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How-To Tutorials - Data

1215 Articles
article-image-creating-effective-dashboards-using-splunk-tutorial
Sunith Shetty
28 Jul 2018
10 min read
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Creating effective dashboards using Splunk [Tutorial]

Sunith Shetty
28 Jul 2018
10 min read
Splunk is easy to use for developing a powerful analytical dashboard with multiple panels. A dashboard with too many panels, however, will require scrolling down the page and can cause the viewer to miss crucial information. An effective dashboard should generally meet the following conditions: Single screen view: The dashboard fits in a single window or page, with no scrolling Multiple data points: Charts and visualizations should display a number of data points Crucial information highlighted: The dashboard points out the most important information, using appropriate titles, labels, legends, markers, and conditional formatting as required Created with the user in mind: Data is presented in a way that is meaningful to the user Loads quickly: The dashboard returns results in 10 seconds or less Avoid redundancy: The display does not repeat information in multiple places In this tutorial, we learn to create different types of dashboards using Splunk. We will also discuss how to gather business requirements for your dashboards. Types of Splunk dashboards There are three kinds of dashboards typically created with Splunk: Dynamic form-based dashboards Real-time dashboards Dashboards as scheduled reports Dynamic form-based dashboards allow Splunk users to modify the dashboard data without leaving the page. This is accomplished by adding data-driven input fields (such as time, radio button, textbox, checkbox, dropdown, and so on) to the dashboard. Updating these inputs changes the data based on the selections. Dynamic form-based dashboards have existed in traditional business intelligence tools for decades now, so users who frequently use them will be familiar with changing prompt values on the fly to update the dashboard data. Real-time dashboards are often kept on a big panel screen for constant viewing, simply because they are so useful. You see these dashboards in data centers, network operations centers (NOCs), or security operations centers (SOCs) with constant format and data changing in real time. The dashboard will also have indicators and alerts for operators to easily identify and act on a problem. Dashboards like this typically show the current state of security, network, or business systems, using indicators for web performance and traffic, revenue flow, login failures, and other important measures. Dashboards as scheduled reports may not be exposed for viewing; however, the dashboard view will generally be saved as a PDF file and sent to email recipients at scheduled times. This format is ideal when you need to send information updates to multiple recipients at regular intervals, and don't want to force them to log in to Splunk to capture the information themselves. We will create the first two types of dashboards, and you will learn how to use the Splunk dashboard editor to develop advanced visualizations along the way. Gathering business requirements As a Splunk administrator, one of the most important responsibilities is to be responsible for the data. As a custodian of data, a Splunk admin has significant influence over how to interpret and present information to users. It is common for the administrator to create the first few dashboards. A more mature implementation, however, requires collaboration to create an output that is beneficial to a variety of user requirements and may be completed by a Splunk development resource with limited administrative rights. Make it a habit to consistently request users input regarding the Splunk delivered dashboards and reports and what makes them useful. Sit down with day-to-day users and layout, on a drawing board, for example, the business process flows or system diagrams to understand how the underlying processes and systems you're trying to measure really work. Look for key phrases like these, which signify what data is most important to the business: If this is broken, we lose tons of revenue... This is a constant point of failure... We don't know what's going on here... If only I can see the trend, it will make my work easier... This is what my boss wants to see... Splunk dashboard users may come from many areas of the business. You want to talk to all the different users, no matter where they are on the organizational chart. When you make friends with the architects, developers, business analysts, and management, you will end up building dashboards that benefit the organization, not just individuals. With an initial dashboard version, ask for users thoughts as you observe them using it in their work and ask what can be improved upon, added, or changed. We hope that at this point, you realize the importance of dashboards and are ready to get started creating some, as we will do in the following sections. Dynamic form-based dashboard In this section, we will create a dynamic form-based dashboard in our Destinations app to allow users to change input values and rerun the dashboard, presenting updated data. Here is a screenshot of the final output of this dynamic form-based dashboard: Let's begin by creating the dashboard itself and then generate the panels: Go the search bar in the Destinations app Run this search command: SPL> index=main status_type="*" http_uri="*" server_ip="*" | top status_type, status_description, http_uri, server_ip Be careful when copying commands with quotation marks. It is best to type in the entire search command to avoid problems. Go to Save As | Dashboard Panel Fill in the information based on the following screenshot: Click on Save Close the pop-up window that appears (indicating that the dashboard panel was created) by clicking on the X in the top-right corner of the window Creating a Status Distribution panel We will go to the after all the panel searches have been generated. Let's go ahead and create the second panel: In the search window, type in the following search command: SPL> index=main status_type="*" http_uri=* server_ip=* | top status_type You will save this as a dashboard panel in the newly created dashboard. In the Dashboard option, click on the Existing button and look for the new dashboard, as seen here. Don't forget to fill in the Panel Title as Status Distribution: Click on Save when you are done and again close the pop-up window, signaling the addition of the panel to the dashboard. Creating the Status Types Over Time panel Now, we'll move on to create the third panel: Type in the following search command and be sure to run it so that it is the active search: SPL> index=main status_type="*" http_uri=* server_ip=* | timechart count by http_status_code You will save this as a Dynamic Form-based Dashboard panel as well. Type in Status Types Over Time in the Panel Title field: Click on Save and close the pop-up window, signaling the addition of the panel to the dashboard. Creating the Hits vs Response Time panel Now, on to the final panel. Run the following search command: SPL> index=main status_type="*" http_uri=* server_ip=* | timechart count, avg(http_response_time) as response_time Save this dashboard panel as Hits vs Response Time: Arrange the dashboard We'll move on to look at the dashboard we've created and make a few changes: Click on the View Dashboard button. If you missed out on the View Dashboard button, you can find your dashboard by clicking on Dashboards in the main navigation bar. Let's edit the panel arrangement. Click on the Edit button. Move the Status Distribution panel to the upper-right row. Move the Hits vs Response Time panel to the lower-right row. Click on Save to save your layout changes. Look at the following screenshot. The dashboard framework you've created should now look much like this. The dashboard probably looks a little plainer than you expected it to. But don't worry; we will improve the dashboard visuals one panel at a time: Panel options in dashboards In this section, we will learn how to alter the look of our panels and create visualizations. Go to the edit dashboard mode by clicking on the Edit button. Each dashboard panel will have three setting options to work with: edit search, select visualization, and visualization format options. They are represented by three drop-down icons: The Edit Search window allows you to modify the search string, change the time modifier for the search, add auto-refresh and progress bar options, as well as convert the panel into a report: The Select Visualization dropdown allows you to change the type of visualization to use for the panel, as shown in the following screenshot: Finally, the Visualization Options dropdown will give you the ability to fine-tune your visualization. These options will change depending on the visualization you select. For a normal statistics table, this is how it will look: Pie chart – Status Distribution Go ahead and change the Status Distribution visualization panel to a pie chart. You do this by selecting the Select Visualization icon and selecting the Pie icon. Once done, the panel will look like the following screenshot: Stacked area chart – Status Types Over Time We will change the view of the Status Types Over Time panel to an area chart. However, by default, area charts will not be stacked. We will update this through adjusting the visualization options: Change the Status Types Over Time panel to an Area Chart using the same Select Visualization button as the prior pie chart exercise. Make the area chart stacked using the Format Visualization icon. In the Stack Mode section, click on Stacked. For Null Values, select Zero. Use the chart that follows for guidance: Click on Apply. The panel will change right away. Remove the _time label as it is already implied. You can do this in the X-Axis section by setting the Title to None. Close the Format Visualization window by clicking on the X in the upper-right corner: Here is the new stacked area chart panel: Column with overlay combination chart – Hits vs Response Time When representing two or more kinds of data with different ranges, using a combination chart—in this case combining a column and a line—can tell a bigger story than one metric and scale alone. We'll use the Hits vs Response Time panel to explore the combination charting options: In the Hits vs Response Time panel, change the chart panel visualization to Column In the Visualization Options window, click on Chart Overlay In the Overlay selection box, select response_time Turn on View as Axis Click on X-Axis from the list of options on the left of the window and change the Title to None Click on Legend from the list of options on the left Change the Legend Position to Bottom Click on the X in the upper-right-hand corner to close the Visualization Options window The new panel will now look similar to the following screenshot. From this and the prior screenshot, you can see there was clearly an outage in the overnight hours: Click on Done to save all the changes you made and exit the Edit mode The dashboard has now come to life. This is how it should look now: To summarize we saw how to create different types of dashboards. To know more about core Splunk functionalities to transform machine data into powerful insights, check out this book Splunk 7 Essentials, Third Edition. Splunk leverages AI in its monitoring tools Splunk Industrial Asset Intelligence (Splunk IAI) targets Industrial IoT marketplace Create a data model in Splunk to enable interactive reports and dashboards
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Sugandha Lahoti
28 Jul 2018
3 min read
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23andMe shares 5mn client genetic data with GSK for drug target discovery, a machine learning application in genetics research

Sugandha Lahoti
28 Jul 2018
3 min read
Genetics company 23andMe, which uses machine learning algorithms for human genome analysis, has entered into a four year collaboration with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. They will now share their 5 million client genetic data with GSK to advance research into treatments of diseases. This collaboration will be used to identify novel drug targets, tackle new subsets of disease and enable rapid progression of clinical programs. The 12 years old firm has already published more than 100 scientific papers based on its customers' data. All activities within the collaboration will initially be co-funded, with either company having certain rights to reduce its funding share. "The goal of the collaboration is to gather insights and discover novel drug targets driving disease progression and develop therapies," GlaxoSmithKline said in a press release. GSK is also reported to have invested $300 million in 23andMe. During the four year collaboration GSK will use 23andMe’s database and statistical analytics for drug target discovery. This collaboration will be used to design GSK’s LRRK2 inhibitor, which is in development for the potential treatment for Parkinson’s disease. 23andMe’s database of consented customers who have a LRRK2 variant status will be used to accelerate the progress of this programme. Together, GSK and 23andMe will target and recruit patients with defined LRRK2 mutations in order to reach clinical proof of concept. 23andMe have made it quite clear that participating in this program is voluntary and requires clients to affirmatively consent to participate. However not everyone is clear of how this would work. First, the company has specified that any research involving customer data that has already been performed or published prior to receipt of withdrawal request will not be reversed. This may have a negative effect as people are generally not aware of all the privacy policies and generally don’t read the Terms of Service. Moreover, as Peter Pitts, president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, notes, “If a person's DNA is used in research, that person should be compensated. Customers shouldn’t be paying for the privilege of 23andMe working with a for-profit company in a for-profit research project.” Both the companies have sworn to provide maximum data protection for their employees. In a blog post, they note, “The continued protection of customers’ data and privacy is the highest priority for both GSK and 23andMe. Both companies have stringent security protections in place when it comes to collecting, storing and transferring information about research participants.” You can read more about the news, on a blog by 23andMe founder, Anne Wojcicki. 6 use cases of Machine Learning in Healthcare Healthcare Analytics: Logistic Regression to Reduce Patient Readmissions NIPS 2017 Special: How machine learning for genomics is bridging the gap between research and clinical trial success by Brendan Frey
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article-image-apache-druid-hadoop-data-visualizations-tutorial
Sunith Shetty
27 Jul 2018
9 min read
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Setting up Apache Druid in Hadoop for Data visualizations [Tutorial]

Sunith Shetty
27 Jul 2018
9 min read
Apache Druid is a distributed, high-performance columnar store. Druid allows us to store both real-time and historical data that is time series in nature. It also provides fast data aggregation and flexible data exploration. The architecture supports storing trillions of data points on petabyte sizes. In this tutorial, we will explore Apache Druid components and how it can be used to visualize data in order to build the analytics that drives the business decisions. In this article we will understand how to set up Apache Druid in Hadoop to visualize data. In order to understand more about the Druid architecture, you may refer to this white paper. This article is an excerpt from a book written by Naresh Kumar and Prashant Shindgikar titled Modern Big Data Processing with Hadoop. Apache Druid components Let's take a quick look at the different components of the Druid cluster: ComponentDescriptionDruid BrokerThese are the nodes that are aware of where the data lies in the cluster. These nodes are contacted by the applications/clients to get the data within Druid.Druid CoordinatorThese nodes manage the data (they load, drop, and load-balance it) on the historical nodes.Druid OverlordThis component is responsible for accepting tasks and returning the statuses of the tasks.Druid RouterThese nodes are needed when the data volume is in terabytes or higher range. These nodes route the requests to the brokers.Druid HistoricalThese nodes store immutable segments and are the backbone of the Druid cluster. They serve load segments, drop segments, and serve queries on segments' requests. Other required components The following table presents a couple of other required components: ComponentDescriptionZookeeperApache Zookeeper is a highly reliable distributed coordination serviceMetadata StorageMySQL and PostgreSQL are the popular RDBMSes used to keep track of all segments, supervisors, tasks, and configurations Apache Druid installation Apache Druid can be installed either in standalone mode or as part of a Hadoop cluster. In this section, we will see how to install Druid via Apache Ambari. Add service First, we invoke the Actions drop-down below the list of services in the Hadoop cluster. The screen looks like this: Select Druid and Superset In this setup, we will install both Druid and Superset at the same time. Superset is the visualization application that we will learn about in the next step. The selection screen looks like this: Click on Next when both the services are selected. Service placement on servers In this step, we will be given a choice to select the servers on which the application has to be installed. I have selected node 3 for this purpose. You can select any node you wish. The screen looks something like this: Click on Next when when the changes are done. Choose Slaves and Clients Here, we are given a choice to select the nodes on which we need the Slaves and Clients for the installed components. I have left the options that are already selected for me: Service configurations In this step, we need to select the databases, usernames, and passwords for the metadata store used by the Druid and Superset applications. Feel free to choose the default ones. I have given MySQL as the backend store for both of them. The screen looks like this: Once the changes look good, click on the Next button at the bottom of the screen. Service installation In this step, the applications will be installed automatically and the status will be shown at the end of the plan. Click on Next once the installation is complete. Changes to the current screen look like this: Installation summary Once everything is successfully completed, we are shown a summary of what has been done. Click on Complete when done: Sample data ingestion into Druid Once we have all the Druid-related applications running in our Hadoop cluster, we need a sample dataset that we must load in order to run some analytics tasks. Let's see how to load sample data. Download the Druid archive from the internet: [druid@node-3 ~$ curl -O http://static.druid.io/artifacts/releases/druid-0.12.0-bin.tar.gz % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 222M 100 222M 0 0 1500k 0 0:02:32 0:02:32 --:--:-- 594k Extract the archive: [druid@node-3 ~$ tar -xzf druid-0.12.0-bin.tar.gz Copy the sample Wikipedia data to Hadoop: [druid@node-3 ~]$ cd druid-0.12.0 [druid@node-3 ~/druid-0.12.0]$ hadoop fs -mkdir /user/druid/quickstart [druid@node-3 ~/druid-0.12.0]$ hadoop fs -put quickstart/wikiticker-2015-09-12-sampled.json.gz /user/druid/quickstart/ Submit the import request: [druid@node-3 druid-0.12.0]$ curl -X 'POST' -H 'Content-Type:application/json' -d @quickstart/wikiticker-index.json localhost:8090/druid/indexer/v1/task;echo {"task":"index_hadoop_wikiticker_2018-03-16T04:54:38.979Z"} After this step, Druid will automatically import the data into the Druid cluster and the progress can be seen in the overlord console. The interface is accessible via http://<overlord-ip>:8090/console.html. The screen looks like this: Once the ingestion is complete, we will see the status of the job as SUCCESS. In case of FAILED imports, please make sure that the backend that is configured to store the Metadata for the Druid cluster is up and running.Even though Druid works well with the OpenJDK installation, I have faced a problem with a few classes not being available at runtime. In order to overcome this, I have had to use Oracle Java version 1.8 to run all Druid applications. Now we are ready to start using Druid for our visualization tasks. MySQL database with Apache Druid We will use a MySQL database to store the data. Apache Druid allows us to read the data present in an RDBMS system such as MySQL. Sample database The employees database is a standard dataset that has a sample organization and their employee, salary, and department data. We will see how to set it up for our tasks. This section assumes that the MySQL database is already configured and running. Download the sample dataset Download the sample dataset from GitHub with the following command on any server that has access to the MySQL database: [user@master ~]$ sudo yum install git -y [user@master ~]$ git clone https://github.com/datacharmer/test_db Cloning into 'test_db'... remote: Counting objects: 98, done. remote: Total 98 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 98 Unpacking objects: 100% (98/98), done. Copy the data to MySQL In this step, we will import the contents of the data in the files to the MySQL database: [user@master test_db]$ mysql -u root < employees.sql INFO CREATING DATABASE STRUCTURE INFO storage engine: InnoDB INFO LOADING departments INFO LOADING employees INFO LOADING dept_emp INFO LOADING dept_manager INFO LOADING titles INFO LOADING salaries data_load_time_diff NULL Verify integrity of the tables This is an important step, just to make sure that all of the data we have imported is correctly stored in the database. The summary of the integrity check is shown as the verification happens: [user@master test_db]$ mysql -u root -t < test_employees_sha.sql +----------------------+ | INFO | +----------------------+ | TESTING INSTALLATION | +----------------------+ +--------------+------------------+------------------------------------------+ | table_name | expected_records | expected_crc | +--------------+------------------+------------------------------------------+ | employees | 300024 | 4d4aa689914d8fd41db7e45c2168e7dcb9697359 | | departments | 9 | 4b315afa0e35ca6649df897b958345bcb3d2b764 | | dept_manager | 24 | 9687a7d6f93ca8847388a42a6d8d93982a841c6c | | dept_emp | 331603 | d95ab9fe07df0865f592574b3b33b9c741d9fd1b | | titles | 443308 | d12d5f746b88f07e69b9e36675b6067abb01b60e | | salaries | 2844047 | b5a1785c27d75e33a4173aaa22ccf41ebd7d4a9f | +--------------+------------------+------------------------------------------+ +--------------+------------------+------------------------------------------+ | table_name | found_records | found_crc | +--------------+------------------+------------------------------------------+ | employees | 300024 | 4d4aa689914d8fd41db7e45c2168e7dcb9697359 | | departments | 9 | 4b315afa0e35ca6649df897b958345bcb3d2b764 | | dept_manager | 24 | 9687a7d6f93ca8847388a42a6d8d93982a841c6c | | dept_emp | 331603 | d95ab9fe07df0865f592574b3b33b9c741d9fd1b | | titles | 443308 | d12d5f746b88f07e69b9e36675b6067abb01b60e | | salaries | 2844047 | b5a1785c27d75e33a4173aaa22ccf41ebd7d4a9f | +--------------+------------------+------------------------------------------+ +--------------+---------------+-----------+ | table_name | records_match | crc_match | +--------------+---------------+-----------+ | employees | OK | ok | | departments | OK | ok | | dept_manager | OK | ok | | dept_emp | OK | ok | | titles | OK | ok | | salaries | OK | ok | +--------------+---------------+-----------+ +------------------+ | computation_time | +------------------+ | 00:00:11 | +------------------+ +---------+--------+ | summary | result | +---------+--------+ | CRC | OK | | count | OK | +---------+--------+ Now the data is correctly loaded in the MySQL database called employees. Single Normalized Table In data warehouses, its a standard practice to have normalized tables when compared to many small related tables. Lets create a single normalized table that contains details of employees, salaries, departments MariaDB [employees]> create table employee_norm as select e.emp_no, e.birth_date, CONCAT_WS(' ', e.first_name, e.last_name) full_name , e.gender, e.hire_date, s.salary, s.from_date, s.to_date, d.dept_name, t.title from employees e, salaries s, departments d, dept_emp de, titles t where e.emp_no = t.emp_no and e.emp_no = s.emp_no and d.dept_no = de.dept_no and e.emp_no = de.emp_no and s.to_date < de.to_date and s.to_date < t.to_date order by emp_no, s.from_date; Query OK, 3721923 rows affected (1 min 7.14 sec) Records: 3721923 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 MariaDB [employees]> select * from employee_norm limit 1G *************************** 1. row *************************** emp_no: 10001 birth_date: 1953-09-02 full_name: Georgi Facello gender: M hire_date: 1986-06-26 salary: 60117 from_date: 1986-06-26 to_date: 1987-06-26 dept_name: Development title: Senior Engineer 1 row in set (0.00 sec) MariaDB [employees]> Once we have normalized data, we will see how to use the data from this table to generate rich visualisations. To summarize, we walked through Hadoop application such as Apache Druid that is used to visualize data and learned how to use them with RDBMses such as MySQL. We also saw a sample database to help us understand the application better. To know more about how to visualize data using Apache Superset and learn how to use them with data in RDBMSes such as MySQL, do checkout this book Modern Big Data Processing with Hadoop. What makes Hadoop so revolutionary? Top 8 ways to improve your data visualizations What is Seaborn and why should you use it for data visualization?
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article-image-automl-build-machine-learning-pipeline-tutorial
Sunith Shetty
27 Jul 2018
15 min read
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Use AutoML for building simple to complex machine learning pipelines [Tutorial]

Sunith Shetty
27 Jul 2018
15 min read
Many moving parts have to be tied together for an ML model to execute and produce results successfully. This process of tying together different pieces of the ML process is known as pipelines. A pipeline is a generalized concept but a very important concept for a Data Scientist. In software engineering, people build pipelines to develop software that is exercised from source code to deployment. Similarly, in ML, a pipeline is created to allow data flow from its raw format to some useful information. It provides a mechanism to construct a multi-ML parallel pipeline system in order to compare the results of several ML methods. In this tutorial, we see how to create our own AutoML pipelines. You will understand how to build pipelines in order to handle the model building process. Each stage of a pipeline is fed processed data from its preceding stage; that is, the output of a processing unit is supplied as an input to its next step. The data flows through the pipeline just as water flows in a pipe. Mastering the pipeline concept is a powerful way to create error-free ML models, and pipelines form a crucial element for building an AutoML system. The code files for this article are available on Github. This article is an excerpt from a book written by Sibanjan Das, Umit Mert Cakmak titled Hands-On Automated Machine Learning. Getting to know machine learning pipelines Usually, an ML algorithm needs clean data to detect some patterns in the data and make predictions over a new dataset. However, in real-world applications, the data is often not ready to be directly fed into an ML algorithm. Similarly, the output from an ML model is just numbers or characters that need to be processed for performing some actions in the real world. To accomplish that, the ML model has to be deployed in a production environment. This entire framework of converting raw data to usable information is performed using a ML pipeline. The following is a high-level illustration of an ML pipeline: We will break down the blocks illustrated in the preceding figure as follows: Data Ingestion: It is the process of obtaining data and importing data for use. Data can be sourced from multiple systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, and web applications. The data extraction can be in the real time or batches. Sometimes, acquiring the data is a tricky part and is one of the most challenging steps as we need to have a good business and data understanding abilities. Data Preparation: There are several methods to preprocess the data to a suitable form for building models. Real-world data is often skewed—there is missing data, which is sometimes noisy. It is, therefore, necessary to preprocess the data to make it clean and transformed, so it's ready to be run through the ML algorithms. ML model training: It involves the use of various ML techniques to understand essential features in the data, make predictions, or derive insights out of it. Often, the ML algorithms are already coded and available as API or programming interfaces. The most important responsibility we need to take is to tune the hyperparameters. The use of hyperparameters and optimizing them to create a best-fitting model are the most critical and complicated parts of the model training phase. Model Evaluation: There are various criteria using which a model can be evaluated. It is a combination of statistical methods and business rules. In an AutoML pipeline, the evaluation is mostly based on various statistical and mathematical measures. If an AutoML system is developed for some specific business domain or use cases, then the business rules can also be embedded into the system to evaluate the correctness of a model. Retraining: The first model that we create for a use case is not often the best model. It is considered as a baseline model, and we try to improve the model's accuracy by training it repetitively. Deployment: The final step is to deploy the model that involves applying and migrating the model to business operations for their use. The deployment stage is highly dependent on the IT infrastructure and software capabilities an organization has. As we see, there are several stages that we will need to perform to get results out of an ML model. The scikit-learn provides us a pipeline functionality that can be used to create several complex pipelines. While building an AutoML system, pipelines are going to be very complex, as many different scenarios have to be captured. However, if we know how to preprocess the data, utilizing an ML algorithm and applying various evaluation metrics, a pipeline is a matter of giving a shape to those pieces. Let's design a very simple pipeline using scikit-learn. Simple ML pipeline We will first import a dataset known as Iris, which is already available in scikit-learn's sample dataset library (http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/datasets/plot_iris_dataset.html). The dataset consists of four features and has 150 rows. We will be developing the following steps in a pipeline to train our model using the Iris dataset. The problem statement is to predict the species of an Iris data using four different features: In this pipeline, we will use a MinMaxScaler method to scale the input data and logistic regression to predict the species of the Iris. The model will then be evaluated based on the accuracy measure: The first step is to import various libraries from scikit-learn that will provide methods to accomplish our task. The only addition is the Pipeline method from sklearn.pipeline. This will provide us with necessary methods needed to create an ML pipeline: from sklearn.datasets import load_iris from sklearn.preprocessing import MinMaxScaler from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline The next step is to load the iris data and split it into training and test dataset. In this example, we will use 80% of the dataset to train the model and the remaining 20% to test the accuracy of the model. We can use the shape function to view the dimension of the dataset: # Load and split the data iris = load_iris() X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(iris.data, iris.target, test_size=0.2, random_state=42) X_train.shape The following result shows the training dataset having 4 columns and 120 rows, which equates to 80% of the Iris dataset and is as expected: Next, we print the dataset to take a glance at the data: print(X_train) The preceding code provides the following output: The next step is to create a pipeline. The pipeline object is in the form of (key, value) pairs. Key is a string that has the name for a particular step, and value is the name of the function or actual method. In the following code snippet, we have named the MinMaxScaler() method as minmax and LogisticRegression(random_state=42) as lr: pipe_lr = Pipeline([('minmax', MinMaxScaler()), ('lr', LogisticRegression(random_state=42))]) Then, we fit the pipeline object—pipe_lr—to the training dataset: pipe_lr.fit(X_train, y_train) When we execute the preceding code, we get the following output, which shows the final structure of the fitted model that was built: The last step is to score the model on the test dataset using the score method: score = pipe_lr.score(X_test, y_test) print('Logistic Regression pipeline test accuracy: %.3f' % score) As we can note from the following results, the accuracy of the model was 0.900, which is 90%: In the preceding example, we created a pipeline, which constituted of two steps, that is, minmax scaling and LogisticRegression. When we executed the fit method on the pipe_lr pipeline, the MinMaxScaler performed a fit and transform method on the input data, and it was passed on to the estimator, which is a logistic regression model. These intermediate steps in a pipeline are known as transformers, and the last step is an estimator. Transformers are used for data preprocessing and has two methods, fit and transform. The fit method is used to find parameters from the training data, and the transform method is used to apply the data preprocessing techniques to the dataset. Estimators are used for creating machine learning model and has two methods, fit and predict. The fit method is used to train a ML model, and the predict method is used to apply the trained model on a test or new dataset. This concept is summarized in the following figure: We have to call only the pipeline's fit method to train a model and call the predict method to create predictions. Rest all functions that is, Fit and Transform are encapsulated in the pipeline's functionality and executed as shown in the preceding figure. Sometimes, we will need to write some custom functions to perform custom transformations. The following section is about function transformer that can assist us in implementing this custom functionality. FunctionTransformer A FunctionTransformer is used to define a user-defined function that consumes the data from the pipeline and returns the result of this function to the next stage of the pipeline. This is used for stateless transformations, such as taking the square or log of numbers, defining custom scaling functions, and so on. In the following example, we will build a pipeline using the CustomLog function and the predefined preprocessing method StandardScaler: We import all the required libraries as we did in our previous examples. The only addition here is the FunctionTransformer method from the sklearn.preprocessing library. This method is used to execute a custom transformer function and stitch it together to other stages in a pipeline: import numpy as np from sklearn.datasets import load_iris from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split from sklearn import preprocessing from sklearn.pipeline import make_pipeline from sklearn.preprocessing import FunctionTransformer from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler In the following code snippet, we will define a custom function, which returns the log of a number X: def CustomLog(X): return np.log(X) Next, we will define a data preprocessing function named PreprocData, which accepts the input data (X) and target (Y) of a dataset. For this example, the Y is not necessary, as we are not going to build a supervised model and just demonstrate a data preprocessing pipeline. However, in the real world, we can directly use this function to create a supervised ML model. Here, we use a make_pipeline function to create a pipeline. We used the pipeline function in our earlier example, where we have to define names for the data preprocessing or ML functions. The advantage of using a make_pipeline function is that it generates the names or keys of a function automatically: def PreprocData(X, Y): pipe = make_pipeline( FunctionTransformer(CustomLog),StandardScaler() ) X_train, X_test, Y_train, Y_test = train_test_split(X, Y) pipe.fit(X_train, Y_train) return pipe.transform(X_test), Y_test As we are ready with the pipeline, we can load the Iris dataset. We print the input data X to take a look at the data: iris = load_iris() X, Y = iris.data, iris.target print(X) The preceding code prints the following output: Next, we will call the PreprocData function by passing the iris data. The result returned is a transformed dataset, which has been processed first using our CustomLog function and then using the StandardScaler data preprocessing method: X_transformed, Y_transformed = PreprocData(X, Y) print(X_transformed) The preceding data transformation task yields the following transformed data results: We will now need to build various complex pipelines for an AutoML system. In the following section, we will create a sophisticated pipeline using several data preprocessing steps and ML algorithms. Complex ML pipeline In this section, we will determine the best classifier to predict the species of an Iris flower using its four different features. We will use a combination of four different data preprocessing techniques along with four different ML algorithms for the task. The following is the pipeline design for the job: We will proceed as follows: We start with importing the various libraries and functions that are required for the task: from sklearn.datasets import load_iris from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler from sklearn.decomposition import PCA from sklearn.preprocessing import MinMaxScaler from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split from sklearn.neighbors import KNeighborsClassifier from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier from sklearn import svm from sklearn import tree from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline Next, we load the Iris dataset and split it into train and test datasets. The X_train and Y_train dataset will be used for training the different models, and X_test and Y_test will be used for testing the trained model: # Load and split the data iris = load_iris() X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(iris.data, iris.target, test_size=0.2, random_state=42) Next, we will create four different pipelines, one for each model. In the pipeline for the SVM model, pipe_svm, we will first scale the numeric inputs using StandardScaler and then create the principal components using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Finally, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model is built using this preprocessed dataset. Similarly, we will construct a pipeline to create the KNN model named pipe_knn. Only StandardScaler is used to preprocess the data before executing the KNeighborsClassifier to create the KNN model. Then, we create a pipeline for building a decision tree model. We use the StandardScaler and MinMaxScaler methods to preprocess the data to be used by the DecisionTreeClassifier method. The last model created using a pipeline is the random forest model, where only the StandardScaler is used to preprocess the data to be used by the RandomForestClassifier method. The following is the code snippet for creating these four different pipelines used to create four different models: # Construct svm pipeline pipe_svm = Pipeline([('ss1', StandardScaler()), ('pca', PCA(n_components=2)), ('svm', svm.SVC(random_state=42))]) # Construct knn pipeline pipe_knn = Pipeline([('ss2', StandardScaler()), ('knn', KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors=6, metric='euclidean'))]) # Construct DT pipeline pipe_dt = Pipeline([('ss3', StandardScaler()), ('minmax', MinMaxScaler()), ('dt', tree.DecisionTreeClassifier(random_state=42))]) # Construct Random Forest pipeline num_trees = 100 max_features = 1 pipe_rf = Pipeline([('ss4', StandardScaler()), ('pca', PCA(n_components=2)), ('rf', RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=num_trees, max_features=max_features))]) Next, we will need to store the name of pipelines in a dictionary, which would be used to display results: pipe_dic = {0: 'K Nearest Neighbours', 1: 'Decision Tree', 2:'Random Forest', 3:'Support Vector Machines'} Then, we will list the four pipelines to execute those pipelines iteratively: pipelines = [pipe_knn, pipe_dt,pipe_rf,pipe_svm] Now, we are ready with the complex structure of the whole pipeline. The only things that remain are to fit the data to the pipeline, evaluate the results, and select the best model. In the following code snippet, we fit each of the four pipelines iteratively to the training dataset: # Fit the pipelines for pipe in pipelines: pipe.fit(X_train, y_train) Once the model fitting is executed successfully, we will examine the accuracy of the four models using the following code snippet: # Compare accuracies for idx, val in enumerate(pipelines): print('%s pipeline test accuracy: %.3f' % (pipe_dic[idx], val.score(X_test, y_test))) We can note from the following results that the k-nearest neighbors and decision tree models lead the pack with a perfect accuracy of 100%. This is too good to believe and might be a result of using a small data set and/or overfitting: We can use any one of the two winning models, k-nearest neighbors (KNN) or decision tree model, for deployment. We can accomplish this using the following code snippet: best_accuracy = 0 best_classifier = 0 best_pipeline = '' for idx, val in enumerate(pipelines): if val.score(X_test, y_test) > best_accuracy: best_accuracy = val.score(X_test, y_test) best_pipeline = val best_classifier = idx print('%s Classifier has the best accuracy of %.2f' % (pipe_dic[best_classifier],best_accuracy)) As the accuracies were similar for k-nearest neighbor and decision tree, KNN was chosen to be the best model, as it was the first model in the pipeline. However, at this stage, we can also use some business rules or access the execution cost to decide the best model: To summarize, we learned about building pipelines for ML systems.  The concepts that we described in this article gave you a foundation for creating pipelines. To have a clearer understanding of the different aspects of Automated Machine Learning, and how to incorporate automation tasks using practical datasets, do checkout the book Hands-On Automated Machine Learning. Read more What is Automated Machine Learning (AutoML)? 5 ways Machine Learning is transforming digital marketing How to improve interpretability of machine learning systems
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Savia Lobo
26 Jul 2018
3 min read
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Cryptocurrency-based firm, Tron acquires BitTorrent

Savia Lobo
26 Jul 2018
3 min read
Justin Sun, founder of the decentralized Internet platform, Tron announced the acquisition of BitTorrent, which is a popular file-sharing network. As reported by Techcrunch, the blockchain-based platform is said to have acquired BitTorrent for a sum of about $126 million. TRON foundation is a decentralized platform for sharing entertainment content, including music and games. It uses blockchain and peer-to-peer (p2p) network technology to exclude the need for a middleman between content producers and consumers such as Google and Amazon. BitTorrent, founded in the year 2004, is a popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol with 100 million users. It also owns the popular, uTorrent client software and torrent client. BitTorrent is known to stream movies and music with great ease and is also fast and reliable. Moreover, it has changed how and why we watch things online. With the BitTorrent acquisition, Justin wants to make Tron the largest decentralized ecosystem in the world. While that’s an exciting prospect for both tech users, users had questions if Tron would charge them via cryptocurrency for the services offered. BitTorrent, in their blog, stated that “it has no plans to change what we do or charge for the services we provide. We have no plans to enable mining of cryptocurrency now or in the future." However, Tron’s plans for BitTorrent are still under the hood. ‘TRON + BitTorrent: The world’s largest decentralized ecosystem’ In an official letter by the Tron foundation, it stated that the firm would continue BitTorrent’s protocol legacy post integrating it within the Tron ecosystem. https://twitter.com/BitTorrent/status/1021629735258841088 The letter also states that, “With the integration of BitTorrent, TRON aims to liberate the Internet from the stranglehold of large corporations, give data rights back to the individual, and reignite the early 21st century vision of a free, transparent, decentralized network to connect the world, because the internet belongs to the people.” Sun in his letter also mentioned BitTorrent as the genesis of the decentralization movement. Tron’s developers, entrepreneurs, and the community consider BitTorrent as the original pioneers of decentralization technology. Sun stated, "We believe that joining the TRON network will further enhance BitTorrent and accelerate our mission of creating an Internet of options, not rules." Due to this acquisition, BitTorrent may lose its primary illegal user base. However, it still continues to demonstrate its legal uses and will further continue to evolve with TRON’s ecosystem. It will also take control of its two popular Torrent applications, BitTorrent and μTorrent clients, which will be free to download, and supported by ads. This merger is a happy turning point for BitTorrent. BitTorrent was in a total mess some years back and had not raised any money since 2008 following which they fired its dual CEOs. Given its commitment to the notion of a decentralized internet, BitTorrent still attempted to function as a business, with its app or service. But these strategies did not work out well. However, TRON’s acquisition has turned the tables for BitTorrent recently. It could be the story of Cinderella meeting Prince Charming of this decade. Read more about BitTorrent’s acquisition on Techcrunch. Top 15 Cryptocurrency Trading Bots Crypto-ML, a machine learning powered cryptocurrency platform Can Cryptocurrency establish a new economic world order?
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Pravin Dhandre
25 Jul 2018
17 min read
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4 powerful custom visuals in Power BI: Why, When, and How to add [Tutorial]

Pravin Dhandre
25 Jul 2018
17 min read
Power BI report authors and BI teams are well-served to remain conscience of both the advantages and limitations of custom visuals. For example, when several measures or dimension columns need to be displayed within the same visual, custom visuals such as the Impact Bubble Chart and the Dot Plot by Maq Software may exclusively address this need. In many other scenarios, a trade-off or compromise must be made between the incremental features provided by a custom visual and the rich controls built into a standard Power BI visual. In this tutorial, we show how to add a custom visual to Power BI and explore 4 powerful custom visuals, and the distinct scenarios and features they support. The Power BI tutorial is taken from Mastering Microsoft Power BI. Learn more - read the book here. Custom visuals available in AppSource and within the integrated custom visuals store for Power BI Desktop are all approved for running in browsers and on mobile devices via the Power BI mobile apps. A subset of these visuals have been certified by Microsoft and support additional Power BI features such as email subscriptions and export to PowerPoint. Additionally, certified custom visuals have met a set of code requirements and have passed strict security tests. The list of certified custom visuals and additional details on the certification process is available here. Adding a custom visual Custom visuals can be added to Power BI reports by either downloading .pbiviz files from Microsoft AppSource or via the integrated Office Store of custom visuals in Power BI Desktop. Utilizing AppSource requires the additional step of downloading the file; however, it can be more difficult to find the appropriate visual as the visuals are not categorized. However, AppSource provides a link to download a sample Power BI report (.pbix file) to learn how the visual is used, such as how it uses field inputs and formatting options. Additionally, AppSource includes a short video tutorial on building report visualizations with the custom visual. The following image reflects Microsoft AppSource filtered by the Power BI visuals Add-ins category: The following link filters AppSource to the Power BI custom visuals per the preceding image: http://bit.ly/2BIZZbZ. The search bar at the top and the vertical scrollbar on the right can be used to browse and identify custom visuals to download. Each custom visual tile in AppSource includes a Get it now link which, if clicked, presents the option to download either the custom visual itself (.pbiviz file) or the sample report for the custom visual (.pbix file). Clicking anywhere else in the tile other than Get it now prompts a window with a detailed overview of the visual, a video tutorial, and customer reviews. To add custom visuals directly to Power BI reports, click the Import from store option via the ellipsis of the Visulaizations pane, as per the following image: If a custom visual (.pbiviz file) has been downloaded from AppSource, the Import from file option can be used to import this custom visual to the report. Additionally, both the Import from store and Import from file options are available as icons on the Home tab of the Report view in Power BI Desktop. Selecting Import from store launches an MS Office Store window of Power BI Custom Visuals. Unlike AppSource, the visuals are assigned to categories such as KPIs, Maps, and Advanced Analytics, making it easy to browse and compare related visuals. More importantly, utilizing the integrated Custom Visuals store avoids the need to manage .pbiviz files and allows report authors to remain focused on report development. As an alternative to the VISUALIZATIONS pane, the From Marketplace and From File icons on the Home tab of the Report view can also be used to add a custom visual. Clicking the From Marketplace icon in the follow image launches the same MS Office Store window of Power BI Custom visuals as selecting Import from store via the VISUALIZATIONS pane: In the following image, the KPIs category of Custom visuals is selected from within the MS Office store: The Add button will directly add the custom visual as a new icon in the Visualizations pane. Selecting the custom visual icon will provide a description of the custom visual and any customer reviews. The Power BI team regularly features new custom visuals in the blog post and video associated with the monthly update to Power BI Desktop. The visual categories, customer reviews, and supporting documentation and sample reports all assist report authors in choosing the appropriate visual and using it correctly. Organizations can also upload custom visuals to the Power BI service via the organization visuals page of the Power BI Admin portal. Once uploaded, these visuals are exposed to report authors in the MY ORGANIZATION tab of the custom visuals MARKETPLACE as per the following example: This feature can help both organizations and report authors simplify their use of custom visuals by defining and exposing a particular set of approved custom visuals. For example, a policy could define that new Power BI reports must only utilize standard and organizational custom visuals. The list of organizational custom visuals could potentially only include a subset of the visuals which have been certified by Microsoft. Alternatively, an approval process could be implemented so that the use case for a custom visual would have to be proven or validated prior to adding this visual to the list of organizational custom visuals. Power KPI visual Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are often prominently featured in Power BI dashboards and in the top left area of Power BI report pages, given their ability to quickly convey important insights. Unlike card and gauge visuals which only display a single metric or a single metric relative to a target respectively, KPI visuals support trend, variance, and conditional formatting logic. For example, without analyzing any other visuals, a user could be drawn to a red KPI indicator symbol and immediately understand the significance of a variance to a target value as well as the recent performance of the KPI metric. For some users, particularly executives and senior managers, a few KPI visuals may represent their only exposure to an overall Power BI solution, and this experience will largely define their impression of Power BI's capabilities and the Power BI project. Given their power and important use cases, report authors should become familiar with both the standard KPI visual and the most robust custom KPI visuals such as the Power KPI Matrix, the Dual KPI, and the Power KPI. Each of these three visuals have been developed by Microsoft and provide additional options for displaying more data and customizing the formatting and layout. The Power KPI Matrix supports scorecard layouts in which many metrics can be displayed as rows or columns against a set of dimension categories such as Operational and Financial. The Dual KPI, which was featured in the Microsoft Power BI Cookbook (https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/microsoft-power-bi-cookbook), is a good choice for displaying two closely related metrics such as the volume of customer service calls and the average waiting time for customer service calls. One significant limitation of custom KPI visuals is that data alerts cannot be configured on the dashboard tiles reflecting these visuals in the Power BI service. Data alerts are currently exclusive to the standard card, gauge, and KPI visuals. In the following Power KPI visual, Internet Net Sales is compared to Plan, and the prior year Internet Net Sales and Year-over-Year Growth percent metrics are included to support the context: The Internet Net Sales measure is formatted as a solid, green line whereas the Internet Sales Plan and Internet Net Sales (PY) measures are formatted with Dotted and Dot-dashed line styles respectively. To avoid clutter, the Y-Axis has been removed and the Label Density property of the Data labels formatting card has been set to 50 percent. This level of detail (three measures with variances) and formatting makes the Power KPI one of the richest visuals in Power BI. The Power KPI provides many options for report authors to include additional data and to customize the formatting logic and layout. Perhaps its best feature, however, is the Auto Scale property, which is enabled by default under the Layout formatting card. For example, in the following image, the Power KPI visual has been pinned to a Power BI dashboard and resized to the smallest tile size possible: As per the preceding dashboard tile, the less critical data elements such as July through August and the year-over- year % metric were removed. This auto scaling preserved space for the KPI symbol, the axis value (2017-Nov), and the actual value ($296K). With Auto Scale, a large Power KPI custom visual can be used to provide granular details in a report and then re-used in a more compact format as a tile in a Power BI dashboard. Another advantage of the Power KPI is that minimal customization of the data model is required. The following image displays the dimension column and measures of the data model mapped to the field inputs of the aforementioned Power KPI visual: The Sales and Margin Plan data is available at the monthly grain and thus the Calendar Yr-Mo column is used as the Axis input. In other scenarios, a Date column would be used for the Axis input provided that the actual and target measures both support this grain. The order of the measures used in the Values field input is interpreted by the visual as the actual value, the target value, and the secondary value. In this example, Internet Net Sales is the first or top measure in the Values field and thus is used as the actual value (for example, $296K for November). A secondary value as the third measure in the Values input (Internet Net Sales (PY)) is not required if the intent is to only display the actual value versus its target. The KPI Indicator Value and Second KPI Indicator Value fields are also optional. If left blank, the Power KPI visual will automatically calculate these two values as the percentage difference between the actual value and the target value, and the actual value and the secondary value respectively. In this example, these two calculations are already included as measures in the data model and thus applying the Internet Net Sales Var to Plan % and Internet Net Sales (YOY %) measures to these fields further clarifies how the visual is being used. If the metric being used as the actual value is truly a critical measure (for example, revenue or count of customers) to the organization or the primary user, it's almost certainly appropriate that related target and variance measures are built into the Power BI dataset. In many cases, these additional measures will be used independently in their own visuals and reports. Additionally, if a target value is not readily available, such as the preceding example with the Internet Net Sales Plan, BI teams can work with stakeholders on the proper logic to apply to a target measure, for example, 10 percent greater than the previous year. The only customization required is the KPI Indicator Index field. The result of the expression used for this field must correspond to one of five whole numbers (1-5) and thus one of the five available KPI Indicators. In the following example, the KPI Indicators KPI 1 and KPI 2 have been customized to display a green caret up icon and a red caret down icon respectively: Many different KPI Indicator symbols are available including up and down arrows, flags, stars, and exclamation marks. These different symbols can be formatted and then displayed dynamically based on the KPI Indicator Index field expression. In this example, a KPI index measure was created to return the value 1 or 2 based on the positive or negative value of the Internet Net Sales Var to Plan % measure respectively: Internet Net Sales vs Plan Index = IF([Internet Net Sales Var to Plan %] > 0,1,2) Given the positive 4.6 percent variance for November of 2017, the value 1 is returned by the index expression and the green caret up symbol for KPI 1 is displayed. With five available KPI Indicators and their associated symbols, it's possible to embed much more elaborate logic such as five index conditions (for example, poor, below average, average, above average, good) and five corresponding KPI indicators. Four different layouts (Top, Left, Bottom, and Right) are available to display the values relative to the line chart. In the preceding example, the Top layout is chosen as this results in the last value of the Axis input (2017-Nov) to be displayed in the top left corner of the visual. Like the standard line chart visual in Power BI Desktop, the line style (for example, Dotted, Solid, Dashed), color, and thickness can all be customized to help distinguish the different series. Chiclet Slicer The standard slicer visual can display the items of a source column as a list or as a dropdown. Additionally, if presented as a list, the slicer can optionally be displayed horizontally rather than vertically. The custom Chiclet Slicer, developed by Microsoft, allows report authors to take even greater control over the format of slicers to further improve the self-service experience in Power BI reports. In the following example, a Chiclet Slicer has been formatted to display calendar months horizontally as three columns: Additionally, a dark green color is defined as the Selected Color property under the Chiclets formatting card to clearly identify the current selections (May and June). The Padding and Outline Style properties, also available under the Chiclets card, are set to 1 and Square respectively, to obtain a simple and compact layout. Like the slicer controls in Microsoft Excel, Chiclet Slicers also support cross highlighting. To enable cross highlighting, specify a measure which references a fact table as the Values input field to the Chiclet Slicer. For example, with the Internet Net Sales measure set as the Values input of the Chiclet Slicer, a user selection on a bar representing a product in a separate visual would update the Chiclet Slicer to indicate the calendar months without Internet Sales for the given product. The Disabled Color property can be set to control the formatting of these unrelated items. Chiclet Slicers also support images. In the following example, one row is used to display four countries via their national flags: For this visual, the Padding and Outline Style properties under the Chiclets formatting card are set to 2 and Cut respectively. Like the Calendar Month slicer, a dark green color is configured as the Selected Color property helping to identify the country or countries selected—Canada, in this example. The Chiclet Slicer contains three input field wells—Category, Values, and Image. All three input field wells must have a value to display the images. The Category input contains the names of the items to be displayed within the Chiclets. The Image input takes a column with URL links corresponding to images for the given category values. In this example, the Sales Territory Country column is used as the Category input and the Internet Net Sales measure is used as the Values input to support cross highlighting. The Sales Territory URL column, which is set as an Image URL data category, is used as the Image input. For example, the following Sales Territory URL value is associated with the United States: http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/images/u/us.gif. A standard slicer visual can also display images when the data category of the field used is set as Image URL. However, the standard slicer is limited to only one input field and thus cannot also display a text column associated with the image. Additionally, the standard slicer lacks the richer cross-highlighting and formatting controls of the Chiclet Slicer. Impact Bubble Chart One of the limitations with standard Power BI visuals is the number of distinct measures that can be represented graphically. For example, the standard scatter chart visual is limited to three primary measures (X-AXIS, Y-AXIS, and SIZE), and a fourth measure can be used for color saturation. The Impact Bubble Chart custom visual, released in August of 2017, supports five measures by including a left and right bar input for each bubble. In the following visual, the left and right bars of the Impact Bubble Chart are used to visually indicate the distribution of AdWorks Net Sales between Online and Reseller Sales channels: The Impact Bubble Chart supports five input field wells: X-AXIS, Y-AXIS, SIZE, LEFT BAR, and RIGHT BAR. In this example, the following five measures are used for each of these fields respectively: AdWorks Net Sales, AdWorks Net Margin %, AdWorks Net Sales (YTD), Internet Net Sales, and Reseller Net Sales. The length of the left bar indicates that Australia's sales are almost exclusively derived from online sales. Likewise, the length of the right bar illustrates that Canada's sales are almost wholly obtained via Reseller Sales. These graphical insights per item would not be possible for the standard Power BI scatter chart. Specifically, the Internet Net Sales and Reseller Net Sales measures could only be added as Tooltips, thus requiring the user to hover over each individual bubble. In its current release, the Impact Bubble Chart does not support the formatting of data labels, a legend, or the axis titles. Therefore, a supporting text box can be created to advise the user of the additional measures represented. In the top right corner of this visual, a text box is set against the background to associate measures to the two bars and the size of the bubbles. Dot Plot by Maq Software Just as the Impact Bubble Chart supports additional measures, the Dot Plot by Maq Software allows for the visualization of up to four distinct dimension columns. With three Axis fields and a Legend field, a measure can be plotted to a more granular level than any other standard or custom visual currently available to Power BI. Additionally, a rich set of formatting controls are available to customize the Dot Plot's appearance, such as orientation (horizontal or vertical), and whether the Axis categories should be split or stacked. In the following visual, each bubble represents the internet sales for a specific grouping of the following dimension columns: Sales Territory Country, Product Subcategory, Promotion Type, and Customer History Segment: For example, one bubble represents the Internet Sales for the Road Bikes Product Subcategory within the United States Sales Territory Country, which is associated with the volume discount promotion type and the first year Customer History Segment. In this visual, the Customer History Segment column is used as the legend and thus the color of each bubble is automatically formatted to one of the three customer history segments. In the preceding example, the Orientation property is set to Horizontal and the Split labels property under the Axis category formatting card is enabled. The Split labels formatting causes the Sales Territory Country column to be displayed on the opposite axis of the Product Subcategory column. Disabling this property results in the two columns being displayed as a hierarchy on the same axis with the child column (Product Subcategory) positioned inside the parent column (Sales Territory Country). Despite its power in visualizing many dimension columns and its extensive formatting features, data labels are currently not supported. Therefore, when the maximum of four dimension columns are used, such as in the previous example, it's necessary to hover over the individual bubbles to determine which specific grouping the bubble represents, such as in the following example: With this, you can easily extend solutions beyond the capabilities of Power BI's standard visuals and support specific and unique, complex use-cases. If you found this tutorial useful, do check out the book Mastering Microsoft Power BI and develop visually rich, immersive, and interactive Power BI reports and dashboards. Building a Microsoft Power BI Data Model How to build a live interactive visual dashboard in Power BI with Azure Stream How to use M functions within Microsoft Power BI for querying data “Tableau is the most powerful and secure end-to-end analytics platform”: An interview with Joshua Milligan
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Sugandha Lahoti
25 Jul 2018
7 min read
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Decoding the reasons behind Alphabet’s record high earnings in Q2 2018

Sugandha Lahoti
25 Jul 2018
7 min read
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, saw its stock price rise quickly after it announced its Q2 2018 earning results, shocking analysts (in a good way) all over the world. Shares of Alphabet have jumped more than 5% in after-hours trading Monday, hitting a new record high. Source: NASDAQ It would seem that the EU’s fine of €4.34 billion on Google for breaching EU antitrust laws had little effect on its progress in terms of Q2 earnings. According to Ruth Porat, Google's CFO, Alphabet generated revenue of $32.66 billion during Q2 2018, compared to $26.01 billion during the same quarter last year. Excluding the fine, Alphabet still booked a net income of $3.2 billion, which equals earnings of $4.54 per share. Had the EU decision gone the other way, Alphabet would have had $32.6 billion in revenue and a profit of $8.2 billion. “We want Google to be the source you think of when you run into a problem.” - Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, in the Q2 2018 Earnings Call In Monday afternoon’s earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai focused on three major domains that have helped Alphabet achieve its Q2 earnings. First, he claimed that machine learning and AI was becoming a crucial unifying component across all of Google's products and offerings helping to cement and consolidate its position in the market. Second, Pichai suggested that investments in computing, video, cloud and advertising platforms have helped push Google into new valuable markets. And third, the company's investment in new businesses and emerging markets was proving to be a real growth driver which should secure Google's future success. Let us look at the various facets of Google’s growth strategy that have proven to be successful this quarter. Investing in AI With the world spinning around the axis of AI, Alphabet is empowering all of its product and service offerings with AI and machine learning. At its annual developer conference earlier this year, Google I/O, Google announced new updates to their products that rely on machine learning. For example, the revamped Google news app uses machine learning to provide relevant news stories for users, and improvements to Google assistant also helped the organization strengthen its position in that particular market. (By the end of 2018, it will be available in more than 30 languages in 80 countries.) This is another smart move by Alphabet in its plan to make information accessible to all while generating more revenue-generating options for themselves and expanding their partnerships to new vendors and enterprise clients. Google Translate also saw a huge bump in volume especially during the World Cup, as fans all over the world traveled to Russia to witness the football gala. Another smart decision was adding updates to Google Maps. This has achieved a 50% year-on-year growth in Indonesia, India, and Nigeria, three very big and expanding markets. Defending its Android ecosystem and business model The first Android Phone arrived in 2008. The project was built on the simple idea of a mobile platform that was free and open to everyone. Today, there are more than 24,000 Android-powered devices from over 1400 phone manufacturers. Google’s decision to build a business model that encourages this open ecosystem to thrive has been a clever strategy. It not only generates significant revenue for the company but it also brings a world of developers and businesses into its ecosystem. It's vendor lock-in with a friendly face. Of course, with the EU watching closely, Google has to be careful to follow regulation. Failure to comply could mean the company would face penalty payments of up to 5% of its average daily worldwide turnover of Alphabet. According to Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group, however, “There do not appear to be any signs that should cause a meaningful slow down anytime soon, as fines from the EU are not likely to hamper Alphabet’s growth rate. Conversely, regulatory changes such as GDPR in Europe (and similar laws implemented elsewhere) could have the effect of reinforcing Alphabet’s growth.” Forming new partnerships Google has always been very keen to form new partnerships and strategic alliances with a wide variety of companies and startups. It has been very smart in systematically looking for partners that will complement their strengths and bring the end product to the market. Partnering also provides flexibility; instead of developing new solutions and tools in-house, Google can instead bring interesting innovations into the Google ecosystem simply thanks to its financial clout. For example, Google has partnered with many electronic companies to expand the number of devices compatible with Google assistant. Furthermore, its investment in computing platforms and AI has also helped the organization to generate considerable momentum in their Made by Google hardware business across Pixel, Home, Nest, and Chromecast. Interestingly, we also saw an acceleration in business adoption of Chromebooks. Chromebooks are the most cost-efficient and secure way for businesses to enable their employees to work in the cloud. The unit sales of managed Chromebooks in Q2 grew by more than 175% year-on-year. “Advertising on Youtube has always been an incredibly strong and growing source of income for its creators. Now Google is also building new ways for creators to source income such as paid channel memberships, merchandise shelves on Youtube channels, and endorsements opportunities through Famebit.”, said Pichai. Famebit is a startup they acquired in 2016 which uses data analytics to build tools to connect brands with the right creators. This acquisition proved to be quite successful as almost half of the creators that used Famebit in 2018 doubled their revenue in the first 3 months. Google has also made significant strides in developing new shopping and commerce partnerships such as with leading global retailers like Carrefour, designed to give people the power to shop wherever and however they want. Such collaborations are great for Google as it brings their shopping, ads, and cloud products under one hood. The success of Google Cloud’s vertical strategy and customer-centric approach was illustrated by key wins including Domino's Pizza, Soundcloud, and PwC moving to GCP this quarter. Target, the chain of department store retailers in the US, is also migrating key areas of it’s business to GCP. AirAsia has also expanded its relationship with Google for using ML and data analytics. This shows that the cloud business is only going to grow further. Further, Google Cloud Platform catering to clients from across very different industries and domains signals a robust way to expand their cloud empire. Supporting future customers Google is not just thinking about its current customer base but also working on specialized products to support the next wave of people which are coming online for the first time, enabled the rise in accessibility of mobile devices. They have established high-speed public WiFi in 400 train stations in India in collaboration with the Indian railways and proposed the system in Indonesia and Mexico as well. They have also announced Google AI research center in Ghana Africa to spur AI innovation with researchers and engineers from Africa. They have also expanded the Google IT support professional certificate program to more than 25 community colleges in the US. This massive uproar by Alphabet even in the midst of EU antitrust case was the most talked about news among Wall Street analysts. Most of them consider it to be buy-in terms of stocks. For the next quarter, Google wants to continue fueling its growing cloud business “We are investing for the long run.” Pichai said. They also don’t plan to dramatically alter their Android strategy and continue to give the OS for free. Pichai said, “I’m confident that we will find a way to make sure Android is available at scale to users everywhere.” A quick look at E.U.’s antitrust case against Google’s Android Is Google planning to replace Android with Project Fuchsia? Google Cloud Launches Blockchain Toolkit to help developers build apps easily
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Amey Varangaonkar
24 Jul 2018
9 min read
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Top 5 Deep Learning Architectures

Amey Varangaonkar
24 Jul 2018
9 min read
If you are a deep learning practitioner or someone who wants to get into the world of deep learning, you might be well acquainted with neural networks already. Neural networks, inspired by biological neural networks, are pretty useful when it comes to solving complex, multi-layered computational problems. Deep learning has stood out pretty well in several high-profile research fields - including facial and speech recognition, natural language processing, machine translation, and more. In this article, we look at the top 5 popular and widely-used deep learning architectures you should know in order to advance your knowledge or deep learning research. Convolutional Neural Networks Convolutional Neural Networks, or CNNs in short, are the popular choice of neural networks for different Computer Vision tasks such as image recognition. The name ‘convolution’ is derived from a mathematical operation involving the convolution of different functions. There are 4 primary steps or stages in designing a CNN: Convolution: The input signal is received at this stage Subsampling: Inputs received from the convolution layer are smoothened to reduce the sensitivity of the filters to noise or any other variation Activation: This layer controls how the signal flows from one layer to the other, similar to the neurons in our brain Fully connected: In this stage, all the layers of the network are connected with every neuron from a preceding layer to the neurons from the subsequent layer Here is an in-depth look at the CNN Architecture and its working, as explained by the popular AI Researcher Giancarlo Zaccone. A sample CNN in action Advantages of CNN Very good for visual recognition Once a segment within a particular sector of an image is learned, the CNN can recognize that segment present anywhere else in the image Disadvantages of CNN CNN is highly dependent on the size and quality of the training data Highly susceptible to noise Recurrent Neural Networks Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been very popular in areas where the sequence in which the information is presented is crucial. As a result, they find a lot applications in real-world domains such as natural language processing, speech synthesis and machine translation. RNNs are called ‘recurrent’ mainly because a uniform task is performed for every single element of a sequence, with the output dependant on the previous computations as well. Think of these networks as having a memory, where every calculated information is captured, stored and utilized to calculate the final outcome. Over the years, quite a few varieties of RNNs have been researched and developed: Bidirectional RNN - The output in this type of RNN depends not only on the past but also the future outcomes Deep RNN - In this type of RNN, there are multiple layers present per step, allowing for a greater rate of learning and more accuracy RNNs can be used to build industry-standard chatbots that can be used to interact with customers on websites. Given a sequence of signals from an audio wave, RNNs can also be used to predict a correct sequence of phonetic segments with a given probability. Advantages of RNN Unlike a traditional neural network, an RNN shares the same parameters across all steps. This greatly reduces the number of parameters that we need to learn RNNs can be used along with CNNs to generate accurate descriptions for unlabeled images. Disadvantages of RNN RNNs find it difficult to track long-term dependencies. This is especially true in case of long sentences and paragraphs having too many words in between the noun and the verb. RNNs cannot be stacked into very deep models. This is due to the activation function used in RNN models, making the gradient decay over multiple layers. Autoencoders Autoencoders apply the principle of backpropagation in an unsupervised environment. Autoencoders, interestingly, have a close resemblance to PCA (Principal Component Analysis) except that they are more flexible. Some of the popular applications of Autoencoders is anomaly detection - for example detecting fraud in financial transactions in banks. Basically, the core task of autoencoders is to identify and determine what constitutes regular, normal data and then identify the outliers or anomalies. Autoencoders usually represent data through multiple hidden layers such that the output signal is as close to the input signal. There are 4 major types of autoencoders being used today: Vanilla autoencoder - the simplest form of autoencoders there is, i.e. a neural net with one hidden layer Multilayer autoencoder - when one hidden layer is not enough, an autoencoder can be extended to include more hidden layers Convolutional autoencoder - In this type, convolutions are used in the autoencoders instead of fully-connected layers Regularized autoencoder - this type of autoencoders use a special loss function that enables the model to have properties beyond the basic ability to copy a given input to the output. This article demonstrates training an autoencoder using H20, a popular machine learning and AI platform. A basic representation of Autoencoder Advantages of Autoencoders Autoencoders give a resultant model which is primarily based on the data rather than predefined filters Very less complexity means it’s easier to train them Disadvantages of Autoencoders Training time can be very high sometimes If the training data is not representative of the testing data, then the information that comes out of the model can be obscured and unclear Some autoencoders, especially of the variational type, cause a deterministic bias being introduced in the model Generative Adversarial Networks The basic premise of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is the training of two deep learning models simultaneously. These deep learning networks basically compete with each other - one model that tries to generate new instances or examples is called as the generator. The other model that tries to classify if a particular instance originates from the training data or from the generator is called as the discriminator. GANs, a breakthrough recently in the field of deep learning,  was a concept put forth by the popular deep learning expert Ian Goodfellow in 2014. It finds large and important applications in Computer Vision, especially image generation. Read more about the structure and the functionality of the GAN from the official paper submitted by Ian Goodfellow. General architecture of GAN (Source: deeplearning4j) Advantages of GAN Per Goodfellow, GANs allow for efficient training of classifiers in a semi-supervised manner Because of the improved accuracy of the model, the generated data is almost indistinguishable from the original data GANs do not introduce any deterministic bias unlike variational autoencoders Disadvantages of GAN Generator and discriminator working efficiently is crucial to the success of GAN. The whole system fails even if one of them fails Both the generator and discriminator are separate systems and trained with different loss functions. Hence the time required to train the entire system can get quite high. Interested to know more about GANs? Here’s what you need to know about them. ResNets Ever since they gained popularity in 2015, ResNets or Deep Residual Networks have been widely adopted and used by many data scientists and AI researchers. As you already know, CNNs are highly useful when it comes to solving image classification and visual recognition problems. As these tasks become more complex, training of the neural network starts to get a lot more difficult, as additional deep layers are required to compute and enhance the accuracy of the model. Residual learning is a concept designed to tackle this very problem, and the resultant architecture is popularly known as a ResNet. A ResNet consists of a number of residual modules - where each module represents a layer. Each layer consists of a set of functions to be performed on the input. The depth of a ResNet can vary greatly - the one developed by Microsoft researchers for an image classification problem had 152 layers! A basic building block of ResNet (Source: Quora) Advantages of ResNets ResNets are more accurate and require less weights than LSTMs and RNNs in some cases They are highly modular. Hundreds and thousands of residual layers can be added to create a network and then trained. ResNets can be designed to determine how deep a particular network needs to be. Disadvantages of ResNets If the layers in a ResNet are too deep, errors can be hard to detect and cannot be propagated back quickly and correctly. At the same time, if the layers are too narrow, the learning might not be very efficient. Apart from the ones above, a few more deep learning models are being increasingly adopted and preferred by data scientists. These definitely deserve a honorable mention: LSTM: LSTMs are a special kind of Recurrent Neural Networks that include a special memory cell that can hold information for long periods of time. A set of gates is used to determine when a particular information enters the memory and when it is forgotten. SqueezeNet: One of the newer but very powerful deep learning architectures which is extremely efficient for low bandwidth platforms such as mobile. CapsNet: CapsNet, or Capsule Networks, is a recent breakthrough in the field of Deep Learning and neural network modeling. Mainly used for accurate image recognition tasks, and is an advanced variation of the CNNs. SegNet: A popular deep learning architecture especially used to solve the image segmentation problem. Seq2Seq: An upcoming deep learning architecture being increasingly used for machine translation and building efficient chatbots So there you have it! Thanks to the intense efforts in research in deep learning and AI, we now have a variety of deep learning models at our disposal to solve a variety of problems - both functional and computational. What’s even better is that we have the liberty to choose the most appropriate deep learning architecture based on the problem at hand. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]Editor’s Tip: It is very important to know the best deep learning frameworks you can use to train your models. Here are the top 10 deep learning frameworks for you.[/box] In contrast to the traditional programming approach where we tell the computer what to do, the deep learning models figure out the problem and devise the most appropriate solution on their own - however complex the problem may be. No wonder these deep learning architectures are being researched on and deployed on a large scale by the major market players such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many others. Packt Explains… Deep Learning in 90 seconds Behind the scenes: Deep learning evolution and core concepts Facelifting NLP with Deep Learning  
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Sunith Shetty
24 Jul 2018
10 min read
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Build Hadoop clusters using Google Cloud Platform [Tutorial]

Sunith Shetty
24 Jul 2018
10 min read
Cloud computing has transformed the way individuals and organizations access and manage their servers and applications on the internet. Before Cloud computing, everyone used to manage their servers and applications on their own premises or on dedicated data centers. The increase in the raw computing power of computing (CPU and GPU) of multiple-cores on a single chip and the increase in the storage space (HDD and SSD) present challenges in efficiently utilizing the available computing resources. In today's tutorial, we will learn different ways of building Hadoop cluster on the Cloud and ways to store and access data on Cloud. This article is an excerpt from a book written by Naresh Kumar and Prashant Shindgikar titled Modern Big Data Processing with Hadoop. Building Hadoop cluster in the Cloud Cloud offers a flexible and easy way to rent resources such as servers, storage, networking, and so on. The Cloud has made it very easy for consumers with the pay-as-you-go model, but much of the complexity of the Cloud is hidden from us by the providers. In order to better understand whether Hadoop is well suited to being on the Cloud, let's try to dig further and see how the Cloud is organized internally. At the core of the Cloud are the following mechanisms: A very large number of servers with a variety of hardware configurations Servers connected and made available over IP networks Large data centers to host these devices Data centers spanning geographies with evolved network and data center designs If we pay close attention, we are talking about the following: A very large number of different CPU architectures A large number of storage devices with a variety of speeds and performance Networks with varying speed and interconnectivity Let's look at a simple design of such a data center on the Cloud:We have the following devices in the preceding diagram: S1, S2: Rack switches U1-U6: Rack servers R1: Router Storage area network Network attached storage As we can see, Cloud providers have a very large number of such architectures to make them scalable and flexible. You would have rightly guessed that when the number of such servers increases and when we request a new server, the provider can allocate the server anywhere in the region. This makes it a bit challenging for compute and storage to be together but also provides elasticity. In order to address this co-location problem, some Cloud providers give the option of creating a virtual network and taking dedicated servers, and then allocating all their virtual nodes on these servers. This is somewhat closer to a data center design, but flexible enough to return resources when not needed. Let's get back to Hadoop and remind ourselves that in order to get the best from the Hadoop system, we should have the CPU power closer to the storage. This means that the physical distance between the CPU and the storage should be much less, as the BUS speeds match the processing requirements. The slower the I/O speed between the CPU and the storage (for example, iSCSI, storage area network, network attached storage, and so on) the poorer the performance we get from the Hadoop system, as the data is being fetched over the network, kept in memory, and then fed to the CPU for further processing. This is one of the important things to keep in mind when designing Hadoop systems on the Cloud. Apart from performance reasons, there are other things to consider: Scaling Hadoop Managing Hadoop Securing Hadoop Now, let's try to understand how we can take care of these in the Cloud environment. Hadoop can be installed by the following methods: Standalone Semi-distributed Fully-distributed When we want to deploy Hadoop on the Cloud, we can deploy it using the following ways: Custom shell scripts Cloud automation tools (Chef, Ansible, and so on) Apache Ambari Cloud vendor provided methods Google Cloud Dataproc Amazon EMR Microsoft HDInsight Third-party managed Hadoop Cloudera Cloud agnostic deployment Apache Whirr Google Cloud Dataproc In this section, we will learn how to use Google Cloud Dataproc to set up a single node Hadoop cluster. The steps can be broken down into the following: Getting a Google Cloud account. Activating Google Cloud Dataproc service. Creating a new Hadoop cluster. Logging in to the Hadoop cluster. Deleting the Hadoop cluster. Getting a Google Cloud account This section assumes that you already have a Google Cloud account. Activating the Google Cloud Dataproc service Once you log in to the Google Cloud console, you need to visit the Cloud Dataproc service. The activation screen looks something like this: Creating a new Hadoop cluster Once the Dataproc is enabled in the project, we can click on Create to create a new Hadoop cluster. After this, we see another screen where we need to configure the cluster parameters: I have left most of the things to their default values. Later, we can click on the Create button which creates a new cluster for us. Logging in to the cluster After the cluster has successfully been created, we will automatically be taken to the cluster lists page. From there, we can launch an SSH window to log in to the single node cluster we have created. The SSH window looks something like this: As you can see, the Hadoop command is readily available for us and we can run any of the standard Hadoop commands to interact with the system. Deleting the cluster In order to delete the cluster, click on the DELETE button and it will display a confirmation window, as shown in the following screenshot. After this, the cluster will be deleted: Looks so simple, right? Yes. Cloud providers have made it very simple for users to use the Cloud and pay only for the usage. Data access in the Cloud The Cloud has become an important destination for storing both personal data and business data. Depending upon the importance and the secrecy requirements of the data, organizations have started using the Cloud to store their vital datasets. The following diagram tries to summarize the various access patterns of typical enterprises and how they leverage the Cloud to store their data: Cloud providers offer different varieties of storage. Let's take a look at what these types are: Block storage File-based storage Encrypted storage Offline storage Block storage This type of storage is primarily useful when we want to use this along with our compute servers, and want to manage the storage via the host operating system. To understand this better, this type of storage is equivalent to the hard disk/SSD that comes with our laptops/MacBook when we purchase them. In case of laptop storage, if we decide to increase the capacity, we need to replace the existing disk with another one. When it comes to the Cloud, if we want to add more capacity, we can just purchase another larger capacity storage and attach it to our server. This is one of the reasons why the Cloud has become popular as it has made it very easy to add or shrink the storage that we need. It's good to remember that, since there are many different types of access patterns for our applications, Cloud vendors also offer block storage with varying storage/speed requirements measured with their own capacity/IOPS, and so on. Let's take an example of this capacity upgrade requirement and see what we do to utilize this block storage on the Cloud. In order to understand this, let's look at the example in this diagram: Imagine a server created by the administrator called DB1 with an original capacity of 100 GB. Later, due to unexpected demand from customers, an application started consuming all the 100 GB of storage, so the administrator has decided to increase the capacity to 1 TB (1,024 GB). This is what the workflow looks like in this scenario: Create a new 1 TB disk on the Cloud Attach the disk to the server and mount it Take a backup of the database Copy the data from the existing disk to the new disk Start the database Verify the database Destroy the data on the old disk and return the disk This process is simplified but in production this might take some time, depending upon the type of maintenance that is being performed by the administrator. But, from the Cloud perspective, acquiring new block storage is very quick. File storage Files are the basics of computing. If you are familiar with UNIX/Linux environments, you already know that, everything is a file in the Unix world. But don't get confused with that as every operating system has its own way of dealing with hardware resources. In this case we are not worried about how the operating system deals with hardware resources, but we are talking about the important documents that the users store as part of their day-to-day business. These files can be: Movie/conference recordings Pictures Excel sheets Word documents Even though they are simple-looking files in our computer, they can have significant business importance and should be dealt with in a careful fashion, when we think of storing these on the Cloud. Most Cloud providers offer an easy way to store these simple files on the Cloud and also offer flexibility in terms of security as well. A typical workflow for acquiring the storage of this form is like this: Create a new storage bucket that's uniquely identified Add private/public visibility to this bucket Add multi-geography replication requirement to the data that is stored in this bucket Some Cloud providers bill their customers based on the number of features they select as part of their bucket creation. Please choose a hard-to-discover name for buckets that contain confidential data, and also make them private. Encrypted storage This is a very important requirement for business critical data as we do not want the information to be leaked outside the scope of the organization. Cloud providers offer an encryption at rest facility for us. Some vendors choose to do this automatically and some vendors also provide flexibility in letting us choose the encryption keys and methodology for the encrypting/decrypting data that we own. Depending upon the organization policy, we should follow best practices in dealing with this on the Cloud. With the increase in the performance of storage devices, encryption does not add significant overhead while decrypting/encrypting files. This is depicted in the following image: Continuing the same example as before, when we choose to encrypt the underlying block storage of 1 TB, we can leverage the Cloud-offered encryption where they automatically encrypt and decrypt the data for us. So, we do not have to employ special software on the host operating system to do the encryption and decryption. Remember that encryption can be a feature that's available in both the block storage and file-based storage offer from the vendor. Cold storage This storage is very useful for storing important backups in the Cloud that are rarely accessed. Since we are dealing with a special type of data here, we should also be aware that the Cloud vendor might charge significantly high amounts for data access from this storage, as it's meant to be written once and forgetten (until it's needed). The advantage with this mechanism is that we have to pay lesser amounts to store even petabytes of data. We looked at the different steps involved in building our own Hadoop cluster on the Cloud. And we saw different ways of storing and accessing our data on the Cloud. To know more about how to build expert Big Data systems, do checkout this book Modern Big Data Processing with Hadoop. Read More: What makes Hadoop so revolutionary? Machine learning APIs for Google Cloud Platform Getting to know different Big data Characteristics
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Natasha Mathur
20 Jul 2018
3 min read
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Optical training of Neural networks is making AI more efficient

Natasha Mathur
20 Jul 2018
3 min read
According to research conducted by T. W. Hughes, M. Minkov, Y. Shi, and S. Fan, artificial neural networks can be directly trained on an optical chip. The research, titled “Training of photonic neural networks through in situ backpropagation and gradient measurement” demonstrates that an optical circuit has all the capabilities to perform the critical functions of an electronics-based artificial neural network. This makes performing complex tasks like speech or image recognition less expensive, faster and more energy efficient. According to research team leader, Shanhui Fan of Stanford University "Using an optical chip to perform neural network computations more efficiently than is possible with digital computers could allow more complex problems to be solved”. During the research, the training step on optical ANNs was performed using a traditional digital computer. The final settings were then imported into the optical circuit. But, according to Optica (the Optical Society journal for high impact research at Stanford),. there is a more direct method for training these networks. This involves making use of an optical analog within the ‘backpropagation' algorithm. Tyler W. Hughes, the first author of the research paper, states that "using a physical device rather than a computer model for training makes the process more accurate”.  He also mentions that “because the training step is a very computationally expensive part of the implementation of the neural network, performing this step optically is key to improving the computational efficiency, speed and power consumption of artificial networks." Neural network processing is usually performed with the help of a traditional computer. But now, for neural network computing, researchers are interested in Optics-based devices as computations performed on these devices use much less energy compared to electronic devices. In New York researchers designed an optical chip that imitates the way, conventional computers train neural networks. This then provides a way of implementing an all-optical neural network. According to Hughes, the ANN is like a black box with a number of knobs. During the training stage, each knob is turned ever so slightly so the system can be tested to see how the algorithm’s performance changes. He says, “Our method not only helps predict which direction to turn the knobs but also how much you should turn each knob to get you closer to the desired performance”. How does the new training protocol work? This new training method uses optical circuits which have tunable beam splitters. You can adjust these spitters by altering the settings of optical phase shifters. First, you feed a laser which is encoded with information that needs to be processed through the optical circuit. Once the laser exits the device, the difference against the expected outcome is calculated. This information that is collected then generates a new light signal through the optical network in the opposite direction. Researchers also showed that neural network performance changes with respect to each beam splitter's setting. You can also change the phase shifter settings based on this information. The whole process is repeated until the desired outcome is produced by the neural network. This training technique has been further tested by researchers using optical simulations. In these tests, the optical implementation performed similarly to a conventional computer. The researchers are planning to further optimize the system in order to come out with a practical application using a neural network. How Deep Neural Networks can improve Speech Recognition and generation Recurrent neural networks and the LSTM architecture  
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Sunith Shetty
20 Jul 2018
22 min read
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Create an RNN based Python machine translation system [Tutorial]

Sunith Shetty
20 Jul 2018
22 min read
Machine translation is a process which uses neural network techniques to automatically translate text from one language to the another, with no human intervention required. In today’s machine learning tutorial, we will understand the architecture and learn how to train and build your own machine translation system. This project will help us automatically translate German to produce English sentences. This article is an excerpt from a book written by Luca Massaron, Alberto Boschetti,  Alexey Grigorev, Abhishek Thakur, and Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani titled TensorFlow Deep Learning Projects. Walkthrough of the architecture A machine translation system receives as input an arbitrary string in one language and produces, as output, a string with the same meaning but in another language. Google Translate is one example (but also many other main IT companies have their own). There, users are able to translate to and from more than 100 languages. Using the webpage is easy: on the left just put the sentence you want to translate (for example, Hello World), select its language (in the example, it's English), and select the language you want it to be translated to. Here's an example where we translate the sentence Hello World to French: Is it easy? At a glance, we may think it's a simple dictionary substitution. Words are chunked, the translation is looked up on the specific English-to-French dictionary, and each word is substituted with its translation. Unfortunately, that's not the case. In the example, the English sentence has two words, while the French one has three. More generically, think about phrasal verbs (turn up, turn off, turn on, turn down), Saxon genitive, grammatical gender, tenses, conditional sentences... they don't always have a direct translation, and the correct one should follow the context of the sentence. That's why, for doing machine translation, we need some artificial intelligence tools. Specifically, as for many other natural language processing (NLP) tasks, we'll be using recurrent neural networks (RNNs).  The main feature they have is that they work on sequences: given an input sequence, they produce an output sequence. The objective of this article is to create the correct training pipeline for having a sentence as the input sequence, and its translation as the output one. Remember also the no free lunch theorem: this process isn't easy, and more solutions can be created with the same result. Here, in this article, we will propose a simple but powerful one. First of all, we start with the corpora: it's maybe the hardest thing to find since it should contain a high fidelity translation of many sentences from a language to another one. Fortunately, NLTK, a well-known package of Python for NLP, contains the corpora Comtrans. Comtrans is the acronym of combination approach to machine translation and contains an aligned corpus for three languages: German, French, and English. In this project, we will use these corpora for a few reasons, as follows: It's easy to download and import in Python. No preprocessing is needed to read it from disk / from the internet. NLTK already handles that part. It's small enough to be used on many laptops (a few dozen thousands sentences). It's freely available on the internet. For more information about the Comtrans project, go to http://www.fask.uni-mainz.de/user/rapp/comtrans/. More specifically, we will try to create a machine translation system to translate German to English. We picked these two languages at random among the ones available in the Comtrans corpora: feel free to flip them, or use the French corpora instead. The pipeline of our project is generic enough to handle any combination. Let's now investigate how the corpora is organized by typing some commands: from nltk.corpus import comtrans print(comtrans.aligned_sents('alignment-de-en.txt')[0]) The output is as follows: <AlignedSent: 'Wiederaufnahme der S...' -> 'Resumption of the se...'> The pairs of sentences are available using the function aligned_sents. The filename contains the from and to language. In this case, as for the following part of the project, we will translate German (de) to English (en). The returned object is an instance of the class nltk.translate.api.AlignedSent. By looking at the documentation, the first language is accessible with the attribute words, while the second language is accessible with the attribute mots. So, to extract the German sentence and its English translation separately, we should run: print(comtrans.aligned_sents()[0].words) print(comtrans.aligned_sents()[0].mots) The preceding code outputs: ['Wiederaufnahme', 'der', 'Sitzungsperiode'] ['Resumption', 'of', 'the', 'session'] How nice! The sentences are already tokenized, and they look as sequences. In fact, they will be the input and (hopefully) the output of the RNN which will provide the service of machine translation from German to English for our project. Furthermore, if you want to understand the dynamics of the language, Comtrans makes available the alignment of the words in the translation: print(comtrans.aligned_sents()[0].alignment) The preceding code outputs: 0-0 1-1 1-2 2-3 The first word in German is translated to the first word in English (Wiederaufnahme to Resumption), the second to the second (der to both of and the), and the third (at index 1) is translated with the fourth (Sitzungsperiode to session). Pre-processing of the corpora The first step is to retrieve the corpora. We've already seen how to do this, but let's now formalize it in a function. To make it generic enough, let's enclose these functions in a file named corpora_tools.py. Let's do some imports that we will use later on: import pickle import re from collections import Counter from nltk.corpus import comtrans Now, let's create the function to retrieve the corpora: def retrieve_corpora(translated_sentences_l1_l2='alignment-de-en.txt'): print("Retrieving corpora: {}".format(translated_sentences_l1_l2)) als = comtrans.aligned_sents(translated_sentences_l1_l2) sentences_l1 = [sent.words for sent in als] sentences_l2 = [sent.mots for sent in als] return sentences_l1, sentences_l2 This function has one argument; the file containing the aligned sentences from the NLTK Comtrans corpora. It returns two lists of sentences (actually, they're a list of tokens), one for the source language (in our case, German), the other in the destination language (in our case, English). On a separate Python REPL, we can test this function: sen_l1, sen_l2 = retrieve_corpora() print("# A sentence in the two languages DE & EN") print("DE:", sen_l1[0]) print("EN:", sen_l2[0]) print("# Corpora length (i.e. number of sentences)") print(len(sen_l1)) assert len(sen_l1) == len(sen_l2) The preceding code creates the following output: Retrieving corpora: alignment-de-en.txt # A sentence in the two languages DE & EN DE: ['Wiederaufnahme', 'der', 'Sitzungsperiode'] EN: ['Resumption', 'of', 'the', 'session'] # Corpora length (i.e. number of sentences) 33334 We also printed the number of sentences in each corpora (33,000) and asserted that the number of sentences in the source and the destination languages is the same. In the following step, we want to clean up the tokens. Specifically, we want to tokenize punctuation and lowercase the tokens. To do so, we can create a new function in corpora_tools.py. We will use the regex module to perform the further splitting tokenization: def clean_sentence(sentence): regex_splitter = re.compile("([!?.,:;$"')( ])") clean_words = [re.split(regex_splitter, word.lower()) for word in sentence] return [w for words in clean_words for w in words if words if w] Again, in the REPL, let's test the function: clean_sen_l1 = [clean_sentence(s) for s in sen_l1] clean_sen_l2 = [clean_sentence(s) for s in sen_l2] print("# Same sentence as before, but chunked and cleaned") print("DE:", clean_sen_l1[0]) print("EN:", clean_sen_l2[0]) The preceding code outputs the same sentence as before, but chunked and cleaned: DE: ['wiederaufnahme', 'der', 'sitzungsperiode'] EN: ['resumption', 'of', 'the', 'session'] Nice! The next step for this project is filtering the sentences that are too long to be processed. Since our goal is to perform the processing on a local machine, we should limit ourselves to sentences up to N tokens. In this case, we set N=20, in order to be able to train the learner within 24 hours. If you have a powerful machine, feel free to increase that limit. To make the function generic enough, there's also a lower bound with a default value set to 0, such as an empty token set. The logic of the function is very easy: if the number of tokens for a sentence or its translation is greater than N, then the sentence (in both languages) is removed: def filter_sentence_length(sentences_l1, sentences_l2, min_len=0, max_len=20): filtered_sentences_l1 = [] filtered_sentences_l2 = [] for i in range(len(sentences_l1)): if min_len <= len(sentences_l1[i]) <= max_len and min_len <= len(sentences_l2[i]) <= max_len: filtered_sentences_l1.append(sentences_l1[i]) filtered_sentences_l2.append(sentences_l2[i]) return filtered_sentences_l1, filtered_sentences_l2 Again, let's see in the REPL how many sentences survived this filter. Remember, we started with more than 33,000: filt_clean_sen_l1, filt_clean_sen_l2 = filter_sentence_length(clean_sen_l1, clean_sen_l2) print("# Filtered Corpora length (i.e. number of sentences)") print(len(filt_clean_sen_l1)) assert len(filt_clean_sen_l1) == len(filt_clean_sen_l2) The preceding code prints the following output: # Filtered Corpora length (i.e. number of sentences) 14788 Almost 15,000 sentences survived, that is, half of the corpora. Now, we finally move from text to numbers (which AI mainly uses). To do so, we shall create a dictionary of the words for each language. The dictionary should be big enough to contain most of the words, though we can discard some if the language has words with low occourrence. This is a common practice even in the tf-idf (term frequency within a document, multiplied by the inverse of the document frequency, i.e. in how many documents that token appears), where very rare words are discarded to speed up the computation, and make the solution more scalable and generic. We need here four special symbols in both dictionaries: One symbol for padding (we'll see later why we need it) One symbol for dividing the two sentences One symbol to indicate where the sentence stops One symbol to indicate unknown words (like the very rare ones) For doing so, let's create a new file named data_utils.py containing the following lines of code: _PAD = "_PAD" _GO = "_GO" _EOS = "_EOS" _UNK = "_UNK" _START_VOCAB = [_PAD, _GO, _EOS, _UNK] PAD_ID = 0 GO_ID = 1 EOS_ID = 2 UNK_ID = 3 OP_DICT_IDS = [PAD_ID, GO_ID, EOS_ID, UNK_ID] Then, back to the corpora_tools.py file, let's add the following function: import data_utils def create_indexed_dictionary(sentences, dict_size=10000, storage_path=None): count_words = Counter() dict_words = {} opt_dict_size = len(data_utils.OP_DICT_IDS) for sen in sentences: for word in sen: count_words[word] += 1 dict_words[data_utils._PAD] = data_utils.PAD_ID dict_words[data_utils._GO] = data_utils.GO_ID dict_words[data_utils._EOS] = data_utils.EOS_ID dict_words[data_utils._UNK] = data_utils.UNK_ID for idx, item in enumerate(count_words.most_common(dict_size)): dict_words[item[0]] = idx + opt_dict_size if storage_path: pickle.dump(dict_words, open(storage_path, "wb")) return dict_words This function takes as arguments the number of entries in the dictionary and the path of where to store the dictionary. Remember, the dictionary is created while training the algorithms: during the testing phase it's loaded, and the association token/symbol should be the same one as used in the training. If the number of unique tokens is greater than the value set, only the most popular ones are selected. At the end, the dictionary contains the association between a token and its ID for each language. After building the dictionary, we should look up the tokens and substitute them with their token ID. For that, we need another function: def sentences_to_indexes(sentences, indexed_dictionary): indexed_sentences = [] not_found_counter = 0 for sent in sentences: idx_sent = [] for word in sent: try: idx_sent.append(indexed_dictionary[word]) except KeyError: idx_sent.append(data_utils.UNK_ID) not_found_counter += 1 indexed_sentences.append(idx_sent) print('[sentences_to_indexes] Did not find {} words'.format(not_found_counter)) return indexed_sentences This step is very simple; the token is substituted with its ID. If the token is not in the dictionary, the ID of the unknown token is used. Let's see in the REPL how our sentences look after these steps: dict_l1 = create_indexed_dictionary(filt_clean_sen_l1, dict_size=15000, storage_path="/tmp/l1_dict.p") dict_l2 = create_indexed_dictionary(filt_clean_sen_l2, dict_size=10000, storage_path="/tmp/l2_dict.p") idx_sentences_l1 = sentences_to_indexes(filt_clean_sen_l1, dict_l1) idx_sentences_l2 = sentences_to_indexes(filt_clean_sen_l2, dict_l2) print("# Same sentences as before, with their dictionary ID") print("DE:", list(zip(filt_clean_sen_l1[0], idx_sentences_l1[0]))) This code prints the token and its ID for both the sentences. What's used in the RNN will be just the second element of each tuple, that is, the integer ID: # Same sentences as before, with their dictionary ID DE: [('wiederaufnahme', 1616), ('der', 7), ('sitzungsperiode', 618)] EN: [('resumption', 1779), ('of', 8), ('the', 5), ('session', 549)] Please also note how frequent tokens, such as the and of in English, and der in German, have a low ID. That's because the IDs are sorted by popularity (see the body of the function create_indexed_dictionary). Even though we did the filtering to limit the maximum size of the sentences, we should create a function to extract the maximum size. For the lucky owners of very powerful machines, which didn't do any filtering, that's the moment to see how long the longest sentence in the RNN will be. That's simply the function: def extract_max_length(corpora): return max([len(sentence) for sentence in corpora]) Let's apply the following to our sentences: max_length_l1 = extract_max_length(idx_sentences_l1) max_length_l2 = extract_max_length(idx_sentences_l2) print("# Max sentence sizes:") print("DE:", max_length_l1) print("EN:", max_length_l2) As expected, the output is: # Max sentence sizes: DE: 20 EN: 20 The final preprocessing step is padding. We need all the sequences to be the same length, therefore we should pad the shorter ones. Also, we need to insert the correct tokens to instruct the RNN where the string begins and ends. Basically, this step should: Pad the input sequences, for all being 20 symbols long Pad the output sequence, to be 20 symbols long Insert an _GO at the beginning of the output sequence and an _EOS at the end to position the start and the end of the translation This is done by this function (insert it in the corpora_tools.py): def prepare_sentences(sentences_l1, sentences_l2, len_l1, len_l2): assert len(sentences_l1) == len(sentences_l2) data_set = [] for i in range(len(sentences_l1)): padding_l1 = len_l1 - len(sentences_l1[i]) pad_sentence_l1 = ([data_utils.PAD_ID]*padding_l1) + sentences_l1[i] padding_l2 = len_l2 - len(sentences_l2[i]) pad_sentence_l2 = [data_utils.GO_ID] + sentences_l2[i] + [data_utils.EOS_ID] + ([data_utils.PAD_ID] * padding_l2) data_set.append([pad_sentence_l1, pad_sentence_l2]) return data_set To test it, let's prepare the dataset and print the first sentence: data_set = prepare_sentences(idx_sentences_l1, idx_sentences_l2, max_length_l1, max_length_l2) print("# Prepared minibatch with paddings and extra stuff") print("DE:", data_set[0][0]) print("EN:", data_set[0][1]) print("# The sentence pass from X to Y tokens") print("DE:", len(idx_sentences_l1[0]), "->", len(data_set[0][0])) print("EN:", len(idx_sentences_l2[0]), "->", len(data_set[0][1])) The preceding code outputs the following: # Prepared minibatch with paddings and extra stuff DE: [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1616, 7, 618] EN: [1, 1779, 8, 5, 549, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] # The sentence pass from X to Y tokens DE: 3 -> 20 EN: 4 -> 22 As you can see, the input and the output are padded with zeros to have a constant length (in the dictionary, they correspond to _PAD, see data_utils.py), and the output contains the markers 1 and 2 just before the start and the end of the sentence. As proven effective in the literature, we're going to pad the input sentences at the start and the output sentences at the end. After this operation, all the input sentences are 20 items long, and the output sentences 22. Training the machine translator So far, we've seen the steps to preprocess the corpora, but not the model used. The model is actually already available on the TensorFlow Models repository, freely downloadable from https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/tutorials/rnn/translate/seq2seq_model.py. The piece of code is licensed with Apache 2.0. We really thank the authors for having open sourced such a great model. Copyright 2015 The TensorFlow Authors. All Rights Reserved. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the License); You may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software. Distributed under the License is distributed on an AS IS BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. We will see the usage of the model throughout this section. First, let's create a new file named train_translator.py and put in some imports and some constants. We will save the dictionary in the /tmp/ directory, as well as the model and its checkpoints: import time import math import sys import pickle import glob import os import tensorflow as tf from seq2seq_model import Seq2SeqModel from corpora_tools import * path_l1_dict = "/tmp/l1_dict.p" path_l2_dict = "/tmp/l2_dict.p" model_dir = "/tmp/translate " model_checkpoints = model_dir + "/translate.ckpt" Now, let's use all the tools created in the previous section within a function that, given a Boolean flag, returns the corpora. More specifically, if the argument is False, it builds the dictionary from scratch (and saves it); otherwise, it uses the dictionary available in the path: def build_dataset(use_stored_dictionary=False): sen_l1, sen_l2 = retrieve_corpora() clean_sen_l1 = [clean_sentence(s) for s in sen_l1] clean_sen_l2 = [clean_sentence(s) for s in sen_l2] filt_clean_sen_l1, filt_clean_sen_l2 = filter_sentence_length(clean_sen_l1, clean_sen_l2) if not use_stored_dictionary: dict_l1 = create_indexed_dictionary(filt_clean_sen_l1, dict_size=15000, storage_path=path_l1_dict) dict_l2 = create_indexed_dictionary(filt_clean_sen_l2, dict_size=10000, storage_path=path_l2_dict) else: dict_l1 = pickle.load(open(path_l1_dict, "rb")) dict_l2 = pickle.load(open(path_l2_dict, "rb")) dict_l1_length = len(dict_l1) dict_l2_length = len(dict_l2) idx_sentences_l1 = sentences_to_indexes(filt_clean_sen_l1, dict_l1) idx_sentences_l2 = sentences_to_indexes(filt_clean_sen_l2, dict_l2) max_length_l1 = extract_max_length(idx_sentences_l1) max_length_l2 = extract_max_length(idx_sentences_l2) data_set = prepare_sentences(idx_sentences_l1, idx_sentences_l2, max_length_l1, max_length_l2) return (filt_clean_sen_l1, filt_clean_sen_l2), data_set, (max_length_l1, max_length_l2), (dict_l1_length, dict_l2_length) This function returns the cleaned sentences, the dataset, the maximum length of the sentences, and the lengths of the dictionaries. Also, we need to have a function to clean up the model. Every time we run the training routine we need to clean up the model directory, as we haven't provided any garbage information. We can do this with a very simple function: def cleanup_checkpoints(model_dir, model_checkpoints): for f in glob.glob(model_checkpoints + "*"): os.remove(f) try: os.mkdir(model_dir) except FileExistsError: pass Finally, let's create the model in a reusable fashion: def get_seq2seq_model(session, forward_only, dict_lengths, max_sentence_lengths, model_dir): model = Seq2SeqModel( source_vocab_size=dict_lengths[0], target_vocab_size=dict_lengths[1], buckets=[max_sentence_lengths], size=256, num_layers=2, max_gradient_norm=5.0, batch_size=64, learning_rate=0.5, learning_rate_decay_factor=0.99, forward_only=forward_only, dtype=tf.float16) ckpt = tf.train.get_checkpoint_state(model_dir) if ckpt and tf.train.checkpoint_exists(ckpt.model_checkpoint_path): print("Reading model parameters from {}".format(ckpt.model_checkpoint_path)) model.saver.restore(session, ckpt.model_checkpoint_path) else: print("Created model with fresh parameters.") session.run(tf.global_variables_initializer()) return model This function calls the constructor of the model, passing the following parameters: The source vocabulary size (German, in our example) The target vocabulary size (English, in our example) The buckets (in our example is just one, since we padded all the sequences to a single size) The long short-term memory (LSTM) internal units size The number of stacked LSTM layers The maximum norm of the gradient (for gradient clipping) The mini-batch size (that is, how many observations for each training step) The learning rate The learning rate decay factor The direction of the model The type of data (in our example, we will use flat16, that is, float using 2 bytes) To make the training faster and obtain a model with good performance, we have already set the values in the code; feel free to change them and see how it performs. The final if/else in the function retrieves the model, from its checkpoint, if the model already exists. In fact, this function will be used in the decoder too to retrieve and model on the test set. Finally, we have reached the function to train the machine translator. Here it is: def train(): with tf.Session() as sess: model = get_seq2seq_model(sess, False, dict_lengths, max_sentence_lengths, model_dir) # This is the training loop. step_time, loss = 0.0, 0.0 current_step = 0 bucket = 0 steps_per_checkpoint = 100 max_steps = 20000 while current_step < max_steps: start_time = time.time() encoder_inputs, decoder_inputs, target_weights = model.get_batch([data_set], bucket) _, step_loss, _ = model.step(sess, encoder_inputs, decoder_inputs, target_weights, bucket, False) step_time += (time.time() - start_time) / steps_per_checkpoint loss += step_loss / steps_per_checkpoint current_step += 1 if current_step % steps_per_checkpoint == 0: perplexity = math.exp(float(loss)) if loss < 300 else float("inf") print ("global step {} learning rate {} step-time {} perplexity {}".format( model.global_step.eval(), model.learning_rate.eval(), step_time, perplexity)) sess.run(model.learning_rate_decay_op) model.saver.save(sess, model_checkpoints, global_step=model.global_step) step_time, loss = 0.0, 0.0 encoder_inputs, decoder_inputs, target_weights = model.get_batch([data_set], bucket) _, eval_loss, _ = model.step(sess, encoder_inputs, decoder_inputs, target_weights, bucket, True) eval_ppx = math.exp(float(eval_loss)) if eval_loss < 300 else float("inf") print(" eval: perplexity {}".format(eval_ppx)) sys.stdout.flush() The function starts by creating the model. Also, it sets some constants on the steps per checkpoints and the maximum number of steps. Specifically, in the code, we will save a model every 100 steps and we will perform no more than 20,000 steps. If it still takes too long, feel free to kill the program: every checkpoint contains a trained model, and the decoder will use the most updated one. At this point, we enter the while loop. For each step, we ask the model to get a minibatch of data (of size 64, as set previously). The method get_batch returns the inputs (that is, the source sequence), the outputs (that is, the destination sequence), and the weights of the model. With the method step, we run one step of the training. One piece of information returned is the loss for the current minibatch of data. That's all the training! To report the performance and store the model every 100 steps, we print the average perplexity of the model (the lower, the better) on the 100 previous steps, and we save the checkpoint. The perplexity is a metric connected to the uncertainty of the predictions: the more confident we're about the tokens, the lower will be the perplexity of the output sentence. Also, we reset the counters and we extract the same metric from a single minibatch of the test set (in this case, it's a random minibatch of the dataset), and performances of it are printed too. Then, the training process restarts again. As an improvement, every 100 steps we also reduce the learning rate by a factor. In this case, we multiply it by 0.99. This helps the convergence and the stability of the training. We now have to connect all the functions together. In order to create a script that can be called by the command line but is also used by other scripts to import functions, we can create a main, as follows: if __name__ == "__main__": _, data_set, max_sentence_lengths, dict_lengths = build_dataset(False) cleanup_checkpoints(model_dir, model_checkpoints) train() In the console, you can now train your machine translator system with a very simple command: $> python train_translator.py On an average laptop, without an NVIDIA GPU, it takes more than a day to reach a perplexity below 10 (12+ hours). This is the output: Retrieving corpora: alignment-de-en.txt [sentences_to_indexes] Did not find 1097 words [sentences_to_indexes] Did not find 0 words Created model with fresh parameters. global step 100 learning rate 0.5 step-time 4.3573073434829713 perplexity 526.6638556683066 eval: perplexity 159.2240770935855 [...] global step 10500 learning rate 0.180419921875 step-time 4.35106209993362414 perplexity 2.0458043055629487 eval: perplexity 1.8646006006241982 [...] In this article, we've seen how to create a machine translation system based on an RNN. We've seen how to organize the corpus, and how to train it. To know more about how to test and translate the model, do checkout this book TensorFlow Deep Learning Projects. Google’s translation tool is now offline – and more powerful than ever thanks to AI Anatomy of an automated machine learning algorithm (AutoML) FAE (Fast Adaptation Engine): iOlite’s tool to write Smart Contracts using machine translation
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Savia Lobo
19 Jul 2018
3 min read
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Google AI releases Cirq and Open Fermion-Cirq to boost Quantum computation

Savia Lobo
19 Jul 2018
3 min read
Google AI Quantum team announced two releases at the First International Workshop on Quantum Software and Quantum Machine Learning(QSML) yesterday. Firstly the public alpha release of Cirq, an open source framework for NISQ computers. The second release is OpenFermion-Cirq, an example of a Cirq-based application enabling near-term algorithms. Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers are devices including ~50 - 100 qubits and high fidelity quantum gates enhance the quantum algorithms such that they can understand the power that these machines uphold. However, quantum algorithms for the quantum computers have their limitations such as A poor mapping between the algorithms and the machines Also, some quantum processors have complex geometric constraints These and other nuances inevitably lead to wasted resources and faulty computations. Cirq comes as a great help for researchers here. It is focussed on near-term questions, which help researchers to understand whether NISQ quantum computers are capable of solving computational problems of practical importance. It is licensed under Apache 2 and is free to be either embedded or modified within any commercial or open source package. Cirq highlights With Cirq, researchers can write quantum algorithms for specific quantum processors. It provides a fine-tuned user control over quantum circuits by, specifying gate behavior using native gates, placing these gates appropriately on the device, and scheduling the timing of these gates within the constraints of the quantum hardware. Other features of Cirq include: Allows users to leverage the most out of NISQ architectures with optimized data structures to write and compile the quantum circuits. Supports running of the algorithms locally on a simulator Designed to easily integrate with future quantum hardware or larger simulators via the cloud. OpenFermion-Cirq highlights Google AI Quantum team also released OpenFermion-Cirq, which is an example of a CIrq-based application that enables the near-term algorithms.  OpenFermion is a platform for developing quantum algorithms for chemistry problems. OpenFermion-Cirq extends the functionality of OpenFermion by providing routines and tools for using Cirq for compiling and composing circuits for quantum simulation algorithms. An instance of the OpenFermion-Cirq is, it can be used to easily build quantum variational algorithms for simulating properties of molecules and complex materials. While building Cirq, the Google AI Quantum team worked with early testers to gain feedback and insight into algorithm design for NISQ computers. Following are some instances of Cirq work resulting from the early adopters: Zapata Computing: simulation of a quantum autoencoder (example code, video tutorial) QC Ware: QAOA implementation and integration into QC Ware’s AQUA platform (example code, video tutorial) Quantum Benchmark: integration of True-Q software tools for assessing and extending hardware capabilities (video tutorial) Heisenberg Quantum Simulations: simulating the Anderson Model Cambridge Quantum Computing: integration of proprietary quantum compiler t|ket> (video tutorial) NASA: architecture-aware compiler based on temporal-planning for QAOA (slides) and simulator of quantum computers (slides) The team also announced that it is using Cirq to create circuits that run on Google’s Bristlecone processor. Their future plans include making the Bristlecone processor available in cloud with Cirq as the interface for users to write programs for this processor. To know more about both the releases, check out the GitHub repositories of each Cirq and OpenFermion-Cirq. Q# 101: Getting to know the basics of Microsoft’s new quantum computing language Google Bristlecone: A New Quantum processor by Google’s Quantum AI lab Quantum A.I. : An intelligent mix of Quantum+A.I.
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Packt Editorial Staff
18 Jul 2018
8 min read
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How to set up an Ethereum development environment [Tutorial]

Packt Editorial Staff
18 Jul 2018
8 min read
There are various ways to develop Ethereum blockchain. We will look at the mainstream options in this article which are: Test networks How to setup Ethereum private net This tutorial is extracted from the book Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition written by Imran Bashir. There are multiple ways to develop smart contracts on Ethereum. The usual and sensible approach is to develop and test Ethereum smart contracts either on a local private net or a simulated environment, and then it can be deployed on a public testnet. After all the relevant tests are successful on public testnet, the contracts can then be deployed to the public mainnet. There are however variations in this process, and many developers opt to only develop and test contracts on locally simulated environments. Then deploy on public mainnet or their private production blockchain networks. Developing on a simulated environment and then deploying directly to a public network can lead to faster time to production. As setting up private networks may take longer compared to setting a local development environment with a blockchain simulator. Let's start with connecting to a test network. Ethereum connection on test networks The Ethereum Go client (https://geth.ethereum.org) Geth, can be connected to the test network using the following command: $ geth --testnet A sample output is shown in the following screenshot. The screenshot shows the type of the network chosen and various other pieces of information regarding the blockchain download: The output of the geth command connecting to Ethereum test net A blockchain explorer for testnet is located at https://ropsten.etherscan.io can be used to trace transactions and blocks on the Ethereum test network. There are other test networks available too, such as Frontier, Morden, Ropsten, and Rinkeby. Geth can be issued with a command-line flag to connect to the desired network: --testnet: Ropsten network: pre-configured proof-of-work test network --rinkeby: Rinkeby network: pre-configured proof-of-authority test network --networkid value: Network identifier (integer, 1=Frontier, 2=Morden (disused), 3=Ropsten, 4=Rinkeby) (default: 1) Now let us do some experiments with building a private network and then we will see how a contract can be deployed on this network using the Mist and command-line tools. Setting up a private net Private net allows the creation of an entirely new blockchain. This is different from testnet or mainnet in the sense that it uses its on-genesis block and network ID. In order to create private net, three components are needed: Network ID The Genesis File Data directory to store blockchain data. Even though the data directory is not strictly required to be mentioned, if there is more than one blockchain already active on the system, then the data directory should be specified so that a separate directory is used for the new blockchain. On the mainnet, the Geth Ethereum client is capable of discovering boot nodes by default as they are hardcoded in the Geth client, and connects automatically. But on a private net, Geth needs to be configured by specifying appropriate flags and configuration in order for it to be discoverable by other peers or to be able to discover other peers. We will see how this is achieved shortly. In addition to the previously mentioned three components, it is desirable that you disable node discovery so that other nodes on the internet cannot discover your private network and it is secure. If other networks happen to have the same genesis file and network ID, they may connect to your private net. The chance of having the same network ID and genesis block is very low, but, nevertheless, disabling node discovery is good practice, and is recommended. In the following section, all these parameters are discussed in detail with a practical example. Network ID Network ID can be any positive number except 1 and 3, which are already in use by Ethereum mainnet and testnet (Ropsten), respectively. Network ID 786 has been chosen for the example private network discussed later in this section. The genesis file The genesis file contains the necessary fields required for a custom genesis block. This is the first block in the network and does not point to any previous block. The Ethereum protocol performs checking in order to ensure that no other node on the internet can participate in the consensus mechanism unless they have the same genesis block. Chain ID is usually used as an identification of the network. A custom genesis file that will be used later in the example is shown here: { "nonce": "0x0000000000000042", "timestamp": "0x00", "parentHash": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000", "extraData": "0x00", "gasLimit": "0x8000000", "difficulty": "0x0400", "mixhash": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000", "coinbase": "0x3333333333333333333333333333333333333333", "alloc": { }, "config": { "chainId": 786, "homesteadBlock": 0, "eip155Block": 0, "eip158Block": 0 } } This file is saved as a text file with the JSON extension; for example, privategenesis.json. Optionally, Ether can be pre-allocated by specifying the beneficiary's addresses and the amount of Wei, but it is usually not necessary as being on the private network, Ether can be mined very quickly. In order to pre-allocate a section can be added to the genesis file, as shown here: "alloc": { "0xcf61d213faa9acadbf0d110e1397caf20445c58f ": { "balance": "100000" }, } Now let's see what each of these parameters mean. nonce: This is a 64-bit hash used to prove that PoW has been sufficiently completed. This works in combination with the mixhash parameter. timestamp: This is the Unix timestamp of the block. This is used to verify the sequence of the blocks and for difficulty adjustment. For example, if blocks are being generated too quickly that difficulty goes higher. parentHash: This is always zero being the genesis (first) block as there is no parent of the first block. extraData: This parameter allows a 32-bit arbitrary value to be saved with the block. gasLimit: This is the limit on the expenditure of gas per block. difficulty: This parameter is used to determine the mining target. It represents the difficulty level of the hash required to prove the PoW. mixhash: This is a 256-bit hash which works in combination with nonce to prove that sufficient amount of computational resources has been spent in order to complete the PoW requirements. coinbase: This is the 160-bit address where the mining reward is sent to as a result of successful mining. alloc: This parameter contains the list of pre-allocated wallets. The long hex digit is the account to which the balance is allocated. config: This section contains various configuration information defining chain ID, and blockchain hard fork block numbers. This parameter is not required to be used in private networks. Data directory This is the directory where the blockchain data for the private Ethereum network will be saved. For example, in the following example, it is ~/etherprivate/. In the Geth client, a nu mber of parameters are specified in order to launch, further fine-tune the configuration, and launch the private network. These flags are listed here. Flags and their meaning The following are the flags used with the Geth client: --nodiscover: This flag ensures that the node is not automatically discoverable if it happens to have the same genesis file and network ID. --maxpeers: This flag is used to specify the number of peers allowed to be connected to the private net. If it is set to 0, then no one will be able to connect, which might be desirable in a few scenarios, such as private testing. --rpc: This is used to enable the RPC interface in Geth. --rpcapi: This flag takes a list of APIs to be allowed as a parameter. For example, eth, web3 will enable the Eth and Web3 interface over RPC. --rpcport: This sets up the TCP RPC port; for example: 9999. --rpccorsdomain: This flag specifies the URL that is allowed to connect to the private Geth node and perform RPC operations. cors in --rpccorsdomain means cross-origin resource sharing. --port: This specifies the TCP port that will be used to listen to the incoming connections from other peers. --identity: This flag is a string that specifies the name of a private node. Static nodes If there is a need to connect to a specific set of peers, then these nodes can be added to a file where the chaindata and keystore files are saved. For example, in the ~/etherprivate/ directory. The filename should be static- nodes.json. This is valuable in a private network because this way the nodes can be discovered on a private network. An example of the JSON file is shown as follows: [ "enode:// 44352ede5b9e792e437c1c0431c1578ce3676a87e1f588434aff1299d30325c233c8d426fc5 7a25380481c8a36fb3be2787375e932fb4885885f6452f6efa77f@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:TCP_P ORT" ] Here, xxx is the public IP address and TCP_PORT can be any valid and available TCP port on the system. The long hex string is the node ID. To summarize, we explored Ethereum test networks and how-to setup private Ethereum networks. Learn about cryptography and cryptocurrencies from this book Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition, to build highly secure, decentralized applications and conduct trusted in-app transactions. Everything you need to know about Ethereum Will Ethereum eclipse Bitcoin? The trouble with Smart Contracts
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Richard Gall
17 Jul 2018
6 min read
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5 reasons government should regulate technology

Richard Gall
17 Jul 2018
6 min read
Microsoft's Brad Smith took the unprecedented move last week of calling for government to regulate facial recognition technology. In an industry that has resisted government intervention, it was a bold yet humble step. It was a way of saying "we can't deal with this on our own." There will certainly be people who disagree with Brad Smith. For some the entrepreneurial spirit that is central to tech and startup culture will only be stifled by regulation. But let's be realistic about where we are at the moment - the technology industry has never faced such a crisis of confidence and met with substantial public cynicism. Perhaps government regulation is precisely what we need to move forward. Here are 4 reasons why government should regulate technology.  Regulation can restore accountability and rebuild trust in tech We've said it a lot in 2018, but there really is a significant trust deficit in technology at the moment. From Cambridge Analytica scandal to AI bias, software has been making headlines in a way it never has before. This only cultivates a culture of cynicism across the public. And with talk of automation and job losses, it paints a dark picture of the future. It's no wonder that TV series like Black Mirror have such a hold over the public imagination. Of course, when used properly, technology should simply help solve problems - whether that's better consumer tech or improved diagnoses in healthcare. The problem arises when we find that there our problem-solving innovations have unintended consequences. By regulating, government can begin to think through some of these unintended consequences. But more importantly, trust can only be rebuilt once there is some degree of accountability within the industry. Think back to Zuckerberg's Congressional hearing earlier this year - while the Facebook chief may have been sweating, the real takeaway was that his power and influence was ultimately untouchable. Whatever mistakes he's made were just part and parcel of moving fast and breaking things. An apology and a humble shrug might normally pass, but with regulation, things begin to get serious. Misusing user data? We've got a law for that. Potentially earning money from people who want to undermine western democracy? We've got a law for that. Read next: Is Facebook planning to spy on you through your mobile’s microphones? Government regulation will make the conversation around the uses and abuses of technology more public Too much conversation about how and why we build technology is happening in the wrong places. Well, not the wrong places, just not enough places. The biggest decisions about technology are largely made by some of the biggest companies on the planet. All the dreams about a new democratized and open world are all but gone, as the innovations around which we build our lives come from a handful of organizations that have both financial and cultural clout. As Brad Smith argues, tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are not the place to be having conversations about the ethical implications of certain technologies. He argues that while it's important for private companies to take more responsibility, it's an "inadequate substitute for decision making by the public and its representatives in a democratic republic." He notes that the commercial dynamics are always going to twist conversations. Companies, after all, are answerable to shareholders - only governments are accountable to the public. By regulating, the decisions we make (or don't make) about technology immediately enter into public discourse about the kind of societies we want to live in. Citizens can be better protected by tech regulation... At present, technology often advances in spite of, not because of, people. For all the talk of human-centered design, putting the customer first, every company that builds software is interested in one thing: making money. AI in particular can be dangerous for citizens For example, according to a ProPublica investigation, AI has been used to predict future crimes in the justice system. That's frightening in itself, of course, but it's particularly terrifying when you consider that criminality was falsely predicted at twice the times for black people as white people. Even in the context of social media filters, in which machine learning serves content based on a user's behavior and profile presents dangers to citizens. It gives rise to fake news and dubious political campaigning, making citizens more vulnerable to extreme - and false - ideas. By properly regulating this technology we should immediately have more transparency over how these systems work. This transparency would not only lead to more accountability in how they are built, it also ensures that changes can be made when necessary. Read next: A quick look at E.U.’s pending antitrust case against Google’s Android ...Software engineers need protection too One group haven't really been talked about when it comes to government regulation - the people actually building the software. This a big problem. If we're talking about the ethics of AI, software engineers building software are left in a vulnerable position. This is because the lines of accountability are blurred. Without a government framework that supports ethical software decision making, engineers are left in limbo. With more support for software engineers from government, they can be more confident in challenging decisions from their employers. We need to have a debate about who's responsible for the ethics of code that's written into applications today - is it the engineer? The product manager? Or the organization itself? That isn't going to be easy to answer, but some government regulation or guidance would be a good place to begin. Regulation can bridge the gap between entrepreneurs, engineers and lawmakers Times change. Years ago, technology was deployed by lawmakers as a means of control, production or exploration. That's why the military was involved with many of the innovations of the mid-twentieth century. Today, the gap couldn't be bigger. Lawmakers barely understand encryption, let alone how algorithms work. But there is also naivety in the business world too. With a little more political nous and even critical thinking, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could have predicted the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Maybe Elon Musk would be a little more humble in the face of a coordinated rescue mission. There's clearly a problem - on the one hand, some people don't know what's already possible. For others, it's impossible to consider that something that is possible could have unintended consequences. By regulating technology, everyone will have to get to know one another. Government will need to delve deeper into the field, and entrepreneurs and engineers will need to learn more about how regulation may affect them. To some extent, this will have to be the first thing we do - develop a shared language. It might also be the hardest thing to do, too.
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Packt Editorial Staff
17 Jul 2018
9 min read
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Extending OpenAI Gym environments with Wrappers and Monitors [Tutorial]

Packt Editorial Staff
17 Jul 2018
9 min read
In this article we are going to discuss two OpenAI Gym functionalities; Wrappers and Monitors. These functionalities are present in OpenAI to make your life easier and your codes cleaner. It provides you these convenient frameworks to extend the functionality of your existing environment in a modular way and get familiar with an agent's activity. So, let's take a quick overview of these classes. This article is an extract taken from the book, Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On, Second Edition written by, Maxim Lapan. What are Wrappers? Very frequently, you will want to extend the environment's functionality in some generic way. For example, an environment gives you some observations, but you want to accumulate them in some buffer and provide to the agent the N last observations, which is a common scenario for dynamic computer games, when one single frame is just not enough to get full information about the game state. Another example is when you want to be able to crop or preprocess an image's pixels to make it more convenient for the agent to digest, or if you want to normalize reward scores somehow. There are many such situations which have the same structure: you'd like to “wrap” the existing environment and add some extra logic doing something. Gym provides you with a convenient framework for these situations, called a Wrapper class. How does a wrapper work? The class structure is shown on the following diagram. The Wrapper class inherits the Env class. Its constructor accepts the only argument: the instance of the Env class to be “wrapped”. To add extra functionality, you need to redefine the methods you want to extend like step() or reset(). The only requirement is to call the original method of the superclass. Figure 1: The hierarchy of Wrapper classes in Gym. To handle more specific requirements, like a Wrapper which wants to process only observations from the environment, or only actions, there are subclasses of Wrapper which allow filtering of only a specific portion of information. They are: ObservationWrapper: You need to redefine its observation(obs) method. Argument obs is an observation from the wrapped environment, and this method should return the observation which will be given to the agent. RewardWrapper: Exposes the method reward(rew), which could modify the reward value given to the agent. ActionWrapper: You need to override the method action(act) which could tweak the action passed to the wrapped environment to the agent. Now let’s implement some wrappers To make it slightly more practical, let's imagine a situation where we want to intervene in the stream of actions sent by the agent and, with a probability of 10%, replace the current action with random one. By issuing the random actions, we make our agent explore the environment and from time to time drift away from the beaten track of its policy. This is an easy thing to do using the ActionWrapper class. import gym from typing import TypeVar import random Action = TypeVar('Action') class RandomActionWrapper(gym.ActionWrapper):     def __init__(self, env, epsilon=0.1):         super(RandomActionWrapper, self).__init__(env)         self.epsilon = epsilon Here we initialize our wrapper by calling a parent's __init__ method and saving epsilon (a probability of a random action). def action(self, action):         if random.random() < self.epsilon:             print("Random!")            return self.env.action_space.sample()        return action This is a method that we need to override from a parent's class to tweak the agent's actions. Every time we roll the die, with the probability of epsilon, we sample a random action from the action space and return it instead of the action the agent has sent to us. Please note, by using action_space and wrapper abstractions, we were able to write abstract code which will work with any environment from the Gym. Additionally, we print the message every time we replace the action, just to check that our wrapper is working. In production code, of course, this won't be necessary. if __name__ == "__main__":    env = RandomActionWrapper(gym.make("CartPole-v0")) Now it's time to apply our wrapper. We create a normal CartPole environment and pass it to our wrapper constructor. From here on we use our wrapper as a normal Env instance, instead of the original CartPole. As the Wrapper class inherits the Env class and exposes the same interface, we can nest our wrappers in any combination we want. This is a powerful, elegant and generic solution: obs = env.reset()    total_reward = 0.0    while True:        obs, reward, done, _ = env.step(0)        total_reward += reward        if done:            break    print("Reward got: %.2f" % total_reward) Here is almost the same code, except that every time we issue the same action: 0. Our agent is dull and always does the same thing. By running the code, you should see that the wrapper is indeed working: rl_book_samples/ch02$ python 03_random_actionwrapper.py WARN: gym.spaces.Box autodetected dtype as <class 'numpy.float32'>. Please provide explicit dtype. Random! Random! Random! Random! Reward got: 12.00 If you want, you can play with the epsilon parameter on the wrapper's creation and check that randomness improves the agent's score on average. We should move on and look at another interesting gem hidden inside Gym: Monitor. What is a Monitor? Another class you should be aware of is Monitor. It is implemented like Wrapper and can write information about your agent's performance in a file with optional video recording of your agent in action. Some time ago, it was possible to upload the result of Monitor class' recording to the https://gym.openai.com website and see your agent's position in comparison to other people's results (see thee following screenshot), but, unfortunately, at the end of August 2017, OpenAI decided to shut down this upload functionality and froze all the results. There are several activities to implement an alternative to the original website, but they are not ready yet. I hope this situation will be resolved soon, but at the time of writing it's not possible to check your result against those of others. Just to give you an idea of how the Gym web interface looked, here is the CartPole environment leaderboard: Figure 2: OpenAI Gym web interface with CartPole submissions Every submission in the web interface had details about training dynamics. For example, below is the author's solution for one of Doom's mini-games: Figure 3: Submission dynamics on the DoomDefendLine environment. Despite this, Monitor is still useful, as you can take a look at your agent's life inside the environment. How to add Monitor to your agent So, here is how we add Monitor to our random CartPole agent, which is the only difference (the whole code is in Chapter02/04_cartpole_random_monitor.py). if __name__ == "__main__":    env = gym.make("CartPole-v0")    env = gym.wrappers.Monitor(env, "recording") The second argument we're passing to Monitor is the name of the directory it will write the results to. This directory shouldn't exist, otherwise your program will fail with an exception (to overcome this, you could either remove the existing directory or pass the force=True argument to Monitor class' constructor). The Monitor class requires the FFmpeg utility to be present on the system, which is used to convert captured observations into an output video file. This utility must be available, otherwise Monitor will raise an exception. The easiest way to install FFmpeg is by using your system's package manager, which is OS distribution-specific. To start this example, one of three extra prerequisites should be met: The code should be run in an X11 session with the OpenGL extension (GLX) The code should be started in an Xvfb virtual display You can use X11 forwarding in ssh connection The cause of this is video recording, which is done by taking screenshots of the window drawn by the environment. Some of the environment uses OpenGL to draw its picture, so the graphical mode with OpenGL needs to be present. This could be a problem for a virtual machine in the cloud, which physically doesn't have a monitor and graphical interface running. To overcome this, there is a special “virtual” graphical display, called Xvfb (X11 virtual framebuffer), which basically starts a virtual graphical display on the server and forces the program to draw inside it. That would be enough to make Monitor happily create the desired videos. To start your program in the Xvbf environment, you need to have it installed on your machine (it usually requires installing the package xvfb) and run the special script xvfb-run: $ xvfb-run -s "-screen 0 640x480x24" python 04_cartpole_random_monitor.py [2017-09-22 12:22:23,446] Making new env: CartPole-v0 [2017-09-22 12:22:23,451] Creating monitor directory recording [2017-09-22 12:22:23,570] Starting new video recorder writing to recording/openaigym.video.0.31179.video000000.mp4 Episode done in 14 steps, total reward 14.00 [2017-09-22 12:22:26,290] Finished writing results. You can upload them to the scoreboard via gym.upload('recording') As you may see from the log above, video has been written successfully, so you can peek inside one of your agent's sections by playing it. Another way to record your agent's actions is using ssh X11 forwarding, which uses ssh ability to tunnel X11 communications between the X11 client (Python code which wants to display some graphical information) and X11 server (software which knows how to display this information and has access to your physical display). In X11 architecture, the client and the server are separated and can work on different machines. To use this approach, you need the following: X11 server running on your local machine. Linux comes with X11 server as a standard component (all desktop environments are using X11). On a Windows machine you can set up third-party X11 implementations like open source VcXsrv (available in https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/). The ability to log into your remote machine via ssh, passing –X command line option: ssh –X servername. This enables X11 tunneling and allows all processes started in this session to use your local display for graphics output. Then you can start a program which uses Monitor class and it will display the agent's actions, capturing the images into a video file. To summarize, we discussed the two extra functionalities in an OpenAI Gym; Wrappers and Monitors. To solve complex real world problems in Deep Learning, grab this practical guide Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On, Second Edition today. How Reinforcement Learning works How to implement Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow Top 5 tools for reinforcement learning
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