I have mostly used ANNs for classification and only recently started to try them out for modeling continuous variables. As an exercise I generated a simple set of (x, y) pairs where y = x^2 and tried to train an ANN to learn this quadratic function.
The ANN model:
This ANN has 1 input node (ie. x), 2 hidden layers each with 2 nodes in each layer, and 1 output node. All four hidden nodes use the non-linear tanh activation function and the output node has no activation function (since it is regression).
The Data:
For the training set I randomly generated 100 numbers between (-20, 20) for x and computed y=x^2. For the testing set I randomly generated 100 numbers between (-30, 30) for x and also computed y=x^2. I then transformed all x so that they are centered around 0 and their min and max are approximately around -1.5 and 1.5. I also transformed all y similarly but made their min and max about -0.9 and 0.9. This way, all the data falls within that mid range of the tanh activation function and not way out at the extremes.
The Problem:
After training the ANN in Keras, I am seeing that only the right half of the polynomial function is being learned, and the left half is completely flat. Does anyone have any ideas why this may be happening? I tried playing around with different scaling options, as well as hidden layer specifications but no luck on that left side.
Thanks!
Attached is the code I used for everything and the image shows the plot of the scaled training x vs the predicted y. As you can see, only half of the parabola is recovered.
import numpy as np, pandas as pd
from keras.models import Sequential
from keras.layers import Dense
from keras.wrappers.scikit_learn import KerasRegressor
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
seed = 10
n = 100
X_train = np.random.uniform(-20, 20, n)
Y_train = X_train ** 2
X_test = np.random.uniform(-30, 30, n)
Y_test = X_test ** 2
#### Scale the data
x_cap = max(abs(np.array(list(X_train) + list(X_test))))
y_cap = max(abs(np.array(list(Y_train) + list(Y_test))))
x_mean = np.mean(np.array(list(X_train) + list(X_test)))
y_mean = np.mean(np.array(list(Y_train) + list(Y_test)))
X_train2 = (X_train-x_mean) / x_cap
X_test2 = (X_test-x_mean) / x_cap
Y_train2 = (Y_train-y_mean) / y_cap
Y_test2 = (Y_test-y_mean) / y_cap
X_train2 = X_train2 * (1.5 / max(X_train2))
Y_train2 = Y_train2 * (0.9 / max(Y_train2))
# define base model
def baseline_model1():
# create model
model1 = Sequential()
model1.add(Dense(2, input_dim=1, kernel_initializer='normal', activation='tanh'))
model1.add(Dense(2, input_dim=1, kernel_initializer='normal', activation='tanh'))
model1.add(Dense(1, kernel_initializer='normal'))
# Compile model
model1.compile(loss='mean_squared_error', optimizer='adam')
return model1
np.random.seed(seed)
estimator1 = KerasRegressor(build_fn=baseline_model1, epochs=100, batch_size=5, verbose=0)
estimator1.fit(X_train2, Y_train2)
prediction = estimator1.predict(X_train2)
plt.scatter(X_train2, prediction)
You should also consider adding more width to you hidden layer. I changed from 2 to 5 and got a very good fit. I also used more epochs as suggested from rvinas
