Regression with Neural Networks using TensorFlow Keras API

As part of this blog post, I am going to walk you through how an Artificial Neural Network figures out a complex relationship in data by itself without much of our hand-holding. You should modify the data generation function and observe if it is able to predict the result correctly. I am going to use the Keras API of TensorFlow. Keras API makes it really easy to create Deep Learning models.

Machine learning is about computer figuring out relationships in data by itself as opposed to programmers figuring out and writing code/rules. Machine learning generally is categorized into two types: Supervised and Unsupervised. In supervised, we have the supervision available. And supervised learning is further classified into Regression and Classification. In classification, we have training data with features and labels and the machine should learn from this training data on how to label a record. In regression, the computer/machine should be able to predict a value – mostly numeric. An example of Regression is predicting the salary of a person based on various attributes: age, years of experience, the domain of expertise, gender.

The notebook having all the code is available here on GitHub as part of cloudxlab repository at the location deep_learning/tensorflow_keras_regression.ipynb . I am going to walk you through the code from this notebook here.

Generate Data: Here we are going to generate some data using our own function. This function is a non-linear function and a usual line fitting may not work for such a function

def myfunc(x):
    if x < 30:
        mult = 10
    elif x < 60:
        mult = 20
    else:
        mult = 50
    return x*mult
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One-on-one discussion on Gradient Descent

Usually, the learners from our classes schedule 1-on-1 discussions with the mentors to clarify their doubts. So, thought of sharing the video of one of these 1-on-1 discussions that one of our CloudxLab learner – Leo – had with Sandeep last week.

Below are the questions from the same discussion.

You can go through the detailed discussion which happened around these questions, in the attached video below.

One-on-one discussion with Sandeep on Gradient Descent
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How To Optimise A Neural Network?

When we are solving an industry problem involving neural networks, very often we end up with bad performance. Here are some suggestions on what should be done in order to improve the performance.

Is your model underfitting or overfitting?

You must break down the input data set into two parts – training and test. The general practice is to have 80% for training and 20% for testing.

You should train your neural network with the training set and test with the testing set. This sounds like common sense but we often skip it.

Compare the performance (MSE in case of regression and accuracy/f1/recall/precision in case of classification) of your model with the training set and with the test set.

If it is performing badly for both test and training it is underfitting and if it is performing great for the training set but not test set, it is overfitting.

Continue reading “How To Optimise A Neural Network?”