CS 188: Artificial Intelligence

Kernels and Clustering

Instructors: Dan Klein and Pieter Abbeel --- University of California, Berkeley
[These slides were created by Dan Klein and Pieter Abbeel for CS188 Intro to AI at UC Berkeley. All CS188 materials are available at http://ai.berkeley.edu.]
Case-Based Learning
Non-Separable Data
 Case-Based Reasoning
 Classification from similarity
 Case-based reasoning
 Predict an instance’s label using similar instances

 Nearest-neighbor classification
 1-NN: copy the label of the most similar data point
 K-NN: vote the k nearest neighbors (need a weighting
scheme)
 Key issue: how to define similarity
 Trade-offs: Small k gives relevant neighbors, Large k gives
smoother functions

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~zhuxj/courseproject/knndemo/KNN.html
 Parametric / Non-Parametric
 Parametric models:
 Fixed set of parameters
 More data means better settings
 Non-parametric models:
 Complexity of the classifier increases with data
 Better in the limit, often worse in the non-limit
 (K)NN is non-parametric Truth

2 Examples 10 Examples 100 Examples 10000 Examples

 Nearest-Neighbor Classification
 Nearest neighbor for digits:
 Take new image 0
 Compare to all training images
 Assign based on closest example
1
 Encoding: image is vector of intensities:
2

 What’s the similarity function? 0

 Dot product of two images vectors?

1
 Usually normalize vectors so ||x|| = 1
 min = 0 (when?), max = 1 (when?) 2
Similarity Functions
 Basic Similarity
 Many similarities based on feature dot products:

 If features are just the pixels:

 Note: not all similarities are of this form

 Invariant Metrics
 Better similarity functions use knowledge about vision
 Example: invariant metrics:
 Similarities are invariant under certain transformations
 Rotation, scaling, translation, stroke-thickness…
 E.g:

 16 x 16 = 256 pixels; a point in 256-dim space

 These points have small similarity in R256 (why?)
 How can we incorporate such invariances into our similarities?

This and next few slides adapted from Xiao Hu, UIUC
Rotation Invariant Metrics

 Each example is now a curve in R256

 Rotation invariant similarity:

s’=max s( r( ), r( ))

 E.g. highest similarity between images’

rotation lines
 Template Deformation
 Deformable templates:
 An “ideal” version of each category
 Best-fit to image using min variance
 Cost for high distortion of template
 Cost for image points being far from distorted template
 Used in many commercial digit recognizers

Examples from [Hastie 94]

 A Tale of Two Approaches…
 Nearest neighbor-like approaches
 Can use fancy similarity functions
 Don’t actually get to do explicit learning

 Perceptron-like approaches
 Explicit training to reduce empirical error
 Can’t use fancy similarity, only linear
 Or can they? Let’s find out!
Kernelization
 Perceptron Weights
 What is the final value of a weight wy of a perceptron?
 Can it be any real vector?
 No! It’s built by adding up inputs.

 Can reconstruct weight vectors (the primal representation) from

update counts (the dual representation)
 Dual Perceptron
 How to classify a new example x?

 If someone tells us the value of K for each pair of examples, never need to build the
weight vectors (or the feature vectors)!
 Dual Perceptron
 Start with zero counts (alpha)
 Pick up training instances one by one
 Try to classify x ,
n

 If correct, no change!
 If wrong: lower count of wrong class (for this instance), raise
count of right class (for this instance)
 Kernelized Perceptron
 If we had a black box (kernel) K that told us the dot product of two examples x and x’:
 Could work entirely with the dual representation
 No need to ever take dot products (“kernel trick”)

 Like nearest neighbor – work with black-box similarities

 Downside: slow if many examples get nonzero alpha
 Kernels: Who Cares?
 So far: a very strange way of doing a very simple calculation

 “Kernel trick”: we can substitute any* similarity function in place of the dot
product

 Lets us learn new kinds of hypotheses

* Fine print: if your kernel doesn’t satisfy certain

technical requirements, lots of proofs break. E.g.
convergence, mistake bounds. In practice, illegal
kernels sometimes work (but not always).
Non-Linearity
 Non-Linear Separators
 Data that is linearly separable works out great for linear decision rules:

0 x

 But what are we going to do if the dataset is just too hard?

0 x
 How about… mapping data to a higher-dimensional space:
x2

0 x
This and next few slides adapted from Ray Mooney, UT
 Non-Linear Separators
 General idea: the original feature space can always be mapped to some higher-
dimensional feature space where the training set is separable:

Φ: x → φ(x)
 Some Kernels
 Kernels implicitly map original vectors to higher dimensional spaces, take the dot
product there, and hand the result back

 Linear kernel:

 Quadratic kernel:

 RBF: infinite dimensional representation

 Discrete kernels: e.g. string kernels

 Why Kernels?
 Can’t you just add these features on your own (e.g. add all pairs of features
instead of using the quadratic kernel)?
 Yes, in principle, just compute them
 No need to modify any algorithms
 But, number of features can get large (or infinite)
 Some kernels not as usefully thought of in their expanded representation, e.g. RBF
kernels

 Kernels let us compute with these features implicitly

 Example: implicit dot product in quadratic kernel takes much less space and time
per dot product
 Of course, there’s the cost for using the pure dual algorithms: you need to compute
the similarity to every training datum
 Recap: Classification

 Classification systems:
 Supervised learning
 Make a prediction given evidence
 We’ve seen several methods for this
 Useful when you have labeled data
 Clustering

 Clustering systems:
 Unsupervised learning
 Detect patterns in unlabeled data
 E.g. group emails or search results
 E.g. find categories of customers
 E.g. detect anomalous program executions
 Useful when don’t know what you’re
looking for
 Requires data, but no labels
 Often get gibberish
Clustering
 Clustering
 Basic idea: group together similar instances
 Example: 2D point patterns

 What could “similar” mean?

 One option: small (squared) Euclidean distance
K-Means
 K-Means

 An iterative clustering
algorithm
 Pick K random points as cluster
centers (means)
 Alternate:
 Assign data instances to closest
mean
 Assign each mean to the average of
its assigned points
 Stop when no points’
assignments change
K-Means Example
 K-Means as Optimization
 Consider the total distance to the means:

points means
assignments
 Each iteration reduces phi

 Two stages each iteration:

 Update assignments: fix means c, change assignments a
 Update means: fix assignments a, change means c
 Phase I: Update Assignments

 For each point, re-assign to

closest mean:

 Can only decrease total

distance phi!
 Phase II: Update Means
 Move each mean to the average
of its assigned points:

 Also can only decrease total

distance… (Why?)

 Fun fact: the point y with

minimum squared Euclidean
distance to a set of points {x} is
their mean
 Initialization

 K-means is non-deterministic
 Requires initial means
 It does matter what you pick!
 What can go wrong?

 Various schemes for preventing this

kind of thing: variance-based split /
merge, initialization heuristics
 K-Means Getting Stuck
 A local optimum:

Why doesn’t this work out like the

earlier example, with the purple
taking over half the blue?
 K-Means Questions
 Will K-means converge?
 To a global optimum?

 Will it always find the true patterns in the data?

 If the patterns are very very clear?

 Will it find something interesting?

 Do people ever use it?

 How many clusters to pick?

Agglomerative Clustering
 Agglomerative Clustering
 Agglomerative clustering:
 First merge very similar instances
 Incrementally build larger clusters out of
smaller clusters

 Algorithm:
 Maintain a set of clusters
 Initially, each instance in its own cluster
 Repeat:
 Pick the two closest clusters
 Merge them into a new cluster
 Stop when there’s only one cluster left

 Produces not one clustering, but a family of

clusterings represented by a dendrogram
 Agglomerative Clustering
 How should we define “closest” for clusters with
multiple elements?

 Many options
 Closest pair (single-link clustering)
 Farthest pair (complete-link clustering)
 Average of all pairs
 Ward’s method (min variance, like k-means)

 Different choices create different clustering

behaviors