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Path: blob/master/C2 - Improving Deep Neural Networks Hyperparameter tuning, Regularization and Optimization/Week 2/Optimization_methods_v1b.ipynb
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Optimization Methods
Until now, you've always used Gradient Descent to update the parameters and minimize the cost. In this notebook, you will learn more advanced optimization methods that can speed up learning and perhaps even get you to a better final value for the cost function. Having a good optimization algorithm can be the difference between waiting days vs. just a few hours to get a good result.
Gradient descent goes "downhill" on a cost function . Think of it as trying to do this:
At each step of the training, you update your parameters following a certain direction to try to get to the lowest possible point.
Notations: As usual, da
for any variable a
.
To get started, run the following code to import the libraries you will need.
Updates to Assignment
If you were working on a previous version
The current notebook filename is version "Optimization_methods_v1b".
You can find your work in the file directory as version "Optimization methods'.
To see the file directory, click on the Coursera logo at the top left of the notebook.
List of Updates
op_utils is now opt_utils_v1a. Assertion statement in
initialize_parameters
is fixed.opt_utils_v1a:
compute_cost
function now accumulates total cost of the batch without taking the average (average is taken for entire epoch instead).In
model
function, the total cost per mini-batch is accumulated, and the average of the entire epoch is taken as the average cost. So the plot of the cost function over time is now a smooth downward curve instead of an oscillating curve.Print statements used to check each function are reformatted, and 'expected output` is reformatted to match the format of the print statements (for easier visual comparisons).
1 - Gradient Descent
A simple optimization method in machine learning is gradient descent (GD). When you take gradient steps with respect to all examples on each step, it is also called Batch Gradient Descent.
Warm-up exercise: Implement the gradient descent update rule. The gradient descent rule is, for :
where L is the number of layers and is the learning rate. All parameters should be stored in the parameters
dictionary. Note that the iterator l
starts at 0 in the for
loop while the first parameters are and . You need to shift l
to l+1
when coding.
Expected Output:
A variant of this is Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), which is equivalent to mini-batch gradient descent where each mini-batch has just 1 example. The update rule that you have just implemented does not change. What changes is that you would be computing gradients on just one training example at a time, rather than on the whole training set. The code examples below illustrate the difference between stochastic gradient descent and (batch) gradient descent.
(Batch) Gradient Descent:
Stochastic Gradient Descent:
In Stochastic Gradient Descent, you use only 1 training example before updating the gradients. When the training set is large, SGD can be faster. But the parameters will "oscillate" toward the minimum rather than converge smoothly. Here is an illustration of this:

"+" denotes a minimum of the cost. SGD leads to many oscillations to reach convergence. But each step is a lot faster to compute for SGD than for GD, as it uses only one training example (vs. the whole batch for GD).
Note also that implementing SGD requires 3 for-loops in total:
Over the number of iterations
Over the training examples
Over the layers (to update all parameters, from to )
In practice, you'll often get faster results if you do not use neither the whole training set, nor only one training example, to perform each update. Mini-batch gradient descent uses an intermediate number of examples for each step. With mini-batch gradient descent, you loop over the mini-batches instead of looping over individual training examples.

"+" denotes a minimum of the cost. Using mini-batches in your optimization algorithm often leads to faster optimization.
2 - Mini-Batch Gradient descent
Let's learn how to build mini-batches from the training set (X, Y).
There are two steps:
Shuffle: Create a shuffled version of the training set (X, Y) as shown below. Each column of X and Y represents a training example. Note that the random shuffling is done synchronously between X and Y. Such that after the shuffling the column of X is the example corresponding to the label in Y. The shuffling step ensures that examples will be split randomly into different mini-batches.
Partition: Partition the shuffled (X, Y) into mini-batches of size
mini_batch_size
(here 64). Note that the number of training examples is not always divisible bymini_batch_size
. The last mini batch might be smaller, but you don't need to worry about this. When the final mini-batch is smaller than the fullmini_batch_size
, it will look like this:
Exercise: Implement random_mini_batches
. We coded the shuffling part for you. To help you with the partitioning step, we give you the following code that selects the indexes for the and mini-batches:
Note that the last mini-batch might end up smaller than mini_batch_size=64
. Let represents rounded down to the nearest integer (this is math.floor(s)
in Python). If the total number of examples is not a multiple of mini_batch_size=64
then there will be mini-batches with a full 64 examples, and the number of examples in the final mini-batch will be ().
Expected Output:
**shape of the 1st mini_batch_X** | (12288, 64) |
**shape of the 2nd mini_batch_X** | (12288, 64) |
**shape of the 3rd mini_batch_X** | (12288, 20) |
**shape of the 1st mini_batch_Y** | (1, 64) |
**shape of the 2nd mini_batch_Y** | (1, 64) |
**shape of the 3rd mini_batch_Y** | (1, 20) |
**mini batch sanity check** | [ 0.90085595 -0.7612069 0.2344157 ] |
3 - Momentum
Because mini-batch gradient descent makes a parameter update after seeing just a subset of examples, the direction of the update has some variance, and so the path taken by mini-batch gradient descent will "oscillate" toward convergence. Using momentum can reduce these oscillations.
Momentum takes into account the past gradients to smooth out the update. We will store the 'direction' of the previous gradients in the variable . Formally, this will be the exponentially weighted average of the gradient on previous steps. You can also think of as the "velocity" of a ball rolling downhill, building up speed (and momentum) according to the direction of the gradient/slope of the hill.

Exercise: Initialize the velocity. The velocity, , is a python dictionary that needs to be initialized with arrays of zeros. Its keys are the same as those in the grads
dictionary, that is: for :
Note that the iterator l starts at 0 in the for loop while the first parameters are v["dW1"] and v["db1"] (that's a "one" on the superscript). This is why we are shifting l to l+1 in the for
loop.
Expected Output:
Exercise: Now, implement the parameters update with momentum. The momentum update rule is, for :
where L is the number of layers, is the momentum and is the learning rate. All parameters should be stored in the parameters
dictionary. Note that the iterator l
starts at 0 in the for
loop while the first parameters are and (that's a "one" on the superscript). So you will need to shift l
to l+1
when coding.
Expected Output:
Note that:
The velocity is initialized with zeros. So the algorithm will take a few iterations to "build up" velocity and start to take bigger steps.
If , then this just becomes standard gradient descent without momentum.
How do you choose ?
The larger the momentum is, the smoother the update because the more we take the past gradients into account. But if is too big, it could also smooth out the updates too much.
Common values for range from 0.8 to 0.999. If you don't feel inclined to tune this, is often a reasonable default.
Tuning the optimal for your model might need trying several values to see what works best in term of reducing the value of the cost function .
4 - Adam
Adam is one of the most effective optimization algorithms for training neural networks. It combines ideas from RMSProp (described in lecture) and Momentum.
How does Adam work?
It calculates an exponentially weighted average of past gradients, and stores it in variables (before bias correction) and (with bias correction).
It calculates an exponentially weighted average of the squares of the past gradients, and stores it in variables (before bias correction) and (with bias correction).
It updates parameters in a direction based on combining information from "1" and "2".
The update rule is, for :
where:
t counts the number of steps taken of Adam
L is the number of layers
and are hyperparameters that control the two exponentially weighted averages.
is the learning rate
is a very small number to avoid dividing by zero
As usual, we will store all parameters in the parameters
dictionary
Exercise: Initialize the Adam variables which keep track of the past information.
Instruction: The variables are python dictionaries that need to be initialized with arrays of zeros. Their keys are the same as for grads
, that is: for :
Expected Output:
Exercise: Now, implement the parameters update with Adam. Recall the general update rule is, for :
Note that the iterator l
starts at 0 in the for
loop while the first parameters are and . You need to shift l
to l+1
when coding.
Expected Output:
You now have three working optimization algorithms (mini-batch gradient descent, Momentum, Adam). Let's implement a model with each of these optimizers and observe the difference.
5 - Model with different optimization algorithms
Lets use the following "moons" dataset to test the different optimization methods. (The dataset is named "moons" because the data from each of the two classes looks a bit like a crescent-shaped moon.)
We have already implemented a 3-layer neural network. You will train it with:
Mini-batch Gradient Descent: it will call your function:
update_parameters_with_gd()
Mini-batch Momentum: it will call your functions:
initialize_velocity()
andupdate_parameters_with_momentum()
Mini-batch Adam: it will call your functions:
initialize_adam()
andupdate_parameters_with_adam()
You will now run this 3 layer neural network with each of the 3 optimization methods.
5.1 - Mini-batch Gradient descent
Run the following code to see how the model does with mini-batch gradient descent.
5.2 - Mini-batch gradient descent with momentum
Run the following code to see how the model does with momentum. Because this example is relatively simple, the gains from using momemtum are small; but for more complex problems you might see bigger gains.
5.3 - Mini-batch with Adam mode
Run the following code to see how the model does with Adam.
5.4 - Summary
**optimization method** | **accuracy** | **cost shape** |
Momentum usually helps, but given the small learning rate and the simplistic dataset, its impact is almost negligeable. Also, the huge oscillations you see in the cost come from the fact that some minibatches are more difficult thans others for the optimization algorithm.
Adam on the other hand, clearly outperforms mini-batch gradient descent and Momentum. If you run the model for more epochs on this simple dataset, all three methods will lead to very good results. However, you've seen that Adam converges a lot faster.
Some advantages of Adam include:
Relatively low memory requirements (though higher than gradient descent and gradient descent with momentum)
Usually works well even with little tuning of hyperparameters (except )
References:
Adam paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.6980.pdf