I am going through a Binary Classification tutorial using PyTorch and here, the last layer of the network is torch.Linear() with just one neuron. (Makes Sense) which will give us a single neuron. as pred=network(input_batch)
After that the choice of Loss function is loss_fn=BCEWithLogitsLoss() (which is numerically stable than using the softmax first and then calculating loss) which will apply Softmax function to the output of last layer to give us a probability. so after that, it'll calculate the binary cross entropy to minimize the loss.
loss=loss_fn(pred,true)
My concern is that after all this, the author used torch.round(torch.sigmoid(pred))
Why would that be? I mean I know it'll get the prediction probabilities in the range [0,1] and then round of the values with default threshold of 0.5.
Isn't it better to use the sigmoid once after the last layer within the network rather using a softmax and a sigmoid at 2 different places given it's a binary classification??
Wouldn't it be better to just
out = self.linear(batch_tensor)
return self.sigmoid(out)
and then calculate the BCE loss and use the argmax() for checking accuracy??
I am just curious that can it be a valid strategy?
You seem to be thinking of the binary classification as a multi-class classification with two classes, but that is not quite correct when using the binary cross-entropy approach. Let's start by clarifying the goal of the binary classification before looking at any implementation details.
Technically, there are two classes, 0 and 1, but instead of considering them as two separate classes, you can see them as opposites of each other. For example, you want to classify whether a StackOverflow answer was helpful or not. The two classes would be "helpful" and "not helpful". Naturally, you would simply ask "Was the answer helpful?", the negative aspect is left off, and if that wasn't the case, you could deduce that it was "not helpful". (Remember, it's a binary case, there is no middle ground).
Therefore, your model only needs to predict a single class, but to avoid confusion with the actual two classes, that can be expressed as: The model predicts the probability that the positive case occurs. In context of the previous example: What is the probability that the StackOverflow answer was helpful?
Sigmoid gives you values in the range [0, 1], which are the probabilities. Now you need to decide when the model is confident enough for it to be positive by defining a threshold. To make it balanced, the threshold is 0.5, therefore as long as the probability is greater than 0.5 it is positive (class 1: "helpful") otherwise it's negative (class 0: "not helpful"), which is achieved by rounding (i.e. torch.round(torch.sigmoid(pred))).
After that the choice of Loss function is
loss_fn=BCEWithLogitsLoss()(which is numerically stable than using the softmax first and then calculating loss) which will applySoftmaxfunction to the output of last layer to give us a probability.Isn't it better to use the sigmoid once after the last layer within the network rather using a softmax and a sigmoid at 2 different places given it's a binary classification??
BCEWithLogitsLoss applies Sigmoid not Softmax, there is no Softmax involved at all. From the nn.BCEWithLogitsLoss documentation:
This loss combines a Sigmoid layer and the BCELoss in one single class. This version is more numerically stable than using a plain Sigmoid followed by a BCELoss as, by combining the operations into one layer, we take advantage of the log-sum-exp trick for numerical stability.
By not applying Sigmoid in the model you get a more numerically stable version of the binary cross-entropy, but that means you have to apply the Sigmoid manually if you want to make an actual prediction outside of training.
[...] and use the
argmax()for checking accuracy??
Again, you're thinking of the multi-class scenario. You only have a single output class, i.e. output has size [batch_size, 1]. Taking argmax of that, will always give you 0, because that is the only available class.