Linear Regression Theory

Linear Regression in Tensorflow

In our example, we will use a data set which contains the number of fires in an area and the number of thefts in that area in Chicago. Our goal is to predict the number of thefts based on the number of fires.

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Let’s check out the data set first to have an idea.

head(data)

##      X  Y
## 1  6.2 29
## 2  9.5 44
## 3 10.5 36
## 4  7.7 37
## 5  8.6 53
## 6 34.1 68

plot(data)

Let’s standardize our data so that we can achieve better accuracy.

data = scale(data)
data = as.data.frame(data)

Let’s see how the scaled data looks like.

plot(data)

The goal of this tutorial is to try out different regression models (both simple linear and polynomial regressions). The models will be trained using the mean squared error.

The first approach to fit a model to the data will be a simple linear regression. Therefore, we assume that the relationship between the number of fires and thefts is linear.

The first thing we should do is to create the placeholders (input ad label):

X = tf$placeholder(tf$float32, name = "X")
Y = tf$placeholder(tf$float32, name = "Y")

Having created the placeholders we should create, the variables will be updated during the training.

W = tf$Variable(0.0, name = "weights")
b = tf$Variable(0.0, name = "bias")

Moreover, let’s create the initialization operation for the variables.

init_op = tf$global_variables_initializer()

After the definition of placeholders and the variables, we will construct the model to predict “Y.” Remember that the formula of this model should be:

Y = X * W + b

pred = tf$add(tf$multiply(X, W),b)

In order to train the model, we need to define a loss function that gives an indication of how our model performs based on which parameters (weights and bias) are updated.

loss = tf$square(Y - pred, name = "loss")

There are many optimization algorithms that help us minimize the loss. The most basic is the gradient descent algorithm. Today, we have many algorithms that outperform it. In this tutorial, we will use the simplest, since the goal is not a state-of-art performance, but your comprehension of Linear Regression in Tensorflow.

optimizer = tf$train$GradientDescentOptimizer(learning_rate = 0.001)$minimize(loss)

Now that we have defined all the data types and operations, we will go ahead and train the model.

with(tf$Session() %as% sess, {
  sess$run(init_op) # Let's intialize the variables
  # Having initialized the parameters let's start the training
  for( i in 1:100){ # run for 100 epochs
    for (j in 1:nrow(data)){ # go over all the training examples
      sess$run(optimizer, feed_dict = dict(X=data$X[j], Y=data$Y[j]))
    }
  }
  w_value = sess$run(W)
  b_value = sess$run(b)
  print(c(w_value, b_value))
})

## [1]  0.552182734 -0.002773606

Let’s plot it to see how it fits.

x = seq(-5, 5, 0.01)
y = w_value*x + b_value
plot(data)
lines(x, y, type="l") 

We can see that it is doesn’t fit quite well. Let’s try a polynomial regression. Let’s try to use a 2nd degree polynomial regression and see how it performs. The only difference is that we add a parameter that will be multiplied by the squared value of independent variables.

U = tf$Variable(0.0, name = "quad_weights")
init_op = tf$global_variables_initializer()

pred = tf$add(tf$multiply(X,tf$multiply(X,U)),tf$add(tf$multiply(X, W),b))

loss = tf$square(Y - pred, name = "loss")

optimizer = tf$train$GradientDescentOptimizer(learning_rate = 0.001)$minimize(loss)

with(tf$Session() %as% sess, {
  sess$run(init_op) # Let's intialize the variables
  # Having initialized the parameters let's start the training
  for( i in 1:100){ # run for 100 epochs
    for (j in 1:nrow(data)){ # go over all the training examples
      sess$run(optimizer, feed_dict = dict(X=data$X[j], Y=data$Y[j]))
    }
  }
  w_value = sess$run(W)
  b_value = sess$run(b)
  u_value = sess$run(U)
  print(c(w_value, u_value, b_value))
})

## [1]  0.2931574  0.2319304 -0.2213118

Let’s plot it to see how it fits.

Y = X^2*U + X*W + b

x = seq(-5,5,0.01)
y = u_value *x^2 + w_value*x + b_value
plot(data)
lines(x, y, type="l") 

It is getting close; let’s check out a 3rd degree polynomial.

The formula should be:

Y = X^3 * V + X^2*U + X*W + b

V = tf$Variable(0.0, name = "quad_3_weights")
init_op = tf$global_variables_initializer()

pred = tf$add(tf$multiply(tf$pow(X,3),V),tf$add(tf$multiply(tf$pow(X,2),U),tf$add(tf$multiply(X,W),b)))

loss = tf$square(Y - pred, name = "loss")

optimizer = tf$train$GradientDescentOptimizer(learning_rate = 0.001)$minimize(loss)

with(tf$Session() %as% sess, {
  sess$run(init_op) # Let's intialize the variables
  # Having initialized the parameters let's start the training
  for( i in 1:100){ # run for 100 epochs
    for (j in 1:nrow(data)){ # go over all the training examples
      sess$run(optimizer, feed_dict = dict(X=data$X[j], Y=data$Y[j]))
    }
  }
  w_value = sess$run(W)
  b_value = sess$run(b)
  u_value = sess$run(U)
  v_value = sess$run(V)
  print(c(v_value, w_value, u_value, b_value))
})

## [1]  0.5549336 -0.4178921 -0.7707534  0.1196232

x = seq(-5,5,0.01)
y = v_value*x^3 + u_value *x^2 + w_value*x + b_value
plot(data)
lines(x, y, type="l") 

It seems like it fits better. However, there is the danger of over-fitting. On the next post, we will go through some practical exercises of regression modeling.