# Monthly Archives: January 2013

## Getting started with the Semantic Web

I’ve been getting started with a new project, for which I need to get up to speed on this whole semantic web/linked data business. I was as let down by the results of my websearching as I was elevated by the tagged-and-up-voted material on Stack Overflow. Here is a little link library:

Why am I doing this? Because supercomputer company Cray, Inc. has built a new type of supercomputer which is optimized for graph searching, and searching RDF with SPARQL is a low-overhead way to use it. And they are running a contest for scientists to do something interesting with their new tool, in which I am a contestant.

Filed under machine learning

## Classic EM in Python: Warm-up problem of 197 animals in PyMC

The classic paper on the EM algorithm begins with a little application in multinomial modeling:

Rao (1965, pp. 368-369) presents data in which 197 animals are distributed multinomially into four categories, so that the observed data consist of $y = (y_1, y_2, y_3, y_4) = (125, 18, 20, 34).$

A genetic model for the population specifies cell probabilities $\left(\frac12 + \frac14\pi, \frac14(1-\pi), \frac14(1 -\pi), \frac14\pi\right)$ for some $\pi$ with $0\leq \pi \leq 1$.

Solving this analytically sounds very much like a 1960’s pastime to me (answer: $\pi = \frac{15 + \sqrt{53809}}{394})$, and a modern computer with PyMC can make short work of numerically approximating this maximum likelihood estimation. It takes no more than this:

import pymc as mc, numpy as np

pi = mc.Uniform('pi', 0, 1)
y = mc.Multinomial('y', n=197,
p=[.5 + .25*pi, .25*(1-pi), .25*(1-pi), .25*pi],
value=[125, 18, 20, 34], observed=True)

mc.MAP([pi,y]).fit()
print pi.value


But the point is to warm-up, not to innovate. The EM way is to introduce a latent variable $x = (x_1, x_2, x_3, x_4, x_5)$ and set $y_1 = x_1+x_2, y_2=x_3, y_3=x_4, y_4=x_5$, and work with a multinomial distribution for $x$ that induces the multinomial distribution above on $y$. The art is determining a good latent variable, mapping, and distribution, and “good” is meant in terms of the computation it yields:

import pymc as mc, numpy as np

pi = mc.Uniform('pi', 0, 1)

@mc.stochastic
def x(n=197, p=[.5, .25*pi, .25*(1-pi), .25*(1-pi), .25*pi], value=[125.,0.,18.,20.,34.]):
return mc.multinomial_like(np.round_(value), n, p)

@mc.observed
def y(x=x, value=[125, 18, 20, 34]):
if np.allclose([x[0]+x[1], x[2], x[3], x[4]], value):
return 0
else:
return -np.inf


It is no longer possible to get a good fit to an mc.MAP object for this model (why?), but EM does not need to. The EM approach is to alternate between two steps:

• Update $x$ (E-step, because it is set to its conditional expectation based on the current value of $\pi$)
• Update $\pi$ (M-step, because it is chosen to maximize the likelihood for the current value of $x$)

This is simply implemented in PyMC and quick to get the goods:

def E_step():
x.value = [125 * .5 / (.5 + .25*pi.value), 125 * .25*pi.value / (.5 + .25*pi.value), 18, 20, 34]
def M_step():
pi.value = (x.value[1] + 34.) / (x.value[1] + 34. + 18. + 20.)
for i in range(5):
print 'iter %2d: pi=%0.4f, X=%s' %(i, pi.value, x.value)
E_step()
M_step()


It is not fair to compare speeds without making both run to the same tolerance, but when that is added EM is 2.5 times faster. That could be important sometimes, I suppose.

1 Comment

Filed under statistics

## What is “hello, world” for statistical graphics?

Tell me on cross-validated.

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Filed under dataviz

## Rewind Data Augmentation to EM

The original paper on Data Augmentation (DA) got me thinking it was time to have a careful look at the original paper on EM. These are both highly cited papers, and Google scholar says the DA paper has been cited 2538 times (a lot!) and the EM paper has been cited 31328 times (is that possible?).

EM (which stands of Expectation-Maximization) is something I have heard about a lot, and, as an algorithm, it is even something I understood when I read a blog post relating it to a clustering algorithm that I now cannot find (maybe on the Geomblog). The arguments from the EM to DA paper, which I read recently, makes me think that there is something more than the algorithm going on here. In this later paper, Tanner and Wong identify the importance of Section 4 of the EM paper, which provides a collection of example applications of their EM algorithm. Is there something about this way of thinking that is even more important than the algorithm itself?

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Filed under statistics