# Dreaming up new dresses via AI and game theory

Level: Beginner, circa 2014

Or I can haz fashion.

Here are some pretty pictures to motivate you

These are all ‘dreamt’ by a neural net. OK, now for the old bait and switch. Let’s talk Deep Learning for a second.

For the uninitiated, traditional machine learning works something like this. Say you are trying to predict housing prices using square footage. You have relevant data with those fields. So you plot the two and see if there appears to be a relationship.

Looks like there is. Usually, you start with a simple algorithm to learn that relationship. Let’s say we used linear for starters, which gets us –

price ~ 6.6 * lotsize + 34,136

Then you look at the errors, and you aren’t satisfied. Maybe this isn’t a straight line after all. Often the next thing to try is to transform the input parameters to make them look linear. So a typical transform in the above case would be natural log. Now the relationship looks like this

and equation

price ~ 37,660 * log(lotsize) - 250,728

And you are rewarded with better results. These sort of transforms are the bread and butter of traditional machine learning. But of course we prefer a fancier term, feature engineering.

But what are you really doing? You are transforming the input space to make the simple line fit. You still want to fit a line, but are mangling the input plane to make it go through that line. It’s like holding your breath to shimmy into a pair of jeans you have owned for longer than you should.

What if you could let the model transform the input all it needs, and build on top of the last transform one step at a time, to put the data in the right shape for your classifier? That’s exactly what deep learning does for you. And at the end, the last layer is a simple linear classifier.

This isn’t exactly a new concept, Bayesians already do this. But they don’t have a fast enough algorithm yet and the models are a bit too custom – making it hard to generalize to a new problem.

We are going to talk about dresses, so the right data format happens to be photos. To a computer, that is a matrix of numbers of height x width x 3 channels (Red, Green, Blue).

Sidenote: The above representation is not perfect. It is important to note that photo format has limitations. In real life, you don’t have borders (padding), you can move your eyes and see further. Borders are a limitation of the medium. Real vision is a fluid and complex thing (mind fills in details, nose is invisible, etc). Photos are just a good approximation of that.

Convolution transforms are designed specifically to learn from this format. It’s job is to transform the input space spatially. So lower layers do versions of edge detection, blurring, etc. And higher layers begin to understand that the combination of which edges means a collar or a sleeve. Finally, linear classifier on top as before to figure out which dress it is. As before, the model learns which convolutions to do in order to achieve the final result. It is not taught edge detection specifically but it will decide to detect a particular edge if it makes it easy for the linear classifier.

Deep learning is responsible for some impressive results. However, those impressive results require lots of data. If you aren’t so lucky, there still are a few options.

One option is transfer learning. The basic idea is that you train the network to learn to distinguish between objects on a large dataset. Then freeze the early layers and train just the last few layers very slowly on your data for it to understand how the same corners it learnt by distinguishing cats and dogs. can be used to piece together a dress.

In my experience, this tends to overfit. In other words, it doesn’t work as well for new (unseen) data. And we don’t get those advertised 90+% accuracy.

So what else can we do?

Here is a crazy idea (thanks Ian Goodfellow, 2014). Why don’t we generate our own data?

There are other data augmentation techniques (adding noise to existing input, Bayesian techniques and others) but I was looking for an excuse to generate sharp pictures of dresses anyway. So that’s what we will do.

Our net that distinguishes between classes is called a discriminator (missed opportunity to call it connoisseur). For now, we will assume all it does is say whether or not what it sees is a dress.

The idea is to invert this discriminator to generate from noise. This is called a generator. This involves inverting the convolution to a deconv layer. The loss is also negative of the Discriminator loss.

We pitch the two nets against each other  but with an odd setup. In the first half of the game, we sample real data and the discriminator tries to say that this is a dress. In the second half, the generator takes in random noise and comes up with a new dress. We then sample and feed that to our discriminator that tries to say that this is not a real dress. We then back propagate the errors through the whole thing.

Over time the discriminator tries to create fakes to fool the generator. And generator tries to guard against this treachery. This goes on till they reach an equilibrium. At this point the discriminator can no longer tell real from fake dresses (50/50). Yes guys, this was the time for game theory.

We now have two nets – a much better discriminator than before because it trained on a lot more data. And a generator that can generate decent fakery.

But you ask, I thought this was ‘sane’ alytics. Where is the practical stuff!

Well, the discriminator has been fed a steady diet of fake dresses and is better at telling real from fake than when it started. It overfits less because it has trained on more data. And sure, we get the generator for free. The images in this article are from the baseline (Alexnetish) generator but theoretically using something better like Resnet should work even better.

Here are some original sample pictures that we had for input

Here are some results from the generator after training.

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And let’s make the distinction from adding noise to data. This is generating data from noise. See this transition to understand how it evolves over training iterations.

The discriminator learns to distinguish between this being a dress vs any fake samples. The generator plays the game and is still generating not very dress like samples at 500 iterations

And after 130,000 iterations, it can generate something like this

Here is a snippet of how it learns

While not perfect, this is impressive from two years ago when this was first introduced.

But wait, there is more. Folks have been able to generate new bedrooms, improve resolution of a photo (CSI Enhance!), make folks with RBF smile, predict what happens in the next frame of the video (compress) and generated colorful birds from text.

We don’t yet know everything GANs can do. But it is already proving to be a useful tool.

Want to generate on your own data? See DCGAN code from Facebook here and (more efficient!) WassersteinGAN here.

Want to learn more? Here is a deeper dive on different kinds of GANs.

This is a rapidly evolving field, so new papers come out all the time. We aren’t too far from dreaming up different dresses for everyone’s personal style and fit, at scale.

# Human in A.I. loop

A.I is out to get us. It will replace us all.. or maybe, it’s just another tool that we will get used to like calculators or iPhones.

If you are reading this post, chances are you are familiar with Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Neural nets.  I am not going to be pedantic and use them interchangeably.

If you don’t care for any of that, feel free to read this article as “Human in Machine Learning loop”. Or how to debug beyond metrics (smell a pattern in this blog?).

Let’s start with a practical example of something I built at Rent The Runway. RTR rents out high end designer dresses for a mass market price.  We have a lot of folks who love us. And they are not shy about tagging us on their Instagram posts.

Wouldn’t it be great if  we could show those Instagram photos on our product pages and help our customers find fashion inspiration through these high quality shots?

We already have photo reviews that our customers post on our site showing us how they wore it. It is a highly used feature for visitors. But customers have to submit to us directly for that to work.

My mind was set. It had to be done.

But how? While it is true that they tag #renttherunway or #myRTR, they don’t tag the exact dress name.

Obviously I brought a tank to a knife fight and built a convolutional neural net. This A.I that would look at these natural images and classify them as one of the thousands of dresses that we have currently on site. I named it DeepDress, but probably should have called it Dress2Vec… too late now. I used Torch to train and Benjamin’s waffle package to create an internal API that I can hit from any language. Since I have little patience, I used NVIDIA GPUs to speed up the training and tests.

I got all 30k Instagram posts at the time and I stored the metadata in Mongo (I know, I know but it’s great for unstructured).

Here is the code for that –

Then I looped through them and called my API to identify the dress and saved that.

Mission accomplished and moving on.

Well my friends, if that were the case, I wouldn’t have written this post. So here is how a production system is really built.

One problem I knew ahead of time is that our inventory changes over time as we retire older styles and acquire new ones. DeepDress did not know of some very new dresses and none of the old ones. Old ones aren’t an issue since we wouldn’t want to display them anyway but there is a cold start problem that I hadn’t solved at the time.

Another issue is that I had trained the algorithm only on our dresses. While that is our bread and butter, we also rent bags, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, activewear, etc. I always start simple for v1. This means there were bound to be things classified incorrectly as the convnet sweats bullets trying to figure out which dress that Diane Von Furstenberg minaudiere looks like. We could use a lower bound on the probability of most likely class, but what should that threshold be?

Besides the above red flags, even if the identification were 100% accurate (ha), it would make sense to have someone in RTR verify that the image is in fact, fit for display on our site and consistent with our branding.

What we need to build is a gamified quick truther thingy that all our 200 employees in main office can log in during their lunch break and rate a few items. It better be interesting and fast because they have important things to do. It wouldn’t hurt to get verification of the same image from a few different folks so we build our confidence. Then there are nice to haves like responsive, reactive, and other fancy words that mean fun to use.

I could have built this in ruby or react or something that pleases my web developer friends. But I am a data scientist who is very familiar with R, so I built another shiny little thing in an hour. I am in good company. My friend Rajiv also loves understanding his A.I. creations in R.

Rough outline on what we want –

2. Retrieve Instagram Images from that seed backwards
3. User has to choose one of N options
4. Upon choice, store the result back in Mongo
5. Automatically move on to the next one (shiny is responsive)
6. Every day, a job would restart the server, freezing what was done and starting on the next batch, moving back in time.

First we set up the global.R to get the relevant Instagram posts we will verify –

Then we create ui.R that my colleagues will see –

Finally we need to hook up some logic –

And shiny does the rest. Here is what this looks like in practice –

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This was so successful that in the two weeks the POC was up, we had 3,281 verifications. Some colleagues (thanks Sam/Sandy) did as many as 350+ verifications over that time. It should be pointed out that besides an announcement email, there was no other push to do this.

We found that there were a significant number of posts that were not even dresses. I guess our fashionistas really love us. This is not a problem I knew about going into building this and was certainly not expecting high probability scores for the suggested class in some cases. It helped me fix it by adding a class for “not a dress” with actual training data (and noise).

Most importantly, we answered important questions like what this cute puppy wore.

And if that isn’t the most satisfying result, I don’t know what is.

We have some amazing employees (hi Sam/Liz/Amanda) who have can remember single dress on site. For mere mortals, matching a photo to something we have is nearly impossible.

DeepDress A.I toiled through all 30k photos and narrowing each down to 3 possible choices from our thousands. But it is humans who really save the day. As a result we have a golden database of Instagram photos mapped to exact product that took advantage of both their strengths. Look at that – humans and A.I can play together.

Hopefully this example demonstrates why it is useful to use your resources (company employees) to check your systems beyond the metrics before releasing things in the wild. I end up using shiny a lot for these sort of internal demos because I slice and dice the results in R. But do them in whatever you are comfortable in and aggressively re-evaluate those choices should they reach production. For example, we will rewrite the truther in Ruby now that it will be production to comply with our other standards. For demos, I have no emotional attachment to any language (close your ears C++).

I’m sure you guessed that could not have been the only reason I built DeepDress and you would be right. But today’s not a day to talk about that.

# Matrix factorization

Or fancy words that mean very simple things.

At the heart of most data mining, we are trying to represent complex things in a simple way. The simpler you can explain the phenomenon, the better you understand. It’s a little zen – compression is the same as understanding.

Warning: Some math ahead.. but stick with it, it’s worth it.

When faced with a matrix of very large number of users and items, we look to some classical ways to explain it. One favorite technique is Singular Value Decomposition, affectionately nicknamed SVD. This says that we can explain any matrix $A$ in the form

$A= USV^T$

Here

$A$ is of size num_users and num_products

$U$ is of size num_users and num_users

$S$ is a rectangular diagonal matrix of size num_users and num_products

$V$ is of size num_products and num_products

This is cool because the numbers in the diagonal $S$ are decreasing values of variance (roughly speaking). So the first number captures the most variance in $A$, the second, less so, and so on, till all the numbers put together capture all the variance of $A$.

You see where this is going. If we are comfortable with explaining only 10% of the variance, we can do so by only taking some of these values. We can then compress $A$.

The other nice thing about all this is eigenvectors (which those roughly represent) are orthogonal. In other words, they are perpendicular to each other and there aren’t any mixed effects. If you don’t understand this paragraph, don’t worry. Keep on.

Consider that above can be rewritten as

$A = U\sqrt{S}\sqrt{S}V^T$

or –

$Y = X \Theta^T$

If $X$ is of size num_users and num_categories and $\Theta$ is of size num_products and num_categories, then we have a decent model that approximates $A$ into $Y$. $Y$ is now called a low rank approximation of $A$, or truncated SVD.

It is important to understand what these matrices represent. $X$ is the representation of users in some low dimension space (say romance, action). And $\Theta$ is the representation of products in the very same low dimension space. However, we don’t know exactly what these factors mean. They could be romance/action or they could NYC/Dallas. This is also why this method is sometimes called Latent Factor Matrix Factorization.. wow, quite a mouthful.

In my chapter in the book Data Mining Applications with R, I go over different themes of matrix factorization models (and other animals as well). But for now, I am only going to cover the basic one that works very well in practice. And yes, won the Netflix prize.

There is one problem with our formulation – SVD is only defined for dense matrices. And our matrix is usually sparse.. very sparse. Netflix’s challenge matrix was 1% dense, or 99% sparse. In my job at Rent the Runway, it is only 2% dense. So what will happen to our beautiful formula?

Machine learning is sort of a bastard science. We steal from beautiful formulations, complex biology, probability, Hoefding’s inequality, and derive rules of thumb from it. Or as an artist would say – get inspiration.

So here is what we are going to do. We are going to ignore all the null values when we solve this model. Our cost function now becomes

$J = R ( Y - X \Theta^T)^2 + \lambda (||X||^2 + ||\Theta||^2)$

Here $Y - X\Theta^T$ is the difference between observed data and our prediction. $R$ is simply a matrix with 1 where we have a value and 0 where we do not. Multiplying these two we are only considering the cost when we observe a value. We are using L2 regularization of magnitude $\lambda$. We are going to divide by 2 to make all other math easier. The cost is relative so it doesn’t matter.

$J = \frac{1}{2} R ( Y - X \Theta^T)^2 +\frac{1}{2} \lambda (||X||^2 + ||\Theta||^2)$

Using this our gradients become –

$\frac{\partial}{\partial{X}} = R (Y - X \Theta^T) \Theta + \lambda ||X||$

$\frac{\partial}{\partial{\Theta}} = R (Y - X \Theta^T)^T X+ \lambda ||\Theta||$

If we were wanted to minimize the cost function, we can move in the direction opposite to the gradient at each step, getting new estimates for $X$ and $\Theta$ each time.

This looks easy enough. One last thing. We now have what we want to minimize, but how do we do it? R provides many optimization tools. There is a whole CRAN page on it. For our purpose we will use out of the box optim() function. This allows us to access a fast optimization method L-BFGS-B. It’s not only fast, but also doesn’t take too memory intensive which is desirable in our case.

We need to give it the cost function and the gradient that we have above. It also expects one gradient function, so we need to unroll it out to do both our gradients.

This is great, we can iterate a few times to approximate users and items into some small number of categories, then predict using that.

I have coded this into another package recommenderlabrats.

Let’s see how this does in practice against what we already have. I am going to use the same scheme as last post to evaluate these predictions against some general ones. I am not using Item Based Collaborative Filtering because it is very slow

It does pretty well. It does better than POPULAR and is equivalent to UBCF. So why use this over UBCF or the other way round?

This is where things get interesting. This algorithm can be sped up quite a lot and more importantly, parallelised. It uses way less memory than UBCF and is more scalable.

Also, if you have already calculated $\Theta$, i.e. your items in some lower dimensional space, you might get away with just putting the users in that space. Now things become really fast because all you have to do is keep $\Theta$ fixed and figure out $X$.

I have gone ahead and implemented a version where we just calculate $\Theta$, I leave it to you as an exercise to modify the code above to test this out as well. The algorithm is called RSVD_SPLIT. Also feel free to try other values of categories, lambda and maxit and see how things change.

On the other hand, the latent categories are very hard to explain. For UBCF you can say this user is similar to these other users. For IBCF, one can say this item that the user picked is similar to these other items. But that not the case for this particular flavor of matrix factorization. We will re-evaluate these limitations later.

The hardest part for a data scientist is to disassociate themselves from their dear models and watch them objectively in the wild. Our simulations and metrics are always imperfect but necessary to optimize. You might see your favorite model crash and burn. And a lot of times simple linear regression will be king. The job is to objectively measure them, tune them and see which one performs better in your scenario.

Good luck.

# Testing recommender systems in R

Recommender systems are pervasive. You have encountered them while buying a book on barnesandnoble, renting a movie on Netflix, listening to music on Pandora, to finding the bar visit (FourSquare). Saar for Revolution Analytics, had demonstrated how to get started with some techniques for R here.

We will build some using Michael Hahsler’s excellent package – recommenderlab. But to build something we have to learn to recognize when it is good. For this reason we will talk about some metrics quickly –

– RMSE  (Root Mean Squared Error) : Here we measure far were real ratings from the ones we predicted. Mathematically, we can write it out as

$RMSE = \sqrt\frac{\sum_{(i,j) \in \kappa}(r_{(i,j)} - \hat {r}_{(i,j)})^2}{|\kappa|}$

where $\kappa$ is the set of all user-item pairings $(i, j)$ for which we have a predicted rating $\hat r_{(i,j)}$ and a known rating $r_{(i,j)}$ which was not used to learn the recommendation model.

Here at sane.a.lytics, I will talk about when an analysis makes sense and when it doesn’t. RMSE is a great metric if you are measuring how good your predicted ratings are. But if you want to know how many people clicked on your recommendation, I have a different metric for you.

– Precision/Recall/f-value/AUC: Precision tells us how good the predictions are. In other words, how many were a hit.

Recall tells us how many of the hits were accounted for, or the coverage of the desirable outcome.

Precision and recall usually have an inverse relationship. This becomes an even bigger issue for rare issue phenomenon like recommendations. To tackle this problem, we will use f-value. This is nothing but the harmonic mean of precision and recall.

Another popular measure is AUC. This is roughly analogous. We will go ahead and use this for now for our comparisons of recommendation effectiveness.

– ARHR (Hit Rate): Karypis likes this metric.

$ARHR = \frac{1}{\#users} \sum_{i=1}^{\#hits} \frac{1}{p_i}$

where $p$ is the position of the item in a ranked list.

OK, on to the fun stuff.

They are a few different ways to build a recommender system

Collaborative Filtering : If my friend Jimmy tells me that he liked the movie “Drive”, I might like it too since we have similar tastes. However if Paula tells me she liked “The Notebook”, I might avoid it. This is called UBCF (User-based collaborative filtering). Another way to think about it is that this is soft-clustering. We find Users with similar tastes (neighbourhood) and use their preferences to build yours.

Another flavour of this is IBCF (Item Based Collaborative Filtering). If I watched “Darjeeling Limited”, I might be inclined to watch “The Royal Tannenbaums” but not necessarily “Die Hard”. This is because the first two are more similar in the users who have watched/rated them. This is a rather simple to compute as all we need is the covariance between products to find out what this might be.

Let’s compare both approaches on some real data (thanks R)

It seems like UBCF did better than IBCF. Then why would you use IBCF? The answer lies is when and how are you generating recommendations. UBCF saves the whole matrix and then generates the recommendation at predict by finding the closest user. IBCF saves only k closest items in the matrix and doesn’t have to save everything. It is pre-calculated and predict simply reads off the closest items.

Predictably, RANDOM is the worst but perhaps surprisingly it seems, its hard to beat POPULAR. I guess we are not so different, you and I.

In the next post I will go over some other algorithms that are out there and how to use them in R. I would also recommend reading Michael’s documentation on recommenderlab for more details.

Also added this to r-bloggers. Please check it out for more R goodies.