# Tutorial¶

In the following we will explain the basic features of climin with a simple example. For that we will first use a multinomial logistic regression, which suffices to show much of climin’s functionality.

Although we will use numpy in this example, we have spent quite some effort to make most optimizers work with gnumpy as well. This makes the use of GPUs possible. Check the reference documentation for specific optimizers whether the usage of GPU is supported.

## Defining a Loss Function¶

At the heart of optimizitation lies the objective function we wish to optimize. In the case of climin, we will always be concernced with minimization. Even though algorithms are sometimes defined with respect to maximization (e.g.i Bayesian optimization or evolution strategies) in the literature. Thus, we will also be talking about loss functions.

A loss function in climin follows a simple protocol: a callable (e.g. a function) which takes an array with a single dimension as input and returns a scalar. An example would be a simple polynomial of degree 2:

def loss(x):
return (x ** 2).sum()


In machine learning, this will mostly be the parameters of our model. Additionally, we will often have further arguments to the loss, the most important being the data that our model works on.

## Logistic Regression¶

Optimizing a scalar quadratic with an iterative technique is all nice, but we want to do more complicated things. We will thus move on to use logistic regression.

In climin, the parameter vector will always be one dimensional. Your loss function will have to unpack that vector into the various parameters of different shapes. While this might seem tedious at first, it makes some calculations much easier and also more efficient.

Logistic regression has commonly two different parameter sets, the weight matrix (or coefficients) and the bias (or intercept). To unpack the parameters we define the following function:

import numpy as np

def unpack_parameters(pars):
w = pars[:n_inpt * n_output].reshape((n_inpt, n_output))
b = pars[n_inpt * n_output:].reshape((1, n_output))
return w, b


We assume that inputs to our model will be an array of size (n, d), where n refers to the number of samples and d to the dimensionality. Given some input we can then make predictions with the following function:

def predict(parameters, inpt):
w, b = unpack_parameters(parameters)
before_softmax = np.dot(inpt, w) + b
softmaxed = np.exp(before_softmax - before_softmax.max(axis=1)[:, np.newaxis])
return softmaxed / softmaxed.sum(axis=1)[:, np.newaxis]


For multiclass classification, we use the cross entropy loss:

def loss(parameters, inpt, targets):
predictions = predict(parameters, inpt)
loss = -np.log(predictions) * targets
return loss.sum(axis=1).mean()


Gradient-based optimization requires not only the loss but also the first derivative with respect to the parameters. That gradient function has to return the gradients aligned with the parameters, which is why we concatenate them into a big array after we flattened out the weight matrix:

def d_loss_wrt_pars(parameters, inpt, targets):
p = predict(parameters, inpt)
g_w = np.dot(inpt.T, p - targets) / inpt.shape[0]
g_b = (p - targets).mean(axis=0)
return np.concatenate([g_w.flatten(), g_b])


Although this implementation can be optimized with no doubt, it suffices for this tutorial.

## An Array for the Parameters¶

First we will need to allocate a region of memory where our parameters live. Climin tries to allocate as little additional memory as possible and will thus work inplace most of the time. After each optimization iteration, the current solution will always be in the array we created. This lets the user control as much as possible. We create an empty array for our solution:

import numpy as np
wrt = np.empty(7850)


where the 7850 refers to the dimensionality of our problem. We picked this number because we will be tackling the MNIST data set. It makes sense to initialize the parameters randomly (depending on the problem), even though the convexity of logistic regressions guarantees that we will always find the minimum. Climin offers convenience functions in its initialize module:

import climin.initialize
climin.initialize.randomize_normal(wrt, 0, 1)


This will populated the parameters with values drawn from a standard normal dostribution.

## Using data¶

Now that we have set up our model and loss and initialized the parameters, we need to manage the data.

In climin, we will always look at streams of data. Even if we do batch learning (as we do here), the recommended way of doing so is a repeating stream of the same data. How does that stream look? In Python, we have a convenient data structure which is the iterator. It can be thought of as a lazy list of infinite length.

The climin API expects that the loss function (and the gradient function) will accept the parameter array as the first argument. All further arguments can be as the user wants. When we initialize an optimizer, a keyword argument args can be specified. This is expected to be an iterator which yields pairs of (a, kw) which are then passed to the loss as f(parameters, *a, **kw) and fprime(parameters, *a, *kw) in case of the derivative.

We will be using the MNIST data set , which can be downloaded from here. We will first load it and convert the target variables to a one-of-k representation, which is what our loss functions expect:

# You can get this at http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~lisa/deep/data/mnist/mnist.pkl.gz

datafile = 'mnist.pkl.gz'
with gzip.open(datafile,'rb') as f:

X, Z = train_set
VX, VZ = val_set
TX, TZ = test_set

def one_hot(arr):
result = np.zeros((arr.shape[0], 10))
result[xrange(arr.shape[0]), arr] = 1.
return result

Z = one_hot(Z)
VZ = one_hot(VZ)
TZ = one_hot(TZ)


To create our data stream, we will just repeat the training data (X, Z):

import itertools
args = itertools.repeat(([X, Z], {}))


This certainly seems like overkill for logistic regression. Yet, even this simple model can often be sped up by estimating the gradients on “mini batches”. Going even further, you might want to have a continuous stream that is read from the network, a data set that does not fit into RAM or which you want to transform on the fly. All these things can be elegantly implemented with iterators.

## Creating an Optimizer¶

Now that we have set everything up, we are ready to create our first optimizer, a GradientDescent object:

import climin
opt = climin.GradientDescent(wrt, d_loss_wrt_pars, step_rate=0.1, momentum=.95, args=args)


We created a new object called opt. For initialization, we passed it several parameters:

• The parameters wrt. This will always be the first argument to any optimizer in climin.
• The derivative d_loss_wrt_pars; we do not need loss itself for gradient descent.
• A scalar to multiply the negative gradient with for the next search step, step_rate. This parameter is often referred to as learning rate in the literature.
• A momentum term momentum to speed up learning.
• Our data stream args.

The parameters wrt and args are consistent over optimizers. All others may vary wildly, according to what an optimizer expects.

## Optimization as Iteration¶

Many optimization algorithms are iterative and so are all in climin. To transfer this metaphor into programming code, optimization with climin is as simple as iterating over our optimizer object:

for i in opt:   # Infinite loop!
pass


This will result in an infinite loop. Climin does not handle stopping from within optimizer objects; instead, you will have to do it manually, since you know it much better. Let’s iterate for a fixed number of iterations, say 100:

print loss(wrt, VX, VZ)   # prints something like 2.49771627484
for info in opt:
if info['n_iter'] >= 100:
break
print loss(wrt, VX, VZ)   # prints something like 0.324243334583


When we iteratore over the optimizer, we iterate over dictionaries. Each of these contains various information about the current state of the optimizer. The exact contents depend on the optimizer, but might contain the last step, gradient, etc. Here, we check the number of iterations that have already been performed.

## Using different optimizers¶

The whole point of climin is to use different optimizers. How that goes, we will explain now. We have already seen Gradient Descent. Furthermore, there are Quasi-Newton (BFGS, L-BFGS), Conjugate Gradients, Resilient Propagation and rmsprop. Let’s see how we can use each of them.

L-BFGS, RPROP and nonlinear conjugate Gradients all have the benefit that they work reasonably well without too much tuning of their hyper parameters. We can thus construct optimizers like this:

ncg = climin.NonlinearConjugateGradient(wrt, loss, d_loss_wrt_pars, args=args)
lbfgs = climin.Lbfgs(wrt, loss, d_loss_wrt_pars, args=args)
rprop = climin.Rprop(wrt, d_loss_wrt_pars, args=args)
rmsprop = climin.RmsProp(wrt, d_loss_wrt_pars, steprate=1e-4, decay=0.9, args=args)


As you can see, we now need to specify the loss function itself in case of Lbfgs and NonlinearConjugateGradient. That is because both utilize a line search after finding a search direction. climin.RmsProp has more hyper parameters and needs more fine grained tuning. Yet, climin.GradientDescent and climin.RmsProp work naturally with so a stochastic estimate of the objective and work very well with mini batches. For more details, see Advanced data handling.

## Conclusion and Next Steps¶

This tutorial explained the basic functionality of climin. There is a lot more to explore to fully leverage the functionality of this library. Check the table of contents and the examples directory of your climin checkout.