Exercises for week 36

Here are three possible exercises for week 36 and the lab sessions of Wednesday September 1..

Exercise 1: Setting up various Python environments

The first exercise here is of a mere technical art. We want you to have

We will make extensive use of Python as programming language and its myriad of available libraries. You will find IPython/Jupyter notebooks invaluable in your work. You can run R codes in the Jupyter/IPython notebooks, with the immediate benefit of visualizing your data. You can also use compiled languages like C++, Rust, Fortran etc if you prefer. The focus in these lectures will be on Python.

If you have Python installed (we recommend Python3) and you feel pretty familiar with installing different packages, we recommend that you install the following Python packages via pip as

  1. pip install numpy scipy matplotlib ipython scikit-learn sympy pandas pillow
For Tensorflow, we recommend following the instructions in the text of Aurelien Geron, Hands‑On Machine Learning with Scikit‑Learn and TensorFlow, O'Reilly

We will come back to tensorflow later.

For Python3, replace pip with pip3.

For OSX users we recommend, after having installed Xcode, to install brew. Brew allows for a seamless installation of additional software via for example

  1. brew install python3
For Linux users, with its variety of distributions like for example the widely popular Ubuntu distribution, you can use pip as well and simply install Python as
  1. sudo apt-get install python3 (or python for Python2.7)
If you don't want to perform these operations separately and venture into the hassle of exploring how to set up dependencies and paths, we recommend two widely used distrubutions which set up all relevant dependencies for Python, namely which is an open source distribution of the Python and R programming languages for large-scale data processing, predictive analytics, and scientific computing, that aims to simplify package management and deployment. Package versions are managed by the package management system conda. is a Python distribution for scientific and analytic computing distribution and analysis environment, available for free and under a commercial license.

We recommend using Anaconda if you are not too familiar with setting paths in a terminal environment.

Exercise 2: making your own data and exploring scikit-learn

We will generate our own dataset for a function \( y(x) \) where \( x \in [0,1] \) and defined by random numbers computed with the uniform distribution. The function \( y \) is a quadratic polynomial in \( x \) with added stochastic noise according to the normal distribution \( \cal {N}(0,1) \). The following simple Python instructions define our \( x \) and \( y \) values (with 100 data points).

x = np.random.rand(100,1)
y = 2.0+5*x*x+0.1*np.random.randn(100,1)
  1. Write your own code (following the examples under the regression notes) for computing the parametrization of the data set fitting a second-order polynomial.
  2. Use thereafter scikit-learn (see again the examples in the regression slides) and compare with your own code.
  3. Using scikit-learn, compute also the mean square error, a risk metric corresponding to the expected value of the squared (quadratic) error defined as
$$ MSE(\boldsymbol{y},\boldsymbol{\tilde{y}}) = \frac{1}{n} \sum_{i=0}^{n-1}(y_i-\tilde{y}_i)^2, $$ and the \( R^2 \) score function. If \( \tilde{\boldsymbol{y}}_i \) is the predicted value of the \( i-th \) sample and \( y_i \) is the corresponding true value, then the score \( R^2 \) is defined as $$ R^2(\boldsymbol{y}, \tilde{\boldsymbol{y}}) = 1 - \frac{\sum_{i=0}^{n - 1} (y_i - \tilde{y}_i)^2}{\sum_{i=0}^{n - 1} (y_i - \bar{y})^2}, $$ where we have defined the mean value of \( \boldsymbol{y} \) as $$ \bar{y} = \frac{1}{n} \sum_{i=0}^{n - 1} y_i. $$ You can use the functionality included in scikit-learn. If you feel for it, you can use your own program and define functions which compute the above two functions. Discuss the meaning of these results. Try also to vary the coefficient in front of the added stochastic noise term and discuss the quality of the fits.

Solution.

The code here is an example of where we define our own design matrix and fit parameters \( \beta \).

import os
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split

def save_fig(fig_id):
    plt.savefig(image_path(fig_id) + ".png", format='png')

def R2(y_data, y_model):
    return 1 - np.sum((y_data - y_model) ** 2) / np.sum((y_data - np.mean(y_data)) ** 2)
def MSE(y_data,y_model):
    n = np.size(y_model)
    return np.sum((y_data-y_model)**2)/n

x = np.random.rand(100)
y = 2.0+5*x*x+0.1*np.random.randn(100)


#  The design matrix now as function of a given polynomial
X = np.zeros((len(x),3))
X[:,0] = 1.0
X[:,1] = x
X[:,2] = x**2
# We split the data in test and training data
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.2)
# matrix inversion to find beta
beta = np.linalg.inv(X_train.T @ X_train) @ X_train.T @ y_train
print(beta)
# and then make the prediction
ytilde = X_train @ beta
print("Training R2")
print(R2(y_train,ytilde))
print("Training MSE")
print(MSE(y_train,ytilde))
ypredict = X_test @ beta
print("Test R2")
print(R2(y_test,ypredict))
print("Test MSE")
print(MSE(y_test,ypredict))

Exercise 3: Normalizing our data

A much used approach before starting to train the data is to preprocess our data. Normally the data may need a rescaling and/or may be sensitive to extreme values. Scaling the data renders our inputs much more suitable for the algorithms we want to employ.

Scikit-Learn has several functions which allow us to rescale the data, normally resulting in much better results in terms of various accuracy scores. The StandardScaler function in Scikit-Learn ensures that for each feature/predictor we study the mean value is zero and the variance is one (every column in the design/feature matrix). This scaling has the drawback that it does not ensure that we have a particular maximum or minimum in our data set. Another function included in Scikit-Learn is the MinMaxScaler which ensures that all features are exactly between \( 0 \) and \( 1 \). The

The Normalizer scales each data point such that the feature vector has a euclidean length of one. In other words, it projects a data point on the circle (or sphere in the case of higher dimensions) with a radius of 1. This means every data point is scaled by a different number (by the inverse of it’s length). This normalization is often used when only the direction (or angle) of the data matters, not the length of the feature vector.

The RobustScaler works similarly to the StandardScaler in that it ensures statistical properties for each feature that guarantee that they are on the same scale. However, the RobustScaler uses the median and quartiles, instead of mean and variance. This makes the RobustScaler ignore data points that are very different from the rest (like measurement errors). These odd data points are also called outliers, and might often lead to trouble for other scaling techniques.

It also common to split the data in a training set and a testing set. A typical split is to use \( 80\% \) of the data for training and the rest for testing. This can be done as follows with our design matrix \( \boldsymbol{X} \) and data \( \boldsymbol{y} \) (remember to import scikit-learn)

# split in training and test data
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X,y,test_size=0.2)

Then we can use the standard scaler to scale our data as

scaler = StandardScaler()
scaler.fit(X_train)
X_train_scaled = scaler.transform(X_train)
X_test_scaled = scaler.transform(X_test)

In this exercise we want you to to compute the MSE for the training data and the test data as function of the complexity of a polynomial, that is the degree of a given polynomial. We want you also to compute the \( R2 \) score as function of the complexity of the model for both training data and test data. You should also run the calculation with and without scaling.

One of the aims is to reproduce Figure 2.11 of Hastie et al.

Our data is defined by \( x\in [-3,3] \) with a total of for example \( 100 \) data points.

np.random.seed()
n = 100
maxdegree = 14
# Make data set.
x = np.linspace(-3, 3, n).reshape(-1, 1)
y = np.exp(-x**2) + 1.5 * np.exp(-(x-2)**2)+ np.random.normal(0, 0.1, x.shape)

where \( y \) is the function we want to fit with a given polynomial.

a) Write a first code which sets up a design matrix \( X \) defined by a fifth-order polynomial. Scale your data and split it in training and test data.

b) Perform an ordinary least squares and compute the means squared error and the \( R2 \) factor for the training data and the test data, with and without scaling.

c) Add now a model which allows you to make polynomials up to degree \( 15 \). Perform a standard OLS fitting of the training data and compute the MSE and \( R2 \) for the training and test data and plot both test and training data MSE and \( R2 \) as functions of the polynomial degree. Compare what you see with Figure 2.11 of Hastie et al. Comment your results. For which polynomial degree do you find an optimal MSE (smallest value)?