A VGG-like CNN for fashion-MNIST with 94% accuracy

This post was kindly contributed by SAS Programming for Data Mining - go there to comment and to read the full post.

In many introductory to image recognition tasks, the famous MNIST data set is typically used. However, there are some issues with this data:

1. It is too easy. For example, a simple MLP model can achieve 99% accuracy, and a 2-layer CNN can achieve 99% accuracy.

2. It is over used. Literally every machine learning introductory article or image recognition task will use this data set as benchmark. But because it is so easy to get nearly perfect classification result, its usefulness is discounted and is not really useful for modern machine learning/AI tasks.

Therefore, there appears Fashion-MNIST dataset. This dataset is developed as a direct replacement for MNIST data in the sense that:

1. It is the same size and style: 28×28 grayscale image
2. Each image is associated with 1 out of 10 classes, which are:
       0:T-shirt/top,
       1:Trouser,
       2:Pullover,
       3:Dress,
       4:Coat,
       5:Sandal,
       6:Shirt,
       7:Sneaker,
       8:Bag,
       9:Ankle boot
3. 60000 training sample and 10000 testing sample Here is a snapshot of some samples:

Since its appearance, there have been multiple submissions to benchmark this data, and some of them are able to achieve 95%+ accuracy, most noticeably Residual network or separable CNN.

I am also trying to benchmark against this data, using keras. keras is a high level framework for building deep learning models, with selection of TensorFlow, Theano and CNTK for backend. It is easy to install and use. For my application, I used CNTK backend. You can refer to this article on its installation.

Here, I will benchmark two models. One is a MLP with layer structure of 256-512-100-10, and the other one is a VGG-like CNN. The first model achieved accuracy of [0.89, 0.90] on testing data after 100 epochs, while the latter achieved accuracy of >0.94 on testing data after 45 epochs. First, read in the Fashion-MNIST data:


import numpy as np
import io, gzip, requests
train_image_url = "http://fashion-mnist.s3-website.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz"
train_label_url = "http://fashion-mnist.s3-website.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/train-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz"
test_image_url = "http://fashion-mnist.s3-website.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/t10k-images-idx3-ubyte.gz"
test_label_url = "http://fashion-mnist.s3-website.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/t10k-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz"

def readRemoteGZipFile(url, isLabel=True):
response=requests.get(url, stream=True)
gzip_content = response.content
fObj = io.BytesIO(gzip_content)
content = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=fObj).read()
if isLabel:
offset=8
else:
offset=16
result = np.frombuffer(content, dtype=np.uint8, offset=offset)
return(result)

train_labels = readRemoteGZipFile(train_label_url, isLabel=True)
train_images_raw = readRemoteGZipFile(train_image_url, isLabel=False)

test_labels = readRemoteGZipFile(test_label_url, isLabel=True)
test_images_raw = readRemoteGZipFile(test_image_url, isLabel=False)

train_images = train_images_raw.reshape(len(train_labels), 784)
test_images = test_images_raw.reshape(len(test_labels), 784)

Let’s first visual it using tSNE. tSNE is said to be the most effective dimension reduction tool.This plot function is borrowed from sklearn example.


from sklearn import manifold
from time import time
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import offsetbox
plt.rcParams['figure.figsize']=(20, 10)
# Scale and visualize the embedding vectors
def plot_embedding(X, Image, Y, title=None):
x_min, x_max = np.min(X, 0), np.max(X, 0)
X = (X - x_min) / (x_max - x_min)

plt.figure()
ax = plt.subplot(111)
for i in range(X.shape[0]):
plt.text(X[i, 0], X[i, 1], str(Y[i]),
color=plt.cm.Set1(Y[i] / 10.),
fontdict={'weight': 'bold', 'size': 9})

if hasattr(offsetbox, 'AnnotationBbox'):
# only print thumbnails with matplotlib > 1.0
shown_images = np.array([[1., 1.]]) # just something big
for i in range(X.shape[0]):
dist = np.sum((X[i] - shown_images) ** 2, 1)
if np.min(dist) < 4e-3:
# don't show points that are too close
continue
shown_images = np.r_[shown_images, [X[i]]]
imagebox = offsetbox.AnnotationBbox(
offsetbox.OffsetImage(Image[i], cmap=plt.cm.gray_r),
X[i])
ax.add_artist(imagebox)
plt.xticks([]), plt.yticks([])
if title is not None:
plt.title(title)

tSNE is very computationally expensive, so for impatient people like me, I used 1000 samples for a quick run. If your PC is fast enough and have time, you can run tSNE against the full dataset.


sampleSize=1000
samples=np.random.choice(range(len(Y_train)), size=sampleSize)
tsne = manifold.TSNE(n_components=2, init='pca', random_state=0)
t0 = time()
sample_images = train_images[samples]
sample_targets = train_labels[samples]
X_tsne = tsne.fit_transform(sample_images)
t1 = time()
plot_embedding(X_tsne, sample_images.reshape(sample_targets.shape[0], 28, 28), sample_targets,
"t-SNE embedding of the digits (time %.2fs)" %
(t1 - t0))
plt.show()

We see that several features, including mass size, split on bottom and semetricity, etc, separate the categories. Deep learning excels here because you don’t have to manually engineering the features but let the algorithm extracts those.

In order to build your own networks, we first import some libraries


from keras.models import Sequential
from keras.layers.convolutional import Conv2D, MaxPooling2D, AveragePooling2D
from keras.layers.advanced_activations import LeakyReLU
from keras.layers import Activation

We also do standard data preprocessing:


X_train = train_images.reshape(train_images.shape[0], 28, 28, 1).astype('float32')
X_test = test_images.reshape(test_images.shape[0], 28, 28, 1).astype('float32')

X_train /= 255
X_test /= 255

X_train -= 0.5
X_test -= 0.5

X_train *= 2.
X_test *= 2.

Y_train = train_labels
Y_test = test_labels
Y_train2 = keras.utils.to_categorical(Y_train).astype('float32')
Y_test2 = keras.utils.to_categorical(Y_test).astype('float32')

Here is the simple MLP implemented in keras:


mlp = Sequential()
mlp.add(Dense(256, input_shape=(784,)))
mlp.add(LeakyReLU())
mlp.add(Dropout(0.4))
mlp.add(Dense(512))
mlp.add(LeakyReLU())
mlp.add(Dropout(0.4))
mlp.add(Dense(100))
mlp.add(LeakyReLU())
mlp.add(Dropout(0.5))
mlp.add(Dense(10, activation='softmax'))
mlp.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
mlp.summary()

This model achieved almost 90% accuracy on test dataset at about 100 epochs. Now, let’s build a VGG-like CNN model, also very easy using keras:


num_classes = len(set(Y_train))
model3=Sequential()
model3.add(Conv2D(filters=32, kernel_size=(3, 3), padding="same",
input_shape=X_train.shape[1:], activation='relu'))
model3.add(Conv2D(filters=64, kernel_size=(3, 3), padding="same", activation='relu'))
model3.add(MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2)))
model3.add(Dropout(0.5))
model3.add(Conv2D(filters=128, kernel_size=(3, 3), padding="same", activation='relu'))
model3.add(Conv2D(filters=256, kernel_size=(3, 3), padding="valid", activation='relu'))
model3.add(MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(3, 3)))
model3.add(Dropout(0.5))
model3.add(Flatten())
model3.add(Dense(256))
model3.add(LeakyReLU())
model3.add(Dropout(0.5))
model3.add(Dense(256))
model3.add(LeakyReLU())
#model2.add(Dropout(0.5))
model3.add(Dense(num_classes, activation='softmax'))
model3.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
model3.summary()

This model has 1.5million parameters. We can call ‘fit’ method to train the model:


model3_fit=model3.fit(X_train, Y_train2, validation_data = (X_test, Y_test2), epochs=50, verbose=1, batch_size=500)

After 40 epochs, this model archieves accuracy of 0.94 on testing data.Obviously, there is also overfitting problem for this model. We will address this issue later.

This post was kindly contributed by SAS Programming for Data Mining - go there to comment and to read the full post.