How can Tensorflow be used with abalone dataset to build a sequential model?

In this article, we will learn how to build a sequential model using TensorFlow in Python to predict the age of an abalone. You may wonder what is an abalone. The answer to this question is that it is a kind of snail. Generally, the age of an Abalone is determined by the physical examination of the abalone but this is a tedious task which is why we will try to build a regressor that can predict the age of abalone using some features which are easy to determine. You can download the abalone dataset from here.

Importing Libraries and Dataset

Python libraries make it easy for us to handle the data and perform typical and complex tasks with a single line of code.

• Pandas – This library helps to load the data frame in a 2D array format and has multiple functions to perform analysis tasks in one go.
• Numpy – Numpy arrays are very fast and can perform large computations in a very short time.
• Matplotlib/Seaborn – This library is used to draw visualizations.
• Sklearn – This module contains multiple libraries are having pre-implemented functions to perform tasks from data preprocessing to model development and evaluation.

Now let’s load the data frame into the panda’s data frame.

Output:

First five rows of the dataset

Here the ring’s feature is actually the age of the abalone. It can be calculated by adding 1.5 to the number of rings present in the abalone shell.

Output:

(4177, 9)

Let’s check which column of the dataset contains which type of data.

Output:

Information on the column’s data type

Checking some descriptive statistical measures of the dataset will help us to understand the distribution of the height and weight of an abalone.

Output:

Descriptive statistical measures of the dataset

Exploratory Data Analysis

EDA is an approach to analyzing the data using visual techniques. It is used to discover trends, and patterns, or to check assumptions with the help of statistical summaries and graphical representations. 

Output:

Sex               0
Length            0
Diameter          0
Height            0
Whole weight      0
Shucked weight    0
Viscera weight    0
Shell weight      0
Rings             0
dtype: int64

Noe let’s check the distribution of the data in male, female and infant.

Output:

Pie chart for the distribution of sex

Here we can say that we have been provided with an equal amount of data for Male female and Infant abalone.

Output:

Grouped data by Sex

Here is an interesting observation that the life expectancy of the female abalone is higher than that of the male abalone. In the other features as well we can see that the height weight, as well as length in all the attributes of the numbers for female abalones, is on the higher sides.

Output:

Scatterplot of Features v/s Ring

Observations from the above graph are as follows:

• A strong linear correlation between the age of the abalone and its height can be observed from the above graphs.
• Length and Diameter have the same kind of relation with age that is up to a certain age length increases and after that it became constant. A similar kind of relationship is present between the weight and the age feature.

Output:

Violin plot of Features to visualize the distribution

Now we will separate the features and target variables and split them into training and validation data using which we will evaluate the performance of the model on the validation data.

Output:

((3341, 8), (836, 8))

Model Architecture

We will implement a Sequential model which will contain the following parts:

• We will have two fully connected layers.
• We have included some BatchNormalization layers to enable stable and fast training and a Dropout layer before the final layer to avoid any possibility of overfitting.

While compiling a model we provide these three essential parameters:

• optimizer – This is the method that helps to optimize the cost function by using gradient descent.
• loss – The loss function by which we monitor whether the model is improving with training or not.
• metrics – This helps to evaluate the model by predicting the training and the validation data.

Output:

Model: "sequential"
_________________________________________________________________
 Layer (type)                Output Shape              Param #   
=================================================================
 dense (Dense)               (None, 256)               2304      
                                                                 
 batch_normalization (BatchN  (None, 256)              1024      
 ormalization)                                                   
                                                                 
 dense_1 (Dense)             (None, 256)               65792     
                                                                 
 dropout (Dropout)           (None, 256)               0         
                                                                 
 batch_normalization_1 (Batc  (None, 256)              1024      
 hNormalization)                                                 
                                                                 
 dense_2 (Dense)             (None, 1)                 257       
                                                                 
=================================================================
Total params: 70,401
Trainable params: 69,377
Non-trainable params: 1,024
_________________________________________________________________

Now we will train our model.

Output:

Epoch 46/50
53/53 [==============================] - 0s 7ms/step - loss: 1.5060 - mape: 14.9777 - val_loss: 1.5403 - val_mape: 14.0747
Epoch 47/50
53/53 [==============================] - 0s 7ms/step - loss: 1.4989 - mape: 14.6385 - val_loss: 1.5414 - val_mape: 14.2294
Epoch 48/50
53/53 [==============================] - 0s 6ms/step - loss: 1.4995 - mape: 14.8053 - val_loss: 1.4832 - val_mape: 14.1244
Epoch 49/50
53/53 [==============================] - 0s 6ms/step - loss: 1.4951 - mape: 14.5988 - val_loss: 1.4735 - val_mape: 14.2099
Epoch 50/50
53/53 [==============================] - 0s 7ms/step - loss: 1.5013 - mape: 14.7809 - val_loss: 1.5196 - val_mape: 15.0205

Let’s visualize the training and validation mae and mape with each epoch.

Output:

 

Output:

Loss v/s val_loss curve of model training

Output:

mape v/s val_mape curve of model training

From the above two graphs, we can certainly say that the two(mae and mape) error values have decreased simultaneously and continuously. Also, the saturation has been achieved after 15 epochs only.

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