## Data Preprocessing

Mean subtraction is the most common form of preprocessing. It involves subtracting the mean across every individual feature in the data, and has the geometric interpretation of centering the cloud of data around the origin along every dimension. In numpy, this operation would be implemented as: X -= np.mean(X, axis = 0). With images specifically, for convenience it can be common to subtract a single value from all pixels (e.g. X -= np.mean(X)), or to do so separately across the three color channels.

Normalization refers to normalizing the data dimensions so that they are of approximately the same scale. There are two common ways of achieving this normalization. One is to divide each dimension by its standard deviation, once it has been zero-centered: (X /= np.std(X, axis = 0)). Another form of this preprocessing normalizes each dimension so that the min and max along the dimension is -1 and 1 respectively. It only makes sense to apply this preprocessing if you have a reason to believe that different input features have different scales (or units), but they should be of approximately equal importance to the learning algorithm. In case of images, the relative scales of pixels are already approximately equal (and in range from 0 to 255), so it is not strictly necessary to perform this additional preprocessing step.

Common pitfall. An important point to make about the preprocessing is that any preprocessing statistics (e.g. the data mean) must only be computed on the training data, and then applied to the validation / test data. E.g. computing the mean and subtracting it from every image across the entire dataset and then splitting the data into train/val/test splits would be a mistake. Instead, the mean must be computed only over the training data and then subtracted equally from all splits (train/val/test).

## Dropout

Dropout is an extremely effective, simple and recently introduced regularization technique by Srivastava et al. While training, dropout is implemented by only keeping a neuron active with some probability $P$ (a hyperparameter), or setting it to zero otherwise.

we must scale the activations by $p$ at test time. Since test-time performance is so critical, it is always preferable to use inverted dropout, which performs the scaling at train time, leaving the forward pass at test time untouched. Additionally, this has the appealing property that the prediction code can remain untouched when you decide to tweak where you apply dropout, or if at all. Inverted dropout looks as follows:

## Loss functions

It is important to note that the L2 loss is much harder to optimize than a more stable loss such as Softmax. Intuitively, it requires a very fragile and specific property from the network to output exactly one correct value for each input (and its augmentations). Notice that this is not the case with Softmax, where the precise value of each score is less important: It only matters that their magnitudes are appropriate. Additionally, the L2 loss is less robust because outliers can introduce huge gradients. When faced with a regression problem, first consider if it is absolutely inadequate to quantize the output into bins. For example, if you are predicting star rating for a product, it might work much better to use 5 independent classifiers for ratings of 1-5 stars instead of a regression loss. Classification has the additional benefit that it can give you a distribution over the regression outputs, not just a single output with no indication of its confidence. If you’re certain that classification is not appropriate, use the L2 but be careful: For example, the L2 is more fragile and applying dropout in the network (especially in the layer right before the L2 loss) is not a great idea.

When faced with a regression task, first consider if it is absolutely necessary. Instead, have a strong preference to discretizing your outputs to bins and perform classification over them whenever possible.

In theory, performing a gradient check is as simple as comparing the analytic gradient to the numerical gradient. In practice, the process is much more involved and error prone. Here are some tips, tricks, and issues to watch out for:

Use the centered formula. The formula you may have seen for the finite difference approximation when evaluating the numerical gradient looks as follows:

Where $h$ is a very small number, in practice approximately 1e-5 or so. In practice, it turns out that it is much better to use the centered difference formula of the form:

Use relative error for the comparison.

• relative error > 1e-2 usually means the gradient is probably wrong
• 1e-2 > relative error > 1e-4 should make you feel uncomfortable
• 1e-4 > relative error is usually okay for objectives with kinks. But if there are no kinks (e.g. use of tanh nonlinearities and softmax), then 1e-4 is too high.
• 1e-7 and less you should be happy.

## Annealing the learning rate

• Step decay: Reduce the learning rate by some factor every few epochs. Typical values might be reducing the learning rate by a half every 5 epochs, or by 0.1 every 20 epochs. These numbers depend heavily on the type of problem and the model. One heuristic you may see in practice is to watch the validation error while training with a fixed learning rate, and reduce the learning rate by a constant (e.g. 0.5) whenever the validation error stops improving.
• Exponential decay. has the mathematical form $\alpha = \alpha_0 e^{-k t}$. where $\alpha_0, k$ are hyperparameters and $t$ is the iteration number (but you can also use units of epochs).
• 1/t decay has the mathematical form $\alpha = \alpha_0 / (1 + k t )$ where $a_0, k$, are hyperparameters and $t$ is the iteration number.

In practice, we find that the step decay is slightly preferable because the hyperparameters it involves (the fraction of decay and the step timings in units of epochs) are more interpretable than the hyperparameter $k$.

## Second order methods

A second, popular group of methods for optimization in context of deep learning is based on Newton’s method, which iterates the following update:

Here,$H f(x)$ is the Hessian matrix, which is a square matrix of second-order partial derivatives of the function. The term
$\nabla f(x)$ is the gradient vector, as seen in Gradient Descent. Intuitively, the Hessian describes the local curvature of the loss function, which allows us to perform a more efficient update. In particular, multiplying by the inverse Hessian leads the optimization to take more aggressive steps in directions of shallow curvature and shorter steps in directions of steep curvature.

However, the update above is impractical for most deep learning applications because computing (and inverting) the Hessian in its explicit form is a very costly process in both space and time. For instance, a Neural Network with one million parameters would have a Hessian matrix of size [1,000,000 x 1,000,000], occupying approximately 3725 gigabytes of RAM. Hence, a large variety of quasi-Newton methods have been developed that seek to approximate the inverse Hessian. Among these, the most popular is L-BFGS, which uses the information in the gradients over time to form the approximation implicitly (i.e. the full matrix is never computed).

In practice, it is currently not common to see L-BFGS or similar second-order methods applied to large-scale Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks. Instead, SGD variants based on (Nesterov’s) momentum are more standard because they are simpler and scale more easily.

## Per-parameter adaptive learning rate methods

Adam. Adam is a recently proposed update that looks a bit like RMSProp with momentum. The (simplified) update looks as follows:

Notice that the update looks exactly as RMSProp update, except the “smooth” version of the gradient m is used instead of the raw (and perhaps noisy) gradient vector dx. Recommended values in the paper are eps = 1e-8, beta1 = 0.9, beta2 = 0.999. In practice Adam is currently recommended as the default algorithm to use, and often works slightly better than RMSProp. However, it is often also worth trying SGD+Nesterov Momentum as an alternative. The full Adam update also includes a bias correction mechanism, which compensates for the fact that in the first few time steps the vectors m,v are both initialized and therefore biased at zero, before they fully “warm up”. With the bias correction mechanism, the update looks as follows:

## Hyperparameter optimization

As we’ve seen, training Neural Networks can involve many hyperparameter settings. The most common hyperparameters in context of Neural Networks include:

• the initial learning rate
• learning rate decay schedule (such as the decay constant)
• regularization strength (L2 penalty, dropout strength)

But as we saw, there are many more relatively less sensitive hyperparameters, for example in per-parameter adaptive learning methods, the setting of momentum and its schedule, etc.

Hyperparameter ranges. Search for hyperparameters on log scale. For example, a typical sampling of the learning rate would look as follows: learning_rate = 10 ** uniform(-6, 1).

Prefer random search to grid search. As argued by Bergstra and Bengio in Random Search for Hyper-Parameter Optimization, “randomly chosen trials are more efficient for hyper-parameter optimization than trials on a grid”. As it turns out, this is also usually easier to implement.

Careful with best values on border. Sometimes it can happen that you’re searching for a hyperparameter (e.g. learning rate) in a bad range. For example, suppose we use learning_rate = 10 ** uniform(-6, 1). Once we receive the results, it is important to double check that the final learning rate is not at the edge of this interval, or otherwise you may be missing more optimal hyperparameter setting beyond the interval.

Stage your search from coarse to fine. In practice, it can be helpful to first search in coarse ranges (e.g. 10 ** [-6, 1]), and then depending on where the best results are turning up, narrow the range. Also, it can be helpful to perform the initial coarse search while only training for 1 epoch or even less, because many hyperparameter settings can lead the model to not learn at all, or immediately explode with infinite cost. The second stage could then perform a narrower search with 5 epochs, and the last stage could perform a detailed search in the final range for many more epochs (for example).

## Model Ensembles

In practice, one reliable approach to improving the performance of Neural Networks by a few percent is to train multiple independent models, and at test time average their predictions. As the number of models in the ensemble increases, the performance typically monotonically improves (though with diminishing returns). Moreover, the improvements are more dramatic with higher model variety in the ensemble. There are a few approaches to forming an ensemble:

• Same model, different initializations. Use cross-validation to determine the best hyperparameters, then train multiple models with the best set of hyperparameters but with different random initialization. The danger with this approach is that the variety is only due to initialization.
• Top models discovered during cross-validation. Use cross-validation to determine the best hyperparameters, then pick the top few (e.g. 10) models to form the ensemble. This improves the variety of the ensemble but has the danger of including suboptimal models. In practice, this can be easier to perform since it doesn’t require additional retraining of models after cross-validation
• Different checkpoints of a single model. If training is very expensive, some people have had limited success in taking different checkpoints of a single network over time (for example after every epoch) and using those to form an ensemble. Clearly, this suffers from some lack of variety, but can still work reasonably well in practice. The advantage of this approach is that is very cheap.
• Running average of parameters during training. Related to the last point, a cheap way of almost always getting an extra percent or two of performance is to maintain a second copy of the network’s weights in memory that maintains an exponentially decaying sum of previous weights during training. This way you’re averaging the state of the network over last several iterations. You will find that this “smoothed” version of the weights over last few steps almost always achieves better validation error. The rough intuition to have in mind is that the objective is bowl-shaped and your network is jumping around the mode, so the average has a higher chance of being somewhere nearer the mode.

reference https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/27919794
cs231n lecture notes

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