MachineLearning笔记week1

1.1 Supervised Learning

In supervised learning, we are given a data set and already know what our correct output should look like, having the idea that there is ralationship between the input and the output.

Supervised learning problems are categoirzed into “regression” and “classification” problems. In a regression problem, we are trying to predict results within a continuous output, meaning that we are trying to ma input variables to some continuous function. In a classification problem, we are instead trying to predict results in a discrete output. In other word, we are trying to map input variables into discrete categories.

Example 1:

Given data about the size of houses on the real estate market, try to predict their price. Price as a function of size is a continuous output, so this is a regression problem.

We could turn this example into a classification problem by instead making our output about whether the house “sells for more or less than the asking price”. Here we are classifying houses base on price into two discrete categories.

Example 2:

(a) Regression - Given a picture of a person, we have to predict their age on the basis of the given picture

(b) Classification - Given a patient with a tumor, we have to predict whether the tumor is malignant or benign.

1.2 Unsupervised Learning

Unsupervised learning allows us to approach problems with little or no idea what our results should look like. We can derive structure from data where we don’t necessarily know the effect of the variables.

We can derive this structure by clustering the data on relationships among the variables in the data.

With unsupervised learning there is no feedback based on the predict results.

Example:

Clustering:Take a collection of 1,000,000 different genes, and find a way to automatically group these genes into groups that are somehow similar or related by different variables, such as lifespan, location, roles, and so on.

Non-clustering:The “Cocktail Party Algorithm”, allows you to find structure in a chaotic envrionment.

1.3 Model Representation

To establish notation for tuture use, we’ll use $x^{(i)}$ to denote the “input” variables(living area in this example), also called input features, and $y^{(i)}$ to denote the “output” variable that we are trying to predict(price). A pair $(x^{(i)},y^{(i)})$ is called a training example, and the dataset that we’ll be using to learn – a list of m training examples $(x^{(i)},y^{(i)});i=1,...,m$ is called a training set. Note that the supercript “(i)” in the notation is simply an index into the training set, and has nothing to do with exponentiation. We will also use X to denote the space of input values, and Y to denote the space of output values. In this example, X=Y=R.

To describe the supervised learning problem slightly more formally, our goal is, given a training set, to learn a function h: X→Y so that h(x) is a “good” predictor for the corresponding value of y. For historical reasons, this function h is called a hypothesis. Seen pictorially, the process is therefore like this:

When the target variable that we’re trying to predict is continuous, such as inour housing example, we call the learning problem a regression preblem. When y can take on only a small number of discrete values(such as if, given the living area, we wanted to predict if a dwelling is a house or an apartment, say), we call it a classification problem.

1.4 Cost Function

We can measure the accuracy of our hypothesis function by using a cost function. This takes an average difference (actually a fancier version of an average) of all the results of the hypothesis with inputs from x’s and the actual output y’s.

$J(\theta_0, \theta_1) = \tfrac{1}{2m}\sum_{i=1}^m(\hat{y_i}-y_i)^2 = \tfrac{1}{2m}\sum_{i=1}^m(h_\theta(x_i)-y_i)^2$

To break it apart, it is $\frac{1}{2}\bar{x}$ where $\bar{x}$ is the mean of the squares of $h_\theta(x_{i})-y_{i}$, or the difference between the predicted value and the actual value.

This function is otherwise called the “Squared error function”, or “Mean squared error”. The mean is halved $(\frac{1}{2})$ as a convenience for the computation of the gradient descent, as the derivative term of the square function will cancel out the $\frac{1}{2}$ term. The following image summarizes what the cost function does:

1.5 Gradient Descent

So we have our hypothesis function and we have a way of measuring how well it fits into the data. Now we need to estimate the parameters in the hypothesis function. That’s where gradient descent comes in.

Imagine that we graph our hypothesis function based on its fields $\theta_0$ and $\theta_1$ (actually we are graphing the cost function as a function of the parameter estimates). We are not graphing x and y itself, but the parameter range of our hypothesis function and the cost resulting from selecting a particular set of parameters.

We put $\theta_0$ on the x axis and $\theta_1$ on the y axis, with the cost function on the vertical z axis. The points on our graph will be the result of the cost function using our hypothesis with those specific theta parameters. The graph below depicts such a setup.

We will know that we have succeeded when our cost function is at the very bottom of the pits in our graph, i.e. when its value is the minimum. The red arrows show the minimum points in the graph.

The way we do this is by taking the derivative (the tangential line to a function) of our cost function. The slope of the tangent is the derivative at that point and it will give us a direction to move towards. We make steps down the cost function in the direction with the steepest descent. The size of each step is determined by the parameter α, which is called the learning rate.

For example, the distance between each ‘star’ in the graph above represents a step determined by our parameter α. A smaller α would result in a smaller step and a larger α results in a larger step. The direction in which the step is taken is determined by the partial derivative of $J(\theta_0,\theta_1)$. Depending on where one starts on the graph, one could end up at different points. The image above shows us two different starting points that end up in two different places.

The gradient descent algorithm is:

repeat until convergence:

$\theta_j := \theta_j - \alpha \frac{\partial}{\partial \theta_j} J(\theta_0, \theta_1)$

where

j=0,1 represents the feature index number.

At each iteration j, one should simultaneously update the parameters $\theta_1, \theta_2,...,\theta_n$. Updating a specific parameter prior to calculating another one on the $j^{(th)}$ iteration would yield to a wrong implementation.

1.6 Gradient Descent For Linear Regression

When specifically applied to the case of linear regression, a new form of the gradient descent equation can be derived. We can substitute our actual cost function and our actual hypothesis function and modify the equation to :

repeat util convergence:

$\theta_0 := \theta_0 - \alpha \frac{1}{m} \sum_{i=1}^m(h_\theta(x_i)-y_i)$

$\theta_1 := \theta_1 - \alpha \frac{1}{m} \sum_{i=1}^m((h_\theta(x_i)-y_i)x_i)$

So, this is simply gradient descent on the original cost function J. This method looks at every example in the entire training set on every step, and is called batch gradient descent. Note that, while gradient descent can be susceptible to local minima in general, the optimization problem we have posed here for linear regression has only one global, and no other local, optima; thus gradient descent always converges (assuming the learning rate α is not too large) to the global minimum. Indeed, J is a convex quadratic function. Here is an example of gradient descent as it is run to minimize a quadratic function.