This past week I came across another paper that purports to get the SOTA for NNs for tabular data. Due to the extreme penchant for exaggeration in this community, I have given up on checking most of these claims, but decided to take a look at this particular work.
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I decided to check how does XGBoost *really* perform on the datasets used in the paper, and the results were not pretty.
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The main takeaway: for all three datasets used in the paper, the reported performance of XGBoost was widely inaccurate and the real performance was much better than their best results.
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This lack of careful considerations is unfortunately extremely prevalent in the “NNs for tabular data research community.”
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One gets a feeling that whole community has an actual disdain for tabular data, and a contempt to do all the important and necessary background work to get a better understanding of their subject matter.
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Decision trees based Machine Learning models are some of the best performant algorithms in eras of predictive capability, especially on small and heterogenous datasets.
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They also provide an unparalleled level of interpretability compared to all other non-linear algorithms. However, they are very hard to optimize on Von Neumann architecture machines due to their non-uniform memory access patterns.
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In groundbreaking work published in Nature Communications a team of researchers has shown that analog content addressable memory (CAM) devices with in-memory calculation can dramatically accelerate tree-based model inference, as much as 10**3 over the conventional approaches 3/4
This week @NVIDIA open sourced the 3D object generation AI model, GET3D. GET3D is a generative model of high quality 3D textured shapes learned from images.
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Trained using only 2D images, GET3D generates 3D shapes with high-fidelity textures and complex geometric details.
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These 3D objects are created in the same format used by popular graphics software applications, allowing users to immediately import their shapes into 3D renderers and game engines for further editing.
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I have just done something really cool - I've managed to *train* XGBoost in browser completely within an HTML file! This has been possible thanks to the PyScript project that allows running Python inside of HTML, similar to how JavaScript works.
The example below is very simple - the script loads the small Iris dataset from sklearn. With a slider you are able to adjust the number of XGBoost trees, and the script will train different XGBoost models accordingly and print out accuracy.
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PyScript is still in very early stages of development. Getting all the relevant components to work together is still tricky, and there are not many detailed tutorials. Hence, this example is *very* rudimentary. I'll try to make it more powerful and snazzy does the road.
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First, you create a simple model with XGBoost. It doesn't have to be fancy, or even too accurate, it's just for reference purposes. Use that model to calculate the Shapley values for your training set. Here is an example:
NVIDIA GTC starts today! There are tons of exciting topics and webinars covered. This year again the whole conference is online and free, so go and register if you have not done so already.
A very good paper I came across this morning by the @DeepMind researchers. For the past five years Transformers have been one of the most dominant approaches to Deep Learning problems, especially in the #NLP domain.
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However, despite many interesting papers on the topic, and lots of good open code, there has been a noticeable lack of *formal* definition of what transformed are, especially on the level of pseudocode.
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This paper aims to rectify that. It provides pseudocode for almost all major Transformer architectures, including training algorithms.
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