A case against Kaggle

If you thought that Kaggle is the home of Data Science - think again.

https://www.kaggle.com/c/airbus-ship-detection/discussion/64355

This is official - they do not know the hell they are doing.
There have been several appalling cases already, but this takes the prize.

Following this thread, wrote a small petition to Kaggle
https://www.kaggle.com/c/airbus-ship-detection/discussion/64393

I doubt that they will hear, but why not.

#data_science

Venn diagrams in python

Compare sets as easy as:

# Import the library
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib_venn import venn3
 
# Make the diagram
plt.figure(figsize=(10,10))
venn3(subsets = (s1,s2,s3),set_labels=['synonyms','our_tree','add_syns'])
plt.show()

Very simple and useful.

#data_science

Crowd-AI maps repo

Just opened my repo for crowd AI maps 2018.
Did not pursue this competition till the end, so it is not polished, .md is not updated. Use it at your own risk!

https://github.com/snakers4/crowdai-maps-2018
https://spark-in.me/post/a-small-case-for-search-of-structure-within-your-data

#deep_learning

A small hack to spare PyTorch memory when resuming training

When you resume from a checkpoint, consider adding this to save GPU memory:

del checkpoint 
 torch.cuda.empty_cache()

#deep_learning

Training a MNASNET from scratch ... and failing

As a small side hobby we tried training new Google's mobile network from scratch and failed:
- https://spark-in.me/post/mnasnet-fail-alas
- https://github.com/snakers4/mnasnet-pytorch

Maybe you know how to train it properly?

Also now you can upvote articles on spark in me! =)

#deep_learning

MySQL - replacing window functions

Older versions of MySQL (and maybe newer ones) do not have all the goodness you can find in PostgreSQL. Ofc you can do plain session matching in Python, but sometimes you just need to do it in plain SQL.

In Postgres you usually use window functions for this purpose if you need PLAIN SQL (ofc there are stored procedures / views / mat views etc).

In MySQL it can be elegantly solved like this:

SET @session_number = 0, @last_uid = '0', @current_id = '0', @dif=0;

    SELECT 
        t1.some_field,
        t2.some_field,
        ...
        @last_uid:=@current_uid,
        @current_uid:=t1.uid,
        @dif:=TIMESTAMPDIFF(MINUTE, t2.session_ts, t1.session_ts),
        if(@last_uid=@current_uid, if(@dif > 30,@session_number:=@session_number+1,@session_number),@session_number:=0) as session
    FROM 
             table1 t1
        JOIN table2 t2 on t1.id = t2.id+1

#data_science

DS/ML digest 23

The key topic of this one - is this is insanity
- vid2vid
- unsupervised NMT

https://spark-in.me/post/2018_ds_ml_digest_23

If you like our digests, you can support the channel via:
- Sharing / reposting;
- Giving an article a decent comment / a thumbs-up;
- Buying me a coffee (links on the digest);

Let's spread the right DS/ML ideas together.

#digest
#deep_learning
#data_science

Chainer - a predecessor of PyTorch

Looks like
- PyTorch was based not only on Torch, but also its autograd was forked from Chainer;
- Chainer looks like PyTorch ... but not by Facebook, but by independent Japanese group;
- A quick glance through the docs confirms that PyTorch and Chainer APIs look 90% identical (both numpy inspired, but using different back-ends);
- Open Images 2nd place was taken by people using Chainer with 512 GPUs;
- I have yet to confirm myself that PyTorch can work with a cluster (but other people have done it) https://github.com/eladhoffer/convNet.pytorch;

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/7lb5n1/d_chainer_vs_pytorch/
https://docs.chainer.org/en/stable/comparison.html

#deep_learning

Also - thanks for all DO referral link supporters - now finally hosting of my website is free (at least for next ~6 months)!

Also today I published a 200th post on spark-in.me. Ofc not all of these are proper long articles, but nevertheless it's cool.

SeNet
- http://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01507;
- A 2017 Imagenet winner;
- Mostly ResNet-152 inspired network;
- Transfers well (ResNet);
- Squeeze and Excitation (SE) block, that adaptively recalibratess channel-wise feature responses by explicitly modelling in- terdependencies between channels;
- Intuitively looks like - convolution meet the attention mechanism;
- SE block:
- https://pics.spark-in.me/upload/aa50a2559f56faf705ad6639ac973a38.jpg
- Reduction ratio r to be 16 in all experiments;
- Results:
- https://pics.spark-in.me/upload/db2c98330744a6fd4dab17259d5f9d14.jpg

#deep_learning

Useful Python / PyTorch bits

dot.notation access to dictionary attributes

class dotdict(dict):
    __getattr__ = dict.get
    __setattr__ = dict.__setitem__
    __delattr__ = dict.__delitem__

PyTorch embedding layer - ignore padding

nn.Embedding has a padding_idx attribute not to update the padding token embedding.

#python
#pytorch

Gensim's fast-text subwords

Some monkey patching to get subwords from Gensim's fast-text


from gensim.models.utils_any2vec import _compute_ngrams,_ft_hash

def subword(self, word):
ngram_lst = []
ngrams = _compute_ngrams(word, self.min_n, self.max_n)

for ngram in ngrams:
ngram_hash = _ft_hash(ngram) % self.bucket
if ngram_hash in self.hash2index:
ngram_lst.append(ngram)
return ngram_lst

gensim.models.keyedvectors.FastTextKeyedVectors.subword = subword

Understanding the current SOTA NMT / NLP model - transformer

A list of articles that really help to do so:
- Understanding attention https://jalammar.github.io/visualizing-neural-machine-translation-mechanics-of-seq2seq-models-with-attention/
- Annotated transformer http://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/2018/04/03/attention.html
- Illustrated transformer https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/

Playing with transformer in practice

This repo turned out to be really helpful
https://github.com/huggingface/pytorch-openai-transformer-lm

It features:
- Decent well encapsulated model and loss;
- Several head for different tasks;
- It works;
- Ofc their data-loading scheme is crappy and over-engineered;

My impressions on actually training the transformer model for classification:
- It works;
- It is high capacity;
- Inference time is ~`5x` higher than char-level or plain RNNs;
- It serves as a classifier as well as an LM;
- Capacity is enough to tackle most challenging tasks;
- It can be deployed on CPU for small texts (!);
- On smaller tasks there is no clear difference between plain RNNs and Transformer;

#nlp

Using sklearn pairwise cosine similarity

http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.pairwise.cosine_similarity.html#sklearn.metrics.pairwise.cosine_similarity

On 7k * 7k example with 300-dimensional vectors it turned out to be MUCH faster than doing the same:
- In 10 processes;
- Using numba;

The more you know.
If you have used it - please PM me.

#nlp

DS/ML digest 24

Key topics of this one:
- New method to calculate phrase/n-gram/sentence embeddings for rare and OOV words;
- So many releases from Google;

https://spark-in.me/post/2018_ds_ml_digest_24

If you like our digests, you can support the channel via:
- Sharing / reposting;
- Giving an article a decent comment / a thumbs-up;
- Buying me a coffee (links on the digest);

#digest
#deep_learning
#data_science