# Linear Regression with Pytorch

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

def generate_experiment(n_obs,n_var):
# Draw X randomly
X = np.random.multivariate_normal(
np.zeros(n_var),
np.eye(n_var),
n_obs
)

# Draw some coefficients
beta = np.random.normal(loc=0., scale=1, size=n_var)

y = np.dot(X,beta) + np.random.normal(loc=0., scale=0.1, size=n_obs)

return X, y, beta


X, y, coef = generate_experiment(n_obs = 1000, n_var=4)


Data loading in pytorch is the infrastructure that passes a mini-batch of the data to the training loop. It requires two pieces:

• A DataLoader handles the sampling and requests the indices of observations from the data
• The Dataset defines a class with functions _len_() to tell the DataLoader how many observations are available and _getitem_() to collect specific observations from the indices requested by the DataLoader. The Dataset can either contain the data (e.g. as numpy arrays) or contain the procedure to load them when requested (e.g. from an image folder).
from torch.utils.data import Dataset, DataLoader

class ExperimentData(Dataset):
def __init__(self, X, y):
self.X = X
self.y = y

def __len__(self):
return X.shape[0]

def __getitem__(self, idx):
return X[idx,:], y[idx]


data = ExperimentData(X,y)

data.X.shape, data.y.shape

((1000, 4), (1000,))


The batch size determines how many observations are passed to the model before updating. More observations give a better signal how to update the parameters (less noisy gradient), but take more time to calculate so updating is slower.

data_loader = DataLoader(data, batch_size=128, shuffle=False, )


## Defining the model

import torch
import torch.nn as nn
import torch.nn.functional as F
from torch.autograd import Variable


Step 1: Architecture I: The model architecture
Define all the layers that make up the network. The simple regression model is equivalent to a single (not a hidden!) linear layer that takes the weighted inputs, adds a bias and returns the result.

There is one design choice to make. Everything that has parameters need to be defined during initialization (since the weights need to be safed within the object), but functional activations like ReLU can also happen during the forward process. I our case, we don’t have any non-linear activation functions like in a ‘real’ neural network, so we don’t care.

The super() function in super()._init_() doesn’t need arguments in Python 3, but you’ll often see super(model, self)._init_()

Step 2: Architecture II: The forward pass
Specify what happens when data is passed to the model. We defined the pieces (i.e. layers) above, but the flow of the model is still missing. This leaves us a lot of flexibility, which we really don’t need for the simple regression model.
Pass the data x to the linear layer and return the result.

class regression(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, input_dim):
# Applies the init method from the parent class nn.Module
# Lots of backend and definitions that all neural networks modules use
# Check it out here:
# https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/_modules/torch/nn/modules/module.html
super().__init__()

# Safe the input in case we want to use/see it
self.input_dim = input_dim

# One layer
self.linear = nn.Linear(input_dim, 1)

def forward(self, x):
y_pred = self.linear(x)
return y_pred



Step 3: Model fitting
See comments within the code below

It’s critical to remember to unsqueeze the true value or label if is a numpy vector (shape [n.]). Pytorch fails silently when calculating the MSE on y (shape [n,]) and y_pred (shape [n,1]) returning errors of dimension [n,n], which in turn gets reduced to a scalar MSE by .mean(). This one took me a long time to figure out myself…

def fit(model, data_loader, optim, epochs):
# Iterate over the data a number of times
for epoch in range(epochs):
# For each subset of the data sampled by data_loader
for i, (X,y) in enumerate(data_loader):

# Make sure data is float and not, for example, integers.
# Wrong format will cause an error during computation.
X = X.float()
y = y.unsqueeze(1).float()

# Make the data a Variable over which gradients can
# automatically be computed
X = Variable(X, requires_grad=True)
y = Variable(y, requires_grad=True)

# Make a prediction for the input X
pred = model(X)

# Calculate the mean squared error loss
# Pytorch naturally has a class for that
loss = (y-pred).pow(2).mean()

# Throw away the gradients that were previously
# computed and stored in the optimizer
# Calculate the gradient for all parts of the above
# calculation, also called a 'backward' pass
loss.backward()
# Update the weights as specified in the optimizer
# Here: Gradient descent update with learning rate as
#       specified
optim.step()

# Give some feedback after each 5th pass through the data
if epoch % 5 == 0:
print(f"loss: {loss}")

return None


## Inference

These are the true coefficients used to generate the data. We only know them, because we simulated the dataset, of course.

coef

array([ 1.10270833, -0.39130098, -0.32453641,  1.18107399])


Let’s see what performance we can expect by using the LinearRegression from scikit-learn.

from sklearn.metrics import mean_absolute_error

from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression
model = LinearRegression()
model.fit(data.X,data.y)
print(model.coef_)
mean_absolute_error(y, model.predict(X))

[ 1.10391649 -0.38996406 -0.32505661  1.18590587]

0.0817587002716065


The data is created by a linear model, so the linear regression is able to capture the coefficients almost exactly and reduce the prediction error almost to 0 (e-15 means 0 followed by 14 zeros then the number in the front).

Let’s build our pytorch regression model. It has 4 inputs, only one linear layer and one output. We include a bias term, which is equivalent to the constant in statistic parlance.

regnet = regression(input_dim=4)

regnet

regression(
(linear): Linear(in_features=4, out_features=1, bias=True)
)


The weights aka coefficients are initialized randomly by default and we can look at them using function parameters().

list(regnet.parameters())

[Parameter containing:
tensor([[-0.4913,  0.1847, -0.1824,  0.4594]], requires_grad=True),
Parameter containing:


We use the same function to tell the optimizer which weights we want to update based on the data. For simplicity, I use plain stochastic gradient descent.
The learning rate is the step size at which parameters are updated. It’s typically somewhere around [0.1;0.00001], but is connected to the loss function and batch size, so it’s one of the parameters that we can tune. I tuned it manually aka played around with it a bit until results looked good.

from torch.optim import SGD, Adam

optim = SGD(regnet.parameters(), lr=0.01)

fit(regnet,
optim = optim,
epochs = 100)

loss: 3.4608473777770996
loss: 0.7528247237205505
loss: 0.16800978779792786
loss: 0.04239470139145851
loss: 0.01585623063147068
loss: 0.010487892664968967
loss: 0.009523425251245499
loss: 0.009412898682057858
loss: 0.00943633820861578
loss: 0.009463834576308727
loss: 0.009480305947363377
loss: 0.009488780982792377
loss: 0.009492901153862476
loss: 0.009494856931269169
loss: 0.009495782665908337
loss: 0.009496204555034637
loss: 0.009496405720710754
loss: 0.009496488608419895
loss: 0.009496539831161499
loss: 0.009496556594967842


For testing purposes, the code below would be a way to set the true weights manually and see if prediction works.

#regnet.linear.weight.data = torch.Tensor([coef])
#regnet.linear.bias.data = torch.Tensor([0.,])


Let’s check the estimated parameters against the results from the sklearn linear regression model

model.coef_

array([ 1.10391649, -0.38996406, -0.32505661,  1.18590587])

list(regnet.parameters())

[Parameter containing:
tensor([[ 1.1035, -0.3897, -0.3244,  1.1858]], requires_grad=True),
Parameter containing:


To make a prediction we need to pass a tensor to the network, something the data loader to care of for us during training.

pred = regnet(torch.Tensor(X).float())

pred[:5]

tensor([[-1.0094],
[-0.2464],
[ 2.2665],
[-1.6032],


The predictions are still a tensor and we can’t pass these on to an evaluation function. In order to transform them to a numpy array, we need to detach() them from the computational graph that pytorch creates in the background (so that it can do automatic differentiation).
Then we can transform the tensor to a numpy array via one of its methods.

pred = pred.detach().numpy()

pred[:5].flatten()

array([-1.0094117 , -0.24639717,  2.2664652 , -1.6031841 ,  1.2056617 ],
dtype=float32)

y[:5]

array([-0.99319348, -0.26379455,  2.10439925, -1.72001673,  1.35644099])


Finally, the mean absolute error is almost as good as for the regression model optimized by numpy. Why not always exactly as good? There are better optimizers for simple regression than stochastic gradient descent. It’s another story for neural networks, where we haven’t found a better optimizer (yet), although there are some tweaks to SGD that are popular.

mean_absolute_error(y_true=y, y_pred=pred)

0.08176263854043513