainings data:
avg_err_train = 0.085 :: num_err_train = 5113
 
Error for test data:
avg_err_test = 0.083 :: num_err_test = 832

So, the relative accuracy is now around 91.5%.
The result depends a bit on the composition of the training and the test dataset after an initial shuffling. But the value remains consistently above 90%.

Data compression by Autoencoders and clustering

Just for interest I also had a look at a very different approach to invoke clustering:

I first applied a simple CNN-based AutoEncoder [AE] to compress the MNIST data into a 25-dimensional space and applied our clustering methods afterwards.

I shall not discuss the technology of autoenconders in this post. The only relevant point in our context is that an autoencoder provides an efficient non-linear way of data compression and dimensionality reduction. Among many other useful properties and abilities … . Note: I did not use a “Variational Autoencoder” which would have allowed for even better results. The loss function for the AE was a simple quadratic loss. The autoencoder was trained on 50,000 training samples and for 40 epochs.

A t-SNE based plot of the “clusters” for test data in the 25-dimensional space looks like:

We see that the separation of the data belonging to different classes is somewhat better than before. Therefore, we expect a slightly better classification based on clusters, too. Without any scaling we get the following confusion data: 

[[5817    7   10    3    1   14   15    2   27    1]
 [   3 6726   29    2    0    1   10    5   12   10]
 [  49   35 5704   35   14    4   10   61   87    7]
 [   8   78   48 5580   22  148    2   40  111   29]
 [  47   27   18    0 4967    0   44   38    3  673]
 [  32   20   10  150    8 5039   73    4   43   28]
 [  31   11   23    2    2   47 5746    0   15    1]
 [   6   35   35    6   32    0    1 5977    7  163]
 [  17   67   22   86   16  217   24   22 5365   52]
 [  35   32   11   92  184   15    1  172   33 5406]]

Error averaged over (all) clusters :  6.74

The resulting relative error for the test data was:

avg_err_test = 0.0574 :: num_err_test = 574

With Normalization:

Error for test data:
avg_err_test = 0.054 :: num_err_test = 832

So, after performing the autoencoder training on normalized data we consistently get

an accuracy of around 94%.

This is not too much of a gain. But remember:
We performed a cluster analysis on a feature space with only 25 dimensions – which of course is much cheaper. However, we paid a prize, namely the Autoencoder training which lasted about 150 secs on my old Nvidia 960 GTX.

And note: Even with only 100 clusters we get above 92% on the AE-compressed data.

Conclusion

We have shown that using a non-supervised cluster analysis of the MNIST data with around 225 clusters allows for classifying images with an accuracy around 90.5%. In combination with an Autoencoder compression we even reaches values around 94%. This is comparable with other non-optimized standard algorithms aside of neural networks.

This means that the MNIST data samples are organized in a well separable cluster structure in their feature space. A test run with normalized data showed that the clusters (and their centers) differ mostly by their direction relative to the origin of the feature space and not so much by their distance from the origin. With a relatively fine grained resolution we could establish a simple cluster-class-relation which allowed for cluster based classification.

The accuracy is, of course, below the values reachable with optimized MLPS (98%) and CNNs (above 99%). But, clustering is a fast, reliable and non-supervised method. In addition in combination with t-SNE we can create plots which can easily be understood by the customers. So, even for more complex data I would always recommend to try a cluster based classification approach if you need to provide plots and quick results. Sometimes the accuracy may even be sufficient for your customer’s purposes.

KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – IV – KMeans on PCA transformed data

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In the last posts of this series

KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – I – Cluster analysis of the WIFI example
KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – II – PCA in combination with KMeans for the WIFI-example
KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – III – KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI-example

we applied the KMeans algorithm to perform a cluster analysis of the WIFI dataset of the UCI Irvine. The results gave us insights into the spatial grouping and the separability of the data samples in their 7-dimensional feature space. An additional PCA analysis helped to understand why projections of the data into some selected 2-dimensional sub-spaces of the feature space revealed the four or five dominant clusters very well. In the third post I discussed a simple method to transform KMeans into a classifier. In the WIFI case a set of 9 to 11 clusters provided a good resolution of the data distribution and we reached a convincing classifier accuracy.

What we have not done, yet, is to transform and project the WIFI data into the coordinate system of the most important main components and afterward apply clustering by the help of KMeans. We know already that three primary components fit the data very well and give us around 90% of the “explained variance“. See the second post for these basic PCA results. We, therefore, expect comparably accurate prediction results of a cluster classifier for the PCA transformed data as the accuracy values given in the last post. For 500 test samples after a KMeans fit of 1500 training samples in the original feature space we found a prediction accuracy of around 98%.

In this post we first perform a PCA analysis for three primary components of the WIFI data distribution and then transform the vectors of 1500 randomly selected training samples to the 3-dimensional main component space. Then we apply KMeans onto the data in the reduced vector space and establish a classifier predictor based on the methods described in the last article. Eventually, we check the accuracy and display the resulting confusion matrix for the 500 test samples.

As a side-step for readers who look for real world use cases regarding signals I want to mention an article in “Nature”, which I found today via a newspaper podcast. There neural firing rates of a brain region, i.e. some very special signals, were used to enable an ALS patient to select letters from presented sequences and form statements – by his “thoughts”. This looks like an environment where Machine Learning really could contribute more in the future.

KMeans as a classifier on the PCA transformed WIFI data

Below I give you the results for the WIFI data transformed and projected to the most important three primary components and 11 clusters:

Results for 1500 training samples 

  
Confusion matrix for training data - 11 clusters, 3 PCA components 
A confusion matrix for the classes according to the clustering
[[374   0   1   0]
 [  0 362  13   0]
 [  4   7 359   5]
 [  1   0   0 374]]

Number of wrongly predicted train samples:  31  :: avg_err =  0.020

So, just from counting wrongly classified examples the average error is measured to be around 2% and the relative accuracy is something like 98%.

And for the test data I got:

Number of wrongly predicted test samples:  6  :: avg_err =  0.012

This gives us the following confusion matrix:

This actually proves that our assumption about combining a PCA transformation with a KMeans classifier was correct. The reduction of the dimensionality of the problem did not affect the prediction accuracy very much.

Just for completeness the data for only 2 primary components:

The accuracy of around 97% is still convincing. The reason is that the two most important primary components already deliver around 85% of the “explained variance”.

Why is the Wifi-example not so boring as one may think?

A reader wrote me that he finds the WIFI example too simple and boring. OK, but … The principles and methods remain the same when more complex data are analyzed for clusters. Especially in the case of binary classification. But are there interesting real world use cases for other types of signals? Oh, yes. I just want to refer to an interesting example which I read about this morning.

The WIFI example works with samples which describe 7 signals. Now, imagine that such signals come from a sensor implant measuring electric potentials of a human brain and that we do not analyze for the location of rooms but for the selection of letters by “Yes/No” decision-“imaginations” – made by a human who was trained via frequency based audio-feedback for the brain regions covered by the implants. Science fiction? No, reality. And of huge help for ALS patients. See

Chaudhary, U., Vlachos, I., Zimmermann, J.B. et al. Spelling interface using intracortical signals in a completely locked-in patient enabled via auditory neurofeedback training. Nat Commun 13, 1236 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28859-8

and
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8

There, signals were measured from two implant arrays with 64 electrodes. OK, these are somewhat more signals than just 7. But if I understood the text correctly not all channels were used or useful. Just a few. Reminds us of PCA? In addition the time structure of the signal (firing rates) are important – but these are just different signal characteristics. And we have different labels. But, at least in principle, we speak of nothing else than pattern detection based on signal values.

I only had a brief look into the supplementary data of the experiment (an Excel file) and I am not at all familiar with the the experimental setup – but from reading my impression was that just threshold values for the firing rate of some channels were used to distinguish “Yes” from “No”. Maybe we could do a bit better with AI (PCA and classifying according to multidimensional pattern analysis)? Does this look like an interesting use case?

Conclusion

In the case of the WIFI example KMeans can be used as an efficient classifier for samples in a feature space which describes characteristics of multiple signal sources. We have seen that the basic concept also works when we apply KMeans after a PCA based transformation to the most important primary components.

The question is: Does this work equally well for other data sets? The answer depends upon the accuracy by which clusters reside completely within regions of the feature space filled by samples of a specific label.
A data set whose samples show grouping in a multidimensional feature space and appear relatively well separable by their labels is the MNIST data set. In the next post of this series we shall therefore try and apply a clustering algorithm to the MNIST data ensemble.

Stay tuned …

Ceterum censeo: The worst fascist today who must be isolated and denazified is the Putler.

KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – III – KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI-example

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In the previous articles of this series

KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – I – Cluster analysis of the WIFI example
KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – II – PCA in combination with KMeans for the WIFI-example

I applied KMeans to the “WIFI” dataset – a small and rather simple training set of the UCI Irvine. The 7 dimensional feature space for this example is defined by the strength of seven different WLAN-signals. The data samples are labeled by numbers specifying four different rooms. We just have 2000 samples. But “simple” does not mean that one cannot learn something of it.

An elbow and a silhouette analysis indicated that the data can well be described by 4 to 5 clusters.
A detailed PCA analysis helped us to understand that the data could basically be described by two primary components whose axes were defined by a diagonal in a two-dimensional sub-space of the original feature space (defined by the features “WLAN-0” and “WLAN-3”) plus an orthogonal axis (defined by “WLAN-4”). As the data points segregated into well separated clusters in the coordinate system of the primary components we could expect that they also segregate well when projected onto two 2-dim sub-spaces of the feature space defined by the signal combinations {WLAN-0/WLAN-4} and {WLAN-3/WLAN-4}.

So we projected the results of a KMeans analysis into a 2-dim sub-space of the 7-dim feature space spanned by two selected “features” (WLAN signals WLAN-0 and WLAN-4). And indeed: For 2 special signal- or feature-combinations we saw a field with 4 to 5 well separated clusters.

As we have well separated clusters – either in sub-planes of the feature space or the space defined by the dominant two PCA components – a legitimate question is: Can we use the cluster information for classifying?

Clusters and classification

In the special example of the WIFI data the data points can obviously be divided into different “groups” filled by data points which belong to a certain “label” or class (in the WIFI case: a room):

In the plots above the colorization of the data points is given by their label in the plot above. However:
Does this mean that these spatially separated “groups” coincide with the clusters detected by KMeans?

In the next plots I superimposed the data points – first colorized by class and then by cluster with different colors and a slight spatial deviation.

We see that the border of the class related points on average overlaps well with the border of the clusters. Only a few points show a major deviation.

Is this always the case? Of course not!

We see this already when we we just use 2 clusters and colorize the data points according to cluster membership in one of the two clusters:

Oops, all the beauty is gone! Members of the previously visual dark-red, green and pink “clusters” would now certainly be members of the first defined “green” cluster. And members of the visual pink and orange clusters would now be members of the “defined” blue cluster. So: Labels may but do strong>not always define clusters.

An important thing we learned by this consideration is that we should at least use a number of cluster greater or equal the number of labels.

But even then the separation may not work. Let us imagine three rooms: In room “A” we only have male persons, in room “B” only female persons and in the third room “C” female persons on one side of the room and male persons on the other – like in some old fashioned dancing courses. If we used the persons’ coordinates to define features and the “male”/”female” attributes as labels and tried a cluster analysis in the feature space we would clearly identify three clusters. However, in the cluster for room “C” we would find a mixture of samples with different labels. Spatial vicinity in the feature space does not mean class identity and a label does not necessarily mean a big distance in the feature space.

Hyperplanes and clusters

The only thing you can hope for with respect to a solvable ML problem is that the data points for different labels may be distributed such that a complicated and curved hyperplane can be found in the multidimensional feature space which separates groups of data points with the same label sufficiently well. But this hyperplane does not necessarily coincide with fictitious borders of some clusters identified by KMeans. We are lucky if the topologically closed surface of a cluster lies completely in a region of the hyperspace separated by complex and topologically open hyperplanes separating data points belonging to one class from other feature space regions which contain data points with different labels.

Not all data ensembles in ML will fall apart in extended clusters each of which dominated by some specific label. Ring like distributions of data samples with identical labels may pose a problem to cluster algorithms – mot only in 2 dimensions.

On the other side: If the labeled data – after some useful transformation – are not well separable in the feature space, then the posed ML task is problematic anyway and the chosen feature definitions may not be appropriate.

Granularity: Hope for label dominance in sufficiently fine grained clusters

What does a label-cluster correlation depend on? Well, if there is an important factor regarding the position of the centroids of KMeans then it is the number of clusters. In the extreme case of as many clusters as data points a super-well defined cluster/label-association exists – but it is not of much use for ML-task. It just represents the most extreme case of overfitting you can think of. It will be useless for new unknown samples.

But the example with the distribution of male/female samples gives you an indication of what we should try: With a growing number of cluster the chances for a fine grained separation into clusters residing on one side of a hyperplane separating samples of different labels rises and with it the chance for a clearer dominance of one label per cluster. This is even true for ring like data distributions: With more then 4 clusters we may even describe a ring like data distribution quite well.

Therefore: If the sample distribution has some reasonable separation hyperplane at all there is a chance that you may find a number of clusters for which each cluster is dominated by a specific label.

In the case of the WIFI example this is pretty obvious. The following first plot shows the data points colorized according to their labels:

The next plot shows four cluster – with data points colorized according to their cluster membership:

The colors are different (we have no control of it) – but the different data point “clouds” in the pictures coincide rather well. Only some data points do not behave well. We can again use the trick we iused in 2 dimensions and superimpose data points with colorization according to cluster and class:

How do we define a classifier by the help of KMeans?

We need a predict()-function which predicts a label from a predicted cluster membership. The recipe is rather simple:

Define the number of cluster you want to use.

  • Use KMeans for a cluster analysis of a training set of samples.
  • Predict the cluster-membership of a sample with the help of the fitted kmeans-object and its predict()-function.
  • Get the labels of the samples belonging to a specific cluster.
  • Find out what the amount of samples with a certain label for a cluster is and compared the data.
  • Find the label which contributes most samples to a cluster. Check the relative amount of deviating data points with other labels. Should be sufficiently small…
  • Build a dictionary which associates the cluster number with its dominant label.
  • Build a prediction function for yet unknown data points. It first predicts the cluster and then the associated label.

You should then test the accuracy of your new cluster-based classifier model on test data.

More clusters than labels?

What will happen to such an algorithm if you use more clusters than labels? Short answer: Nothing – as long as each cluster is really dominated by a specific label. More precisely: A vast majority of your clusters should exhibit contributions from data points with one specific label to an amount significantly far beyond the statistical average. Having more clusters means that under reasonable conditions we just have more than one cluster predicting a certain label. For the case of the WIFI example this means that we can work with five clusters without getting nervous.

Application to the WIFI example

As the clusters represent the labels quite well we expect very good values for the recall values. The experiment is pretty simple. I just present the resulting confusion matrices for the four labels (identifying rooms) and different numbers of clusters “nclus”. I first show you a presentation with seaborn, which explains, how to interpret rows and columns:

nclus = 5

Here I used five (5) clusters and included all samples in the calculation. I.e. I did not separate a training set from a test set of data points.

Confusion matrices for different numbers of clusters

nclus = 4

[[496   0   4   0]
 [  0 425  75   0]
 [  2   0 492   6]
 [  2   0   2 496]]
num of wrongly predicted samples:  91  :: avg_err =  0.0455

The “avg_err” gives you the number of wrongly predicted samples divided by the total number of samples. We see that 4 clusters have a problem with the differentiation of the data points for the room “Diele”.

nclus = 5

[[495   0   5   0]
 [  0 455  45   0]
 [  2   0 493   5]
 [  2   0   2 496]]
num of wrongly predicted samples:  61  :: avg_err =  0.0305

nclus = 6

[[499   0   1   0]
 [  0 452  48   0]
 [  5   0 490   5]
 [  2   0   2 496]]
num of wrongly predicted samples:  63  :: avg_err =  0.0315

nclus = 7

[[499   0   1   0]
 [  0 492   8   0]
 [  4  38 455   3]
 [  2   0   3 495]]
 num of wrongly predicted samples:  59  :: avg_err =  0.0295

nclus = 

num wrongly predicted samples:  58  :: avg_err =  0.029

nclus = 9

[[499   0   1   0]
 [  0 484  16   0]
 [  4  16 476   4]
 [  2   0   2 496]]
num of wrongly predicted samples:  45  :: avg_err =  0.0225

All data above were derived for the same random_state-variable to KMeans.

However, this result depends on the initial shuffling of the samples, the random_state parameter and the initial statistical distribution of the centroids by KMeans. And other hyperparameters … The next plot shows a slightly different result for nclus = 9:

nclus = 9

This means: Nine cluster give us a reasonably fine grained resolution in the case of the WIFI example.

But: Note that the problem areas in the confusion matrix have changed. “Diele” is handled a bit better, but “Wohnzimmer” is not so sharply separated as before. This is not astonishing as we saw a significant mix of data of different labels for different clusters above already:

After nclus = 9 we do not get much better – and dance around an average error of 0.025 => 2.5%:

nclus = 10

num of wrongly predicted samples:  55  :: avg_err =  0.0275

nclus = 11

num of wrongly predicted samples:  52  :: avg_err =  0.026

nclus = 25

num of wrongly predicted samples:  40  :: avg_err =  0.02

Being conservative we can say that our simple cluster based classifier approaches an accuracy around 97.4%. Not so bad regarding the crudeness of our approach! A random forest algorithm reaches something above 98.2%. This is not so much better.

Results after a separation of test data samples

I divided the data set than into 1500 train and 500 test samples.

For 9 clusters I got:

nclus = 9

[[374   0   1   0]
 [  0 362  13   0]
 [  3  17 352   3]
 [  2   0   2 371]]
num wrongly predicted train samples:  41  :: avg_err =  0.027333333333333334
num wrongly predicted train samples:  8  :: avg_err =  0.016

But these numbers depend strongly on the splitting – even if we split stratified. Another run gives:

nclus = 9

[[374   0   1   0]
 [  0 352  23   0]
 [  3   0 369   3]
 [  1   0   2 372]]
num wrongly predicted train samples:  33  :: avg_err =  0.022 
num wrongly predicted test samples:  11  :: avg_err =  0.022

Other runs may even give higher average error values. The variation depend upon of how many critical data points in the intermixing zone were omitted in the train samples. At least the results are not too different from the ones named above.

Conclusion

In this article I presented a very simple method by which a cluster algorithm can be used as a classifier. When we applied the approach to the rather simple WIFI example we saw that this worked pretty well.

What we in addition should try is to combine the classifier with a dimension reduction based on a PCA-analysis. From the results of a previous post we would expect that a cluster classifier should work well on the WIFI data after a transformation and projection of the samples’ data points into a 3-dimensional space spanned by the most important orthogonal main component axes. This is the topic of the next post in this series:

KMeans as a classifier for the WIFI and MNIST datasets – IV – KMeans on PCA transformed data

Ceterum censeo: The worst fascist today who must be denazified is the Putler.