Category Archives: DataScience

Get Rapid with RAPIDS

Leave a reply

RAPIDS is a collection of open source libraries to write, deploy and manage data pipelines end-to-end on GPUs. It uses  NVIDIA CUDA® for optimizing compute resources, but exposes parallelism through well known Python interfaces.

The Focus of this post is not to share the details for RAPIDS  but to detail steps to get started with it without many difficulties. The RAPIDS team has done a great job in compiling the Startup Guide. But, if you are someone like me who is very new to the world of GPU’s but got some decent experience in designing data pipelines then this post will help you very much in getting up and running using AWS platform .

These are the prerequisites mentioned on the Startup Guide.

Container Host Prerequisites

  • NVIDIA Pascal™ GPU architecture or better
  • CUDA 9.2 or 10.0 compatible nvidia driver
  • Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04
  • Docker CE v18+
  • nvidia-docker v2+

Well,  I was not aware of most of these requirements and what they mean when I first started working on RAPIDS . To make it easy I have compiled these below steps –
Note:- You need to have AWS account in place for this, GCP and other cloud providers also provides support for machines required for RAPIDS but for the sake of this post I have selected AWS

Step 1) In AWS console launch an instance with ami Deep Learning Base AMI (Amazon Linux) Version 16.2 (ami-038f5aa6f8673b785) .

Step2) Once you have selected the AMI, make sure to choose GPU instances in filter-by, else you won’t be able to run the docker image of RAPIDS as the NVIDIA CUDA®  framework requires GPU in place

AWS_GPUMachine
Step3) Once the instance is up and running

      •  Install docker 
         yum install docker
      •  once docker is installed you need to download the image for RAPIDS  from docker repository, there are many other places where you can find the image , follow Startup Guide for more details on this. Run below command to download RAPIDS  image 
        $ docker pull nvcr.io/nvidia/rapidsai/rapidsai:latest
      • once the image is downloaded run below command to start RAPIDS container 
        $ docker run --runtime=nvidia \
                --rm -it \
                -p 8888:8888 \
                -p 8787:8787 \
                -p 8786:8786 \
                -p 8889:8889 \
                nvcr.io/nvidia/rapidsai/rapidsai:latest

        Note the port mentioned in this command it is required that the jupyter gets started on of the mentioned port else you won’t be able to access the notebook and will get error

         File "/conda/envs/gdf/lib/python3.5/site-packages/tornado/netutil.py", line 168, in bind_sockets
    sock.bind(sockaddr)
OSError: [Errno 99] Cannot assign requested address

        It is mentioned in Startup Guide that the above command will start jupyter but it was not the case with me . I had to start the jupyter separately. If, this happens with you too use below command to start the jupyter

        jupyter notebook --ip=0.0.0.0  --port=8889 --allow-root

         

And YA!! you got the jupyter notebook running which using RAPIDS to perform ETL and many other transformations. Follow Startup Guide for all ETL operations as the intent for this post was just to get RAPIDS  up and running using docker image.

For reference here is the cheat sheet for RAPIDS

Logistic Regression – PART 1

Leave a reply

One of the most commonly used Binary Classification technique. Given (m) training examples you want to classify these training examples into 2 groups.
Let’s  consider a problem statement where given a set of images we want to know if this is a Dog ( Probability – 1) or not (Probability – 0 )

These images in a computer are represented by pixel density based on the color pattern. This pixel vector is the Feature vector( A vector that represents the important characteristics of an object) for the images.

Given an Image ( I ) will have a feature vector (n) of dimension

Row = Number of pixel across Red, Green, Blue band
Column =1

metrics

Each image in our data set will have the corresponding vector related to three colors Red, Green and Blue, we can stack them together to produce one big column vector with all values
stckedmetrics

Each value in this vector is independent of other but is part of single observation i.e in our case part of one single image. Like this we will have a number of vectors = number of images, with the dimension of the vector as [number of Pixels X 1], if we represent the number of Pixels as nx., then the dimension of the vector becomes 1 X nx

To determine if the given image is of a Dog or not the only way is to look at the characteristics of every input image we have in training set since these images are nothing but the vector of pixels which means using these pixels we need to determine if the given image is of a dog!

 

Imagining Logistic regression as the simplest Neural Network

We can imagine logistic regression as a one-layer neural network also known as a shallow neural network.
We will have inputs (x1,x2,……xm) where M = number of training examples we have. With every input in our case an image to be more precise a feature vector corresponding to that image, we will have a weight associated with every input.
shallowNN

Where Ŷ is the probability of the feature being of a dog picture feature i.e probability of Picture being of a Dog.

ŷ= P (Y = 1/X)

Some Function = b0+ w1*x1 + w2*x2 + …..+ wm*xm

Need for constant in Logistic Regression b0

With regression we want to approximate a function that defines a relationship between X and Y ( Input -> to -> Output) to get this working we need a bias term so that we can predict accurate values i.e if your input values are zero then the predicted value would also have to be zero Adding a bias weight that does not depend on any of the features allows the hyperplane described by your learned weights to more easily fit data that doesn’t pass through the origin

W€Rnx   Where R is some real number vector of dimension nx

b€R  Where R is some real number vector

Question is to predict ŷ using w,b given inputs  x1,x2,……xm

Since the output of a logistic regression function can only be 0 or 1. The output function would be a Sigmoid function defined as

sigmoid
ŷ =  σ ( wTx+b )
z = wTx+b
ŷ =  σ ( z )

σ ( z ) =  1 / 1 + e -z

Case1 = When Z is very small, in that case, e -z will be some big number  giving value for σ ( z ) ~0
Case2 = When Z is very large , in that case e -z will be ~ 0 giving value for σ ( z ) ~ 1

So, in logistic regression, the task is to learn w,b so that ŷ becomes a good estimate of y.

In the next blog post, we will discuss how to learn the values for w,b

Charts for Data Analysis

Leave a reply

Visualizing data efficiently is the first step in understanding the type of distribution( e.g normal distribution) present in available data Set.It also helps in finding skewness,outliers and many other properties present in data , to help us normalize/ clean it before performing any data-analytics on top of it.

Below are the few charts that are most commonly used in Datascience.

Histogram
It shows the underlying frequency distribution of set of continuous data, divided in intervals bins.The x-axis represents the values present in the data, while the y-axis (and thus the height of each bar) represents the frequency.
Each bin contains the number of occurrences of scores in the data that are contained withing that distribution. The size of bins should be chosen wisely to make sure the resulting graph is able to depict the underlying frequency distribution of data.

Histogram

“Use a histogram when you have numerical data and want to understand the data distribution, including its shape and central tendency”

ScatterPlot
Typically used with large dataset, when we want to find out if there is any relation between variables, provided both are numeric.If there is any relationship between the variables plot across x and y axis the points would scatter across in a way, as if there existed a invisible line.If the relationship is weaker, the dots will be arranged more loosely but still show a tendency for the y variable to either increase or decrease as the x variable increases.If no relationship exists between variables they would be scattered randomly.
scatter
“Use this type of graph when you have two numerical variables and are interested in the relationship between them”

Box-and-Whiskers Plot
These are useful when you are comparing numerical data across multiple groups or categories. With a boxplot you can quickly get information about the mean or median of the data, the overall distribution and degree of variation, and the existence of outliers.
box-whisker

“It is especially useful for indicating whether a distribution is skewed and whether there are potential unusual observations (outliers) in the data set. Box and whisker plots are also very useful when large numbers of observations are involved and when two or more data sets are being compared”

Happy reading .. ☺