In this tutorial, we'll go through another example of linear regression from an implementation perspective. We will use the Boston Housing dataset, and predict the median cost of a home in an area of Boston. We will:
import matplotlib
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
The Boston Housing data is one of the "toy datasets" available in sklearn. We can import and display the dataset description like this:
from sklearn.datasets import load_boston
boston_data = load_boston()
print(boston_data['DESCR'])
To keep the example simple, we will only work with two features: INDUS
and RM
. The explanations of these features are in the description above.
# take the boston data
data = boston_data['data']
# we will only work with two of the features: INDUS and RM
x_input = data[:, [2,5]]
y_target = boston_data['target']
Just to give us an intuition of how these two features INDUS and RM affect housing prices, lets visualize the feature interactions. As expected, the more "industrial" a neighbourhood is, the lower the housing prices. The more rooms houses in a neighbourhood have, the higher the median housing price.
# Individual plots for the two features:
plt.title('Industrialness vs Med House Price')
plt.scatter(x_input[:, 0], y_target)
plt.xlabel('Industrialness')
plt.ylabel('Med House Price')
plt.show()
plt.title('Avg Num Rooms vs Med House Price')
plt.scatter(x_input[:, 1], y_target)
plt.xlabel('Avg Num Rooms')
plt.ylabel('Med House Price')
plt.show()
In lecture, we defined the cost function for a linear regression problem using the square loss:
$$\mathcal{E}(y, t) = \frac{1}{2N} \sum_{i=1}^N (y^{(i)}-t^{(i)})^2$$
In our case, since we have two features $x_1$ and $x_2$, our linear regression model will look like this:
$$\mathcal{E}(y, t) = \frac{1}{2N} \sum_{i=1}^N (w_1 x_1^{(i)} + w_2 x_2^{(i)} + b -t^{(i)})^2$$
We can use the above formula to compute the cost function across an entire dataset (X, t):
def cost(w1, w2, b, X, t):
'''
Evaluate the cost function in a non-vectorized manner for
inputs `X` and targets `t`, at weights `w1`, `w2` and `b`.
'''
# TODO: write this!
For example, the cost for this hypothesis...
cost(3, 5, 20, x_input, y_target)
...is higher than this one:
cost(3, 5, 0, x_input, y_target)
Vectorization is a way to use linear algbera to represent computations like the one above.
In Python, vectorized code written in numpy tend to be faster than code that uses a for
loop.
We'll talk about vectorization in more detail in lecture 2.
If we write the linear regression cost function using matrix computations, it would look like this:
$$\mathcal{E}(y, t) = \frac{1}{2N} \| \bf{X} \bf{w} + b \bf{1} - \bf{t} \| ^2$$
Following the above formula, our vectorized code looks like this:
def cost_vectorized(w1, w2, b, X, t):
'''
Evaluate the cost function in a vectorized manner for
inputs `X` and targets `t`, at weights `w1`, `w2` and `b`.
'''
# TODO: write this!
We can check that the vectorized code provides the same answers as the non-vectorized code:
# TODO: write this!
# TODO: write this!
We'll see below that the vectorized code already runs ~2x faster than the non-vectorized code!
Hopefully this will convince you to always vectorized your code whenever possible
import time
Time for non-vectorized code:
t0 = time.time()
print(cost(4, 5, 20, x_input, y_target))
t1 = time.time()
print(t1 - t0)
Time for vectorized code:
t0 = time.time()
print(cost_vectorized(4, 5, 20, x_input, y_target))
t1 = time.time()
print(t1 - t0)
We'll plot the cost for two of our weights, assuming that bias = -22.89831573.
We'll see where that number comes from later.
Notice the shape of the contours are ovals.
w1s = np.arange(-1.0, 0.0, 0.01)
w2s = np.arange(6.0, 10.0, 0.1)
z_cost = []
for w2 in w2s:
z_cost.append([cost_vectorized(w1, w2, -22.89831573, x_input, y_target) for w1 in w1s])
z_cost = np.array(z_cost)
np.shape(z_cost)
W1, W2 = np.meshgrid(w1s, w2s)
CS = plt.contour(W1, W2, z_cost, 25)
plt.clabel(CS, inline=1, fontsize=10)
plt.title('Costs for various values of w1 and w2 for b=0')
plt.xlabel("w1")
plt.ylabel("w2")
plt.plot([-0.33471389], [7.82205511], 'o') # this will be the minima that we'll find later
plt.show()
Work this out on the board:
# add an extra feature (column in the input) that are just all ones
x_in = np.concatenate([x_input, np.ones([np.shape(x_input)[0], 1])], axis=1)
x_in
def solve_exactly(X, t):
'''
Solve linear regression exactly. (fully vectorized)
Given `X` - NxD matrix of inputs
`t` - target outputs
Returns the optimal weights as a D-dimensional vector
'''
# TODO: write this!
solve_exactly(x_in, y_target)
In practice, we use library code that is written for us.
# In real life we don't want to code it directly
np.linalg.lstsq(x_in, y_target)
Another approach to optimize the cost function is via gradient descent, which we will discuss in lecture 2.
The main idea is that we compute the gradient of the cost function with respect to each parameter $w_j$, which will tell us how to update $w_j$ (by a small amount) to improve the cost function (by a small amount).
In order to implement gradient descent, we need to be able to compute the gradient of the cost function with respect to a weight $w_j$:
$$\frac{\partial \mathcal{E}}{\partial w_j} = \frac{1}{N}\sum_i x_j^{(i)}(y^{(i)}-t^{(i)})$$
# Vectorized gradient function
def gradfn(weights, X, t):
'''
Given `weights` - a current "Guess" of what our weights should be
`X` - matrix of shape (N,D) of input features
`t` - target y values
Return gradient of each weight evaluated at the current value
'''
# TODO: write this!
With this function, we can solve the optimization problem by repeatedly applying gradient descent on $w$:
def solve_via_gradient_descent(X, t, print_every=5000,
niter=100000, alpha=0.005):
'''
Given `X` - matrix of shape (N,D) of input features
`t` - target y values
Solves for linear regression weights.
Return weights after `niter` iterations.
'''
# TODO: write this!
# TODO: write this!
solve_via_gradient_descent( X=x_in, t=y_target)
For comparison, this was the exact result:
np.linalg.lstsq(x_in, y_target)