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Suppose there are three variables that take on discrete integer values, say w1 = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12}, w2 = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12}, and w3 = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12}. The task is to pick one value from each set such that the resulting triplet minimizes some (black box, computationally expensive) cost function.
I've tried the surrogate optimization in Matlab but I'm not sure it is appropriate. I've also heard about simulated annealing but found no implementation applied to this instance.
Which algorithm, apart from exhaustive search, can solve this combinatorial optimization problem?
Any help would be much appreciated.
The requirement/benefit of Simulated Annealing (SA), is that the objective surface is somewhat smooth, that is, we can be close to a solution.
For a completely random spiky surface- you might as well do a random search
If it is anything smooth, or even sometimes, it makes sense to try SA.
The idea is that (sometimes) changing only 1 of the 3 values, we have little effect on out blackbox function.
Here is a basic example to do this with Simulated Annealing, using frigidum in Python
import numpy as np
w1 = np.array( [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12] )
w2 = np.array( [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12] )
w3 = np.array( [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12] )
W = np.array([w1,w2,w3])
LENGTH = 12
I define a black-box using the Rastrigin function.
def rastrigin_function_n( x ):
"""
N-dimensional Rastrigin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastrigin_function
x_i is in [-5.12, 5.12]
"""
A = 10
n = x.shape[0]
return A*n + np.sum( x**2- A*np.cos(2*np.pi * x) )
def black_box( x ):
"""
Transform from domain [1,12] to [-5,5]
to be able to push to rastrigin
"""
x = (x - 6.5) * (5/5.5)
return rastrigin_function_n(x)
Simulated Annealing needs to modify state X. Instead of taking/modifying values directly, we keep track of indices. This simplifies creating new proposals as an index is always an integer we can simply add/subtract 1 modulo LENGTH.
def random_start():
"""
returns 3 random indices
"""
return np.random.randint(0, LENGTH, size=3)
def random_small_step(x):
"""
change only 1 index
"""
d = np.array( [1,0,0] )
if np.random.random() < .5:
d = np.array( [-1,0,0] )
np.random.shuffle(d)
return (x+d) % LENGTH
def random_big_step(x):
"""
change 2 indici
"""
d = np.array( [1,-1,0] )
np.random.shuffle(d)
return (x+d) % LENGTH
def obj(x):
"""
We have a triplet of indici,
1. Calculate corresponding values in W = [w1,w2,w3]
2. Push the values in out black-box function
"""
indices = x
values = W[np.array([0,1,2]), indices]
return black_box(values)
And throw a SA Scheme at it
import frigidum
local_opt = frigidum.sa(random_start=random_start,
neighbours=[random_small_step, random_big_step],
objective_function=obj,
T_start=10**4,
T_stop=0.000001,
repeats=10**3,
copy_state=frigidum.annealing.naked)
I am not sure what the minimum for this function should be, but it found a objective with 47.9095 with indicis np.array([9, 2, 2])
Edit:
For frigidum to change the cooling schedule, use alpha=.9. My experience is that all the work of experiment which cooling scheme works best doesn't out-weight simply let it run a little longer. The multiplication you proposed, (sometimes called geometric) is the standard one, also implemented in frigidum. So to implement Tn+1 = 0.9*Tn you need a alpha=.9. Be aware this cooling step is done after N repeats, so if repeats=100, it will first do 100 proposals before lowering the temperature with factor alpha
Simple variations on current state often works best. Since its best practice to set the initial temperature high enough to make most proposals (>90%) accepted, it doesn't matter the steps are small. But if you fear its soo small, try 2 or 3 variations. Frigidum accepts a list of proposal functions, and combinations can enforce each other.
I have no experience with MINLP. But even if, so many times experiments can surprise us. So if time/cost is small to bring another competitor to the table, yes!
Try every possible combination of the three values and see which has the lowest cost.
I have been trying to work out how to calculate Poincaré sections for a system of non-linear ODEs, using a paper on the exact system as reference, and have been wrestling with numpy to try and make it run better. This is intended to run within a bounded domain.
Currently, I have the following code
import numpy as np
from scipy.integrate import odeint
X = 0
Y = 1
Z = 2
def generate_poincare_map(function, initial, plane, iterations, delta):
intersections = []
p_i = odeint(function, initial.flatten(), [0, delta])[-1]
for i in range(1, iterations):
p_f = odeint(function, p_i, [i * delta, (i+1) * delta])[-1]
if (p_f[Z] > plane) and (p_i[Z] < plane):
intersections.append(p_i[:2])
if (p_f[Z] > plane) and (p_i[Z] < plane):
intersections.append(p_i[:2])
p_i = p_f
return np.stack(intersections)
This is pretty wasteful due to the integration solely between successive time steps, and seems to produce incorrect results. The original reference includes sections along the lines of
whereas mine tend to result in something along the lines of
Do you have any advice on how to proceed to make this more correct, and perhaps a little faster?
To get a Pointcaré map of the ABC flow
def ABC_ode(u,t):
A, B, C = 0.75, 1, 1 # matlab parameters
x, y, z = u
return np.array([
A*np.sin(z)+C*np.cos(y),
B*np.sin(x)+A*np.cos(z),
C*np.sin(y)+B*np.cos(x)
])
def mysolver(u0, tspan): return odeint(ABC_ode, u0, tspan, atol=1e-10, rtol=1e-11)
you have first to understand that the dynamical system is really about the points (cos(x),sin(x)) etc. on the unit circle. So values different by multiples of 2*pi represent the same point. In the computation of the section one has to reflect this, either by computing it on the Cartesian product of the 3 circles. Let's stay with the second variant, and chose [-pi,pi] as the fundamental period to have the zero location well in the center. Keep in mind that jumps larger pi are from the angle reduction, not from a real crossing of that interval.
def find_crosssections(x0,y0):
u0 = [x0,y0,0]
px = []
py = []
u = mysolver(u0, np.arange(0, 4000, 0.5)); u0 = u[-1]
u = np.mod(u+pi,2*pi)-pi
x,y,z = u.T
for k in range(len(z)-1):
if z[k]<=0 and z[k+1]>=0 and z[k+1]-z[k]<pi:
# find a more exact intersection location by linear interpolation
s = -z[k]/(z[k+1]-z[k]) # 0 = z[k] + s*(z[k+1]-z[k])
rx, ry = (1-s)*x[k]+s*x[k+1], (1-s)*y[k]+s*y[k+1]
px.append(rx);
py.append(ry);
return px,py
To get a full picture of the Poincare cross-section and avoid duplicate work, use a grid of squares and mark if one of the intersections already fell in it. Only start new iterations from the centers of free squares.
N=20
grid = np.zeros([N,N], dtype=int)
for i in range(N):
for j in range(N):
if grid[i,j]>0: continue;
x0, y0 = (2*i+1)*pi/N-pi, (2*j+1)*pi/N-pi
px, py = find_crosssections(x0,y0)
for rx,ry in zip(px,py):
m, n = int((rx+pi)*N/(2*pi)), int((ry+pi)*N/(2*pi))
grid[m,n]=1
plt.plot(px, py, '.', ms=2)
You can now play with the density of the grid and the length of the integration interval to get the plot a little more filled out, but all characteristic features are already here. But I'd recommend re-programming this in a compiled language, as the computation will take some time.
I'm trying to write fast, optimized code based on matrices, and have recently discovered einsum as a tool for achieving significant speed-up.
Is it possible to use this to set the diagonals of a multidimensional array efficiently, or can it only return data?
In my problem, I'm trying to set the diagonals for an array of square matrices (shape: M x N x N) by summing the columns in each square (N x N) matrix.
My current (slow, loop-based) solution is:
# Build dummy array
dimx = 2 # Dimension x (likely to be < 100)
dimy = 3 # Dimension y (likely to be between 2 and 10)
M = np.random.randint(low=1, high=9, size=[dimx, dimy, dimy])
# Blank the diagonals so we can see the intended effect
np.fill_diagonal(M[0], 0)
np.fill_diagonal(M[1], 0)
# Compute diagonals based on summing columns
diags = np.einsum('ijk->ik', M)
# Set the diagonal for each matrix
# THIS IS LOW. CAN IT BE IMPROVED?
for i in range(len(M)):
np.fill_diagonal(M[i], diags[i])
# Print result
M
Can this be improved at all please? It seems np.fill_diagonal doesn't accepted non-square matrices (hence forcing my loop based solution). Perhaps einsum can help here too?
One approach would be to reshape to 2D, set the columns at steps of ncols+1 with the diagonal values. Reshaping creates a view and as such allows us to directly access those diagonal positions. Thus, the implementation would be -
s0,s1,s2 = M.shape
M.reshape(s0,-1)[:,::s2+1] = diags
If you do np.source(np.fill_diagonal) you'll see that in the 2d case it uses a 'strided' approach
if a.ndim == 2:
step = a.shape[1] + 1
end = a.shape[1] * a.shape[1]
a.flat[:end:step] = val
#Divakar's solution applies this to your 3d case by 'flattening' on 2 dimensions.
You could sum the columns with M.sum(axis=1). Though I vaguely recall some timings that found that einsum was actually a bit faster. sum is a little more conventional.
Someone has has asked for an ability to expand dimensions in einsum, but I don't think that will happen.
As a warm-up to writing my own elastic net solver, I'm trying to get a fast enough version of ordinary least squares implemented using coordinate descent.
I believe I've implemented the coordinate descent algorithm correctly, but when I use the "fast" version (see below), the algorithm is insanely unstable, outputting regression coefficients that routinely overflow a 64-bit float when the number of features is of moderate size compared to the number of samples.
Linear Regression and OLS
If b = A*x, where A is a matrix, x a vector of the unknown regression coefficients, and y is the output, I want to find x that minimizes
||b - Ax||^2
If A[j] is the jth column of A and A[-j] is A without column j, and the columns of A are normalized so that ||A[j]||^2 = 1 for all j, the coordinate-wise update is then
Coordinate Descent:
x[j] <-- A[j]^T * (b - A[-j] * x[-j])
I'm following along with these notes (page 9-10) but the derivation is simple calculus.
It's pointed out that instead of recomputing A[j]^T(b - A[-j] * x[-j]) all the time, a faster way to do it is with
Fast Coordinate Descent:
x[j] <-- A[j]^T*r + x[j]
where the total residual r = b - Ax is computed outside the loop over coordinates. The equivalence of these update rules follows from noting that Ax = A[j]*x[j] + A[-j]*x[-j] and rearranging terms.
My problem is that while the second method is indeed faster, it's wildly numerically unstable for me whenever the number of features isn't small compared to the number of samples. I was wondering if anyone might have some insight as to why that's the case. I should note that the first method, which is more stable, still starts disagreeing with more standard methods as the number of features approaches the number of samples.
Julia code
Below is some Julia code for the two update rules:
function OLS_builtin(A,b)
x = A\b
return(x)
end
function OLS_coord_descent(A,b)
N,P = size(A)
x = zeros(P)
for cycle in 1:1000
for j = 1:P
x[j] = dot(A[:,j], b - A[:,1:P .!= j]*x[1:P .!= j])
end
end
return(x)
end
function OLS_coord_descent_fast(A,b)
N,P = size(A)
x = zeros(P)
for cycle in 1:1000
r = b - A*x
for j = 1:P
x[j] += dot(A[:,j],r)
end
end
return(x)
end
Example of the problem
I generate data with the following:
n = 100
p = 50
σ = 0.1
β_nz = float([i*(-1)^i for i in 1:10])
β = append!(β_nz,zeros(Float64,p-length(β_nz)))
X = randn(n,p); X .-= mean(X,1); X ./= sqrt(sum(abs2(X),1))
y = X*β + σ*randn(n); y .-= mean(y);
Here I use p=50, and I get good agreement between OLS_coord_descent(X,y) and OLS_builtin(X,y), whereas OLS_coord_descent_fast(X,y)returns exponentially large values for the regression coefficients.
When p is less than about 20, OLS_coord_descent_fast(X,y) agrees with the other two.
Conjecture
Since things agrees for the regime of p << n, I think the algorithm is formally correct, but numerically unstable. Does anyone have any thoughts on whether this guess is correct, and if so how to correct for the instability while retaining (most) of the performance gains of the fast version of the algorithm?
The quick answer: You forgot to update r after each x[j] update. Following is the fixed function which behaves like OLS_coord_descent:
function OLS_coord_descent_fast(A,b)
N,P = size(A)
x = zeros(P)
for cycle in 1:1000
r = b - A*x
for j = 1:P
x[j] += dot(A[:,j],r)
r -= A[:,j]*dot(A[:,j],r) # Add this line
end
end
return(x)
end
I've created a codebook using k-means of size 4000x300 (4000 centroids, each with 300 features). Using the codebook, I then want to label an input vector (for purposes of binning later on). The input vector is of size Nx300, where N is the total number of input instances I receive.
To compute the labels, I calculate the closest centroid for each of the input vectors. To do so, I compare each input vector against all centroids and pick the centroid with the minimum distance. The label is then just the index of that centroid.
My current Matlab code looks like:
function labels = assign_labels(centroids, X)
labels = zeros(size(X, 1), 1);
% for each X, calculate the distance from each centroid
for i = 1:size(X, 1)
% distance of X_i from all j centroids is: sum((X_i - centroid_j)^2)
% note: we leave off the sqrt as an optimization
distances = sum(bsxfun(#minus, centroids, X(i, :)) .^ 2, 2);
[value, label] = min(distances);
labels(i) = label;
end
However, this code is still fairly slow (for my purposes), and I was hoping there might be a way to optimize the code further.
One obvious issue is that there is a for-loop, which is the bane of good performance on Matlab. I've been trying to come up with a way to get rid of it, but with no luck (I looked into using arrayfun in conjunction with bsxfun, but haven't gotten that to work). Alternatively, if someone know of any other way to speed this up, I would be greatly appreciate it.
Update
After doing some searching, I couldn't find a great solution using Matlab, so I decided to look at what is used in Python's scikits.learn package for 'euclidean_distance' (shortened):
XX = sum(X * X, axis=1)[:, newaxis]
YY = Y.copy()
YY **= 2
YY = sum(YY, axis=1)[newaxis, :]
distances = XX + YY
distances -= 2 * dot(X, Y.T)
distances = maximum(distances, 0)
which uses the binomial form of the euclidean distance ((x-y)^2 -> x^2 + y^2 - 2xy), which from what I've read usually runs faster. My completely untested Matlab translation is:
XX = sum(data .* data, 2);
YY = sum(center .^ 2, 2);
[val, ~] = max(XX + YY - 2*data*center');
Use the following function to calculate your distances. You should see an order of magnitude speed up
The two matrices A and B have the columns as the dimenions and the rows as each point.
A is your matrix of centroids. B is your matrix of datapoints.
function D=getSim(A,B)
Qa=repmat(dot(A,A,2),1,size(B,1));
Qb=repmat(dot(B,B,2),1,size(A,1));
D=Qa+Qb'-2*A*B';
You can vectorize it by converting to cells and using cellfun:
[nRows,nCols]=size(X);
XCell=num2cell(X,2);
dist=reshape(cell2mat(cellfun(#(x)(sum(bsxfun(#minus,centroids,x).^2,2)),XCell,'UniformOutput',false)),nRows,nRows);
[~,labels]=min(dist);
Explanation:
We assign each row of X to its own cell in the second line
This piece #(x)(sum(bsxfun(#minus,centroids,x).^2,2)) is an anonymous function which is the same as your distances=... line, and using cell2mat, we apply it to each row of X.
The labels are then the indices of the minimum row along each column.
For a true matrix implementation, you may consider trying something along the lines of:
P2 = kron(centroids, ones(size(X,1),1));
Q2 = kron(ones(size(centroids,1),1), X);
distances = reshape(sum((Q2-P2).^2,2), size(X,1), size(centroids,1));
Note
This assumes the data is organized as [x1 y1 ...; x2 y2 ...;...]
You can use a more efficient algorithm for nearest neighbor search than brute force.
The most popular approach are Kd-Tree. O(log(n)) average query time instead of the O(n) brute force complexity.
Regarding a Maltab implementation of Kd-Trees, you can have a look here