# A primer on artificial neural networks and convolutions for image data.

Posted by Craig Glastonbury. on August 6, 2017

In this blog, I aim to introduce both artifical and convolutional neural networks. I will motivate why convolutional neural nets are so successful on data that has local structure and dependency (images).

Graphically, an artifical neural network looks as follows:

It is composed of inputs ( $$x_{n}$$), hidden layers $$(y_{j}$$) and an output layer ($$z_{k}$$). Each input value is associated to a weight connected to each in the hidden layer. Each of the neurons in the hidden layer ($$u_{j}$$) are connected to each other neuron in $$u_{j+1}$$.

A way of thinking about a feedforward network or artificial neural network (ANN) is as a glorified composite function: $$f(g(h(x)))$$ of matrix multiplications: $$h(x) = \textbf{W}\textbf{x}$$ that are summed: $$g(x) = \sum\limits_{n=1}^{n}\textbf{W}\textbf{x}$$ and fed as inputs to a non-linear activation function: $$f(x) = \frac{1}{1 + e^{-g(x)}}$$ with each neuron having randomly initialised weights that are optimised to minimise some defined objective function. So each neuron in each layer computes the weighted sum of its inputs. This product is then passed through a non-linearity function. Finally, quite often for classification problems, a final softmax function also known as logistic is used to constrain the output values to $$[0-1]$$ which are readily interpreted as probabilities. This simple model results in a universal classifier and given multiple hidden layers can represent any Boolean function (AND, OR, XOR..) and is in fact, a universal appoximator.

So to predict an unobserved data point, what do we need to learn? We need to learn the weights of the network. Like any linear classification or regression task, given a set of inputs and their labels/values $$(x,y)$$ we want to learn a function $$g(x)$$ that maps $$x \Rightarrow y$$. To do this, we define a cost/objective function ($$C(x)$$) which specifies what we want to achieve, i.e. We want to minimise the difference between the networks predictions and the known labels/values. A simple cost-function is: $$C(y,\hat{y}) = \frac{1}{2}(\|{\hat{y} - y\|)^{2}}$$

So how do we do learn the weights (back propagation)? Fairly simply with some high school calculus, albeit it gets fairly hairy after a single hidden layer. We want to minimise our prediction error, with respect to all of our individual weights. We can do this because our cost function is differentiable: $$\frac{\partial C}{\partial y^{'}} = \hat{y} - y$$ and so are our activation functions: $$\frac{\partial f(x)}{\partial x} = f(x) \cdot (1-f(x))$$ After obtaining a prediction from the feed forward step ($$\hat{y}$$) we compute our prediction error. This error is then back propagated along the network so we can perform weight updates. To update the weights we compute the partial derivative of the cost function with respect to every weight in the network ($$\frac{\partial C}{\partial w_{n}}$$) , thus allowing us to model how the prediction error changes with respect to each of the current network weights. This derivative can be broken down (via the chain rule) as its a composite function, to represent multiple derivatives at every layer and weight throughout the network (see section on back propagation for details).

Once we know how the prediction error changes with respect to the weights (the computed gradient) We update the weights by subtracting a proportion of this gradient. This proportion is yet another hyperparameter, called the learning rate $$\eta$$, which determines how stable and quickly a network learns. Typically, the amount of input data we have is so large, it’s not possible to feed all of it into the network at one go to calculate how the prediction error changes with respect for the weights for all inputs. Multiple options exist, the most commonly used are mini-batch updates or online learning. A mini-batch (mini-batch size being another hyperparameter!) is the number of training examples the network will use for each weight update. To do this, the average gradient for the mini-batch of inputs is used to update the weights - representing how the prediction error varies with this sample of the input space. Online learning on the other hand, uses a single training example for each weight update. Multiple optimisers exist to perform this step (Stochastic gradient descent, RMSprop, Adagrad, AdaDelta, Adam…).

So as a recap, we have the following hyper parameters:

1. Number of neurons
2. Number of layers
3. Learning rate
4. Mini-batch size
5. Optimizer (Can have additional parameters like momentum)

The following choices:

1. Non-linear activation function
2. Cost function
3. Type of weight initialisation (haven’t detailed this, assume randomly initialised weights)
4. Any many more choices I haven’t described (pooling operations, dropout, batch normalisation, weight regularisers...)

## Imaging data and convolutions

So great? Let's apply it to imaging data! Sadly this is a bad idea. Firstly, imaging data is represented as a matrix if it's grayscale or a 3D tensor if it’s RGB. You can represent it as a single vector, a grey scale MNIST digit for example is $$28 \times 28 = 784$$ length vector, and for this problem it’s manageable (and can obtain 96% accuracy classifying 60k digits). If we have a single hidden layer of 10 neurons (one for each digit 0-9) that would be $$28 \times 28 \times 10 = 7,840$$ connection weights! But what about a image of dimensions $$299 \times 299$$? We would need at least 894,010 weights! This doesn’t make any sense, as we are ignoring the fact the input is an image and therefore has local dependencies (parts of an image are more similar to each other in space) and also we are naively flattening the input into a N-dimensional vector (where: $$N = w \times h$$), where w = width, h = height. We need convolutions.

Convolutional neural networks have transformed image recognition, segmentation, localisation and regression tasks (and fairly recently too). The basic idea is instead of having fully connected layers like in ANNs in which each neuron in each layer is connected and has its own weights, we have layers of neurons that share $$N$$ filters. Each filter is defined as an $$n \times m$$ matrix (however RGB images have three colour channels, $$n \times m \times 3$$), which slide across the input image volume, multiplying themselves by the pixel values. The weights of the filter are shared across neurons in each layer, reducing the number of weights required dramatically. Put another way, The filters that slide across the entire image space have the same weights.

A example of a filter and a convolution is demonstrated below:

$$W_{t} = \begin{bmatrix} .001&.1 &.03 &.4 \\ .1&.0.2 &.78 &0.2 \\ 0.2&.15 &.01 &0 \\ 0&0 &.01 &.001 \end{bmatrix}$$

Which evolves (is learned) to become, for example, a square detector: $$W_{t+n} = \begin{bmatrix} .2&.1 &.03 &.4 \\ .1&.89 &.99 &0 \\ 0&.70 &.92 &0 \\ 0&0 &.05 &.1 \end{bmatrix}$$

For the input image: $$I = \begin{bmatrix} 255&0 &0 &0 \\ 0&220 &139 &0 \\ 0&180 &49 &0 \\ 0&0 &0 &255 \end{bmatrix}$$

Hence the matrix dot product results in a square-like activation: $$\begin{bmatrix} .2&.1 &.03 &.4 \\ .1&.89 &.99 &0 \\ 0&.70 &.92 &0 \\ 0&0 &.05 &.1 \end{bmatrix} \cdot \begin{bmatrix} 255&0 &0 &0 \\ 0&220 &139 &0 \\ 0&180 &49 &0 \\ 0&0 &0 &255 \end{bmatrix} = \begin{bmatrix} 51&25.5 &7.65 &102 \\ 22&293.1 &345.68 &0 \\ 18&194.5 &223.28 &0 \\ 0&0 &12.75 &25.5 \end{bmatrix}$$

Visualisation of this process is even more intuitive:

Hence, everytime this particular filter in the network finds a square in the image, it would have a strong activation!

Given a number of filters, an increasingly complex representation of image features can be built up with deeper and deeper networks. The feature map of the first few layers of a CNN tend to learn edge detectors, colour differences, blob detectors etc. Further into the network, more complex representations can be recognised readily and given the weights are themselves images, they can be visualised and (somewhat) understood. Below is an example of a CNN trained on 1000 different image tasks, and its (learned) filters visualised. You can clearly see both low level features early in the network, but also high level representations, including rotation invariances later on (deeper) into the network.

Shallow layer filters:

Deep layer filters

To reduce the parameter space even more, several operations are commonly used in practice when designing CNNs. Pooling operations after each convolutional layer results in only the maximum activation being kept for each filter across the input image (max pooling, it can also be average pooling). This reduces the dimension of the input to the next layer, by: $$\frac{w - f + 2p}{s + 1}$$ Where $$w$$ = image width, $$p$$ = padding. The filter size ($$f$$) and stride ($$s$$) (how many pixels to slide the filter across the image) are again, user defined parameters. So after each convolutional + max pooling layer, the input is reducing in dimension and therefore the number of weights required is also decreasing, reducing the chance of overfitting.

Typically, for image classification, the output layer is a fully-connected layer (Also known as a dense layer) in which the input is flattened into a $$n$$-dimensional vector and passed through (typically) a softmax/logistic function to obtain a class probability. If the dense layer is omitted, the last layer is a convolutional layer and the output is an image (a fully convolutional neural network). CNNs applied to MNIST digits routinely score above $$99$$% accuracy, well above the accuracy of a fully connected feed-forward ANN.

So hopefully I have motivated with this introductory primer, why CNNs are preferred over ANNs for image related tasks and more generally for any task whose input has local dependencies. In future blogs, I will describe the application of common CNN architectures to a Kaggle image classification problem, and in general, practical examples and implementations. In later blogs I'd like to explore how I’m using CNNs in my genetics research, and how they can be used to model multiple biological data sources.

Back propagation derivation:

Back propagation is the method/algorithm used to update neural network weights in order to minimise a cost function, such as the one we defined earlier. In the forward pass stage, the network finishes by predicting a class label (classification) or value (regression) $$\hat{y}$$ and the cost function computes the magnitude of the error made. In back propagation, this error is then 'back-propagated' into the network to update the weights of the network to try and minimise this error. Given all the functions in our network are differentiable, we can compute gradients which tell us the direction of the weight update to do, in order to minimise the error.

The derivation starts by computing the derivative of our cost function and our non-linear activation function: $$\frac{\partial C}{\partial y} = \hat{y} - y$$ $$\frac{\partial f(x)}{\partial x} = f(x) \cdot (1-f(x))$$ The aim is to work out, how the cost function error changes with respect to the network weights, this can be decomposed using the chain rule into three partial derivatives: $$\frac{\partial C}{\partial w} = \frac{\partial C}{\partial o} \frac{\partial o}{\partial a} \frac{\partial a}{\partial w}$$ Where: $$g(x) = \sum\limits_{n=1}^{n}\textbf{W}\textbf{x}$$ $$a = \frac{1}{1 + e^{-g(x)}}$$ What this means is, we can understand how the cost function changes with respect to each individual weight, by computing how the output changes, with respect to the weighted-input activations and how the activations change with respect to the weights. Clearly it's called back propogation as these gradients are being computed going back from the output to the input layer.

The last partial $$\frac{\partial a}{\partial w}$$ only depends on $$x$$ given $$g(x)$$ above so it's simply: $$\frac{\partial a}{\partial w} = x$$ We have already defined $$\frac{\partial o}{\partial a}$$ above as it is simply the derivative of the activation function : $$\frac{\partial o}{\partial a} = \frac{\partial f(x)}{\partial x} = f(x) \cdot (1-f(x))$$ Finally we are left with $$\frac{\partial C}{\partial o}$$ which if the neuron activation is in the output layer it is easily given by the derivative of the cost function defined above. This is because only a single weight connects it to a particular output. However, if we are in a hidden layer, in a deep network, we have to consider the cost function error to all neurons this weight can lead to (see diagram at start), so we chain rule again!: $$\frac{\partial C}{\partial o_{j}} = \sum\limits_{i \in I} \frac{\partial C}{\partial o_{i}} \frac{\partial o_{i}}{\partial a_{i}} \frac{\partial a_{i}}{\partial o_{j}}$$ where $$\frac{\partial a_{i}}{\partial o_{j}}$$ is simply the weight $$w$$.

So we have the following function if we are in the output layer: $$\frac{\partial o}{\partial a} \frac{\partial a}{\partial w} = f(x) \cdot (1-f(x)) (\hat{y} - y)(y)$$ or if we are in an arbitrary hidden layer: $$\frac{\partial O}{\partial w_{kj}} = - \sum\limits_{i \in I} \frac{\partial C}{\partial o_{i}} \frac{\partial o_{i}}{\partial a_{i}}w f(x) \cdot (1-f(x)) (\hat{y} - y)(y)$$ Notice the minus given we want to minimise the cost. So we have the gradient, how much of it do we want to update the weights by? By introducing a scalar multiple, the learning rate, $$\eta$$ we can add a given fraction of the gradient to the weights. $$\frac{\partial O}{\partial w_{kj}} = - \eta\sum\limits_{i \in I} \frac{\partial C}{\partial o_{i}} \frac{\partial o_{i}}{\partial a_{i}}w f(x) \cdot (1-f(x)) (\hat{y} - y)(y)$$ And voilà! That's why differentiable functions are used. Many sexier ways of doing this now exist (multiple optimisers exist, not just stocastic graident descent), such as the use of momentum and other adaptive learning algorithms (ADAM, Adagrad..) that basically keep a history of weight updates to inform the next decision.