# Predict house prices with dense neural networks and tensorflow

Disclaimer: The content in this post has been adapted from a template released by Google. the dataset used was downloaded from Kaggle. we added a few visualisation technics to enhance the understanding of the problem. we hope that you enjoy reading this tutorial.

NN_basic_regression
In [1]:
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In [2]:
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# Regression: predict house prices¶

In a regression problem, we aim to predict the output of a continuous value, like a price or a probability. Contrast this with a classification problem, where we aim to select a class from a list of classes (for example, where a picture contains an apple or an orange, recognizing which fruit is in the picture).

This notebook uses the classic Kaggle House prices Dataset and builds a model to predict the house prices from 79 explanatory variables describing (almost) every aspect of residential homes in Ames, Iowa. you can read more about the dataset by following the link above.

This example uses the tf.keras API, see this guide for details.

In [3]:
# Use seaborn for pairplot
!pip install seaborn

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In [4]:
from __future__ import absolute_import, division, print_function, unicode_literals

import pathlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns
import numpy as np

import tensorflow as tf
from tensorflow import keras
from tensorflow.keras import layers

print(tf.__version__)

1.13.1


## The House prices dataset¶

The dataset is available from Kaggle.

### Get the data¶

In [5]:
dataset_path = keras.utils.get_file("train.data", "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gakuba/house_pricing/master/train.data")
dataset_path

Downloading data from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gakuba/house_pricing/master/train.data
466944/460676 [==============================] - 0s 0us/step

Out[5]:
'/Users/gakuba/.keras/datasets/train.data'

Import it using pandas. since the aim of this tutorial is to show various techniques when building a regression model with neural networks using tensorflow, We’ve decided to choose a few features that are easy to understand and from which we believe the impact to the price is almost obvious

In [6]:
column_names = ['MSSubClass','MSZoning','LotArea','LotShape',
'RoofStyle','MasVnrArea','TotalBsmtSF','Heating','HeatingQC','1stFlrSF','2ndFlrSF','GrLivArea','BedroomAbvGr','KitchenAbvGr','PoolArea','SalePrice']
na_values = "NA", comment='\t',
sep=",",usecols=column_names, skipinitialspace=False)

dataset = raw_dataset.copy()
dataset.tail()

Out[6]:
MSSubClass MSZoning LotArea LotShape LandContour LotConfig LandSlope Neighborhood Condition1 Condition2 TotalBsmtSF Heating HeatingQC 1stFlrSF 2ndFlrSF GrLivArea BedroomAbvGr KitchenAbvGr PoolArea SalePrice
1455 60 RL 7917 Reg Lvl Inside Gtl Gilbert Norm Norm 953 GasA Ex 953 694 1647 3 1 0 175000
1456 20 RL 13175 Reg Lvl Inside Gtl NWAmes Norm Norm 1542 GasA TA 2073 0 2073 3 1 0 210000
1457 70 RL 9042 Reg Lvl Inside Gtl Crawfor Norm Norm 1152 GasA Ex 1188 1152 2340 4 1 0 266500
1458 20 RL 9717 Reg Lvl Inside Gtl NAmes Norm Norm 1078 GasA Gd 1078 0 1078 2 1 0 142125
1459 20 RL 9937 Reg Lvl Inside Gtl Edwards Norm Norm 1256 GasA Gd 1256 0 1256 3 1 0 147500

5 rows × 28 columns

### Clean the data¶

The dataset contains a few unknown values.

In [7]:
dataset.isna().sum()

Out[7]:
MSSubClass      0
MSZoning        0
LotArea         0
LotShape        0
LandContour     0
LotConfig       0
LandSlope       0
Neighborhood    0
Condition1      0
Condition2      0
BldgType        0
HouseStyle      0
OverallQual     0
OverallCond     0
YearBuilt       0
RoofStyle       0
MasVnrArea      8
TotalBsmtSF     0
Heating         0
HeatingQC       0
1stFlrSF        0
2ndFlrSF        0
GrLivArea       0
BedroomAbvGr    0
KitchenAbvGr    0
PoolArea        0
SalePrice       0
dtype: int64

MasVnrArea has 8 entries with unknow values. To keep this initial tutorial simple drop those rows. In practice you may not want to lose your data in which case you can build a simple model to predict the unknown values. depending on observation sometimes you can replace the missing values with the mean or median of all the values within the same column

In [8]:
dataset = dataset.dropna()


later on this tutorial we will use onehot encoding to transform categorical variables into numbers either 0 or 1. this is known to create a lot of troubles when a particular value is present in the training set and not in the test set and vice versa which causes the number of features generated in both sets to be different. to avoid this issue, let’s drop all rows that have unique categorical value that is not present in any other row.

In [9]:
print('MSSubClass',(dataset['MSSubClass'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('MSZoning',(dataset['MSZoning'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('LotShape',(dataset['LotShape'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('LandContour',(dataset['LandContour'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('LotConfig',(dataset['LotConfig'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('LandSlope',(dataset['LandSlope'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('Neighborhood',(dataset['Neighborhood'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('Condition1',(dataset['Condition1'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('Condition2',(dataset['Condition2'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('BldgType',(dataset['BldgType'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('HouseStyle',(dataset['HouseStyle'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('RoofStyle',(dataset['RoofStyle'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('Heating',(dataset['Heating'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('HeatingQC',(dataset['HeatingQC'].value_counts()==1).any())

MSSubClass False
MSZoning False
LotShape False
LandContour False
LotConfig False
LandSlope False
Neighborhood False
Condition1 False
Condition2 True
BldgType False
HouseStyle False
RoofStyle False
Heating True
HeatingQC True


According to the findings above, "HeatingQC","Condition2","Heating" have a value that shows up only once in the dataset, we need to delete such values since the it is guaranteed to create a std of zero either in the training set or the test set

In [10]:
print(dataset['HeatingQC'].value_counts())
dataset = dataset[dataset['HeatingQC'] != 'Po']

Ex    734
TA    427
Gd    241
Fa     49
Po      1
Name: HeatingQC, dtype: int64

In [11]:
print(dataset['Condition2'].value_counts())
dataset = dataset[(dataset['Condition2'] != 'RRAn') & (dataset['Condition2'] != 'RRAe') & (dataset['Condition2'] != 'PosA')]

Norm      1436
Feedr        6
Artery       2
RRNn         2
PosN         2
PosA         1
RRAe         1
RRAn         1
Name: Condition2, dtype: int64

In [12]:
print(dataset['Heating'].value_counts())
dataset = dataset[dataset['Heating'] != 'Floor']

GasA     1416
GasW       18
Grav        7
Wall        4
OthW        2
Floor       1
Name: Heating, dtype: int64


Sometimes deleting this values ends by rendering some new rows to be unique on a different categorical column. we need to double check if this is the case.

In [13]:
print('MSSubClass',(dataset['MSSubClass'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('MSZoning',(dataset['MSZoning'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('LotShape',(dataset['LotShape'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('LandContour',(dataset['LandContour'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('LotConfig',(dataset['LotConfig'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('LandSlope',(dataset['LandSlope'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('Neighborhood',(dataset['Neighborhood'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('Condition1',(dataset['Condition1'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('Condition2',(dataset['Condition2'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('BldgType',(dataset['BldgType'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('HouseStyle',(dataset['HouseStyle'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('RoofStyle',(dataset['RoofStyle'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('Heating',(dataset['Heating'].value_counts()==1).any())
print('HeatingQC',(dataset['HeatingQC'].value_counts()==1).any())

MSSubClass False
MSZoning False
LotShape False
LandContour False
LotConfig False
LandSlope False
Neighborhood False
Condition1 False
Condition2 False
BldgType False
HouseStyle False
RoofStyle True
Heating False
HeatingQC False


Ooops the RoofStyle has now a unique value. let’s find what it is and delete it

In [14]:
dataset['RoofStyle'].value_counts()

Out[14]:
Gable      1131
Hip         284
Flat         13
Gambrel      11
Mansard       7
Shed          1
Name: RoofStyle, dtype: int64
In [15]:
print(dataset['RoofStyle'].value_counts())
dataset = dataset[dataset['RoofStyle'] != 'Shed']

Gable      1131
Hip         284
Flat         13
Gambrel      11
Mansard       7
Shed          1
Name: RoofStyle, dtype: int64


You can double check again if no unique values are left but I have already done that to keep this notebook short.

Let’s now convert "columns" that are categorical to one-hot encoded values:

In [16]:
def onehot(df,column_name):
# receives a column name are return a dataframe where the column name has been converted to onehot encoding
categorical_values = df[column_name].unique()
data_to_encode = df.pop(column_name)

for cat_value in categorical_values:
col_name = column_name+str(cat_value)
df[col_name] = (data_to_encode == cat_value)* 1.0
#return df


In [17]:
onehot(dataset,'MSSubClass')
onehot(dataset,'MSZoning')
onehot(dataset,'LotShape')
onehot(dataset,'LandContour')
onehot(dataset,'LotConfig')
onehot(dataset,'LandSlope')
onehot(dataset,'Neighborhood')
onehot(dataset,'Condition1')
onehot(dataset,'Condition2')
onehot(dataset,'BldgType')
onehot(dataset,'HouseStyle')
onehot(dataset,'RoofStyle')
onehot(dataset,'Heating')
onehot(dataset,'HeatingQC')

In [18]:
dataset.head()

Out[18]:
LotArea OverallQual OverallCond YearBuilt YearRemodAdd MasVnrArea TotalBsmtSF 1stFlrSF 2ndFlrSF GrLivArea RoofStyleFlat HeatingGasA HeatingGasW HeatingGrav HeatingWall HeatingOthW HeatingQCEx HeatingQCGd HeatingQCTA HeatingQCFa
0 8450 7 5 2003 2003 196.0 856 856 854 1710 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
1 9600 6 8 1976 1976 0.0 1262 1262 0 1262 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
2 11250 7 5 2001 2002 162.0 920 920 866 1786 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
3 9550 7 5 1915 1970 0.0 756 961 756 1717 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0
4 14260 8 5 2000 2000 350.0 1145 1145 1053 2198 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

5 rows × 116 columns

In [19]:
dataset.shape

Out[19]:
(1446, 116)

### Split the data into train and test¶

Now split the dataset into a training set and a test set.

We will use the test set in the final evaluation of our model.

In [20]:
train_dataset = dataset.sample(frac=0.8,random_state=0)
test_dataset = dataset.drop(train_dataset.index)


### Inspect the data¶

Have a quick look at the joint distribution of a few pairs of columns from the training set.

In [21]:
sns.pairplot(train_dataset[["LotArea", "MasVnrArea", "GrLivArea"]], diag_kind="kde")

/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/scipy/stats/stats.py:1713: FutureWarning: Using a non-tuple sequence for multidimensional indexing is deprecated; use arr[tuple(seq)] instead of arr[seq]. In the future this will be interpreted as an array index, arr[np.array(seq)], which will result either in an error or a different result.
return np.add.reduce(sorted[indexer] * weights, axis=axis) / sumval

Out[21]:
<seaborn.axisgrid.PairGrid at 0x1a364c2080>

We can see that some features are correlated. to have a full picture, let’s draw a pairwise map of correlation for all non categorical values.

Plot the correlation plot of a random sample of 200 features (train_dataset[non_categ_variables].sample(n=200)) with seaborn.

In [22]:
# seaborn
'PoolArea']
sampled =  train_dataset[non_categ_variables].sample(n=200)
corr = sampled.corr()  # compute correlation matrix

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(11, 9))  # create a figure and a subplot
cmap = sns.diverging_palette(220, 10, as_cmap=True)  # custom color map
sns.heatmap(
corr,
cmap=cmap,
center=0,
linewidth=0.5,
cbar_kws={'shrink': 0.5}
);


Looking at the above table we can see a few strong correlations. However since we run random samples, we observed after repetitively running the cell, that a few of them are consistent. particularly there is a consistent strong positive correlation between GrLivArea(the size of Living area) and 2ndFlrSF(the size of the second floor). we also see a high positive correlation between 1stFlrSF(the size of 1st floor) and TotalBsmtSF(total basement surface). what if we drop1stFlrSF and 2ndFlrSF? note that you don’t always have to drop one of the correlated features. only when you are sure that the values of one feature is linearly dependent to the other, then you can delete either of them since the value of the deleted feature was obtained from a combination of the maintained one. there are a lot statistical consideration that I did not mention here but you get the big picture.

In [23]:
train_dataset = train_dataset.drop(['1stFlrSF','2ndFlrSF'],axis=1)
test_dataset = test_dataset.drop(['1stFlrSF','2ndFlrSF'],axis=1)


Also look at the overall statistics:

In [24]:
train_stats = train_dataset.describe()
train_stats.pop("SalePrice")
train_stats = train_stats.transpose()
train_stats

Out[24]:
count mean std min 25% 50% 75% max
LotArea 1157.0 10580.938634 10406.555540 1300.0 7596.0 9525.0 11600.0 215245.0
OverallQual 1157.0 6.092481 1.393604 1.0 5.0 6.0 7.0 10.0
OverallCond 1157.0 5.579084 1.108326 2.0 5.0 5.0 6.0 9.0
YearBuilt 1157.0 1971.057908 30.290992 1872.0 1953.0 1972.0 2000.0 2010.0
YearRemodAdd 1157.0 1984.528090 20.807911 1950.0 1965.0 1994.0 2004.0 2010.0
MasVnrArea 1157.0 103.337943 176.203486 0.0 0.0 0.0 166.0 1378.0
TotalBsmtSF 1157.0 1056.707001 445.687102 0.0 793.0 991.0 1288.0 6110.0
GrLivArea 1157.0 1520.535004 535.173435 334.0 1134.0 1466.0 1786.0 5642.0
BedroomAbvGr 1157.0 2.878997 0.809256 0.0 2.0 3.0 3.0 8.0
KitchenAbvGr 1157.0 1.045808 0.217273 0.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 3.0
PoolArea 1157.0 3.038894 42.554923 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 738.0
MSSubClass60 1157.0 0.212619 0.409337 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass20 1157.0 0.363872 0.481320 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0
MSSubClass70 1157.0 0.043215 0.203429 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass50 1157.0 0.103717 0.305024 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass190 1157.0 0.022472 0.148277 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass45 1157.0 0.007779 0.087891 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass90 1157.0 0.035436 0.184960 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass120 1157.0 0.053587 0.225298 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass30 1157.0 0.048401 0.214705 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass85 1157.0 0.012965 0.113170 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass80 1157.0 0.039758 0.195475 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass160 1157.0 0.039758 0.195475 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass75 1157.0 0.008643 0.092605 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass180 1157.0 0.006914 0.082901 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSSubClass40 1157.0 0.000864 0.029399 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSZoningRL 1157.0 0.789974 0.407503 0.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
MSZoningRM 1157.0 0.149525 0.356759 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSZoningC (all) 1157.0 0.006914 0.082901 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
MSZoningFV 1157.0 0.043215 0.203429 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
Condition2RRNn 1157.0 0.001729 0.041559 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
Condition2Feedr 1157.0 0.004322 0.065624 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
Condition2PosN 1157.0 0.001729 0.041559 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
BldgType1Fam 1157.0 0.844425 0.362608 0.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
BldgType2fmCon 1157.0 0.022472 0.148277 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
BldgTypeDuplex 1157.0 0.035436 0.184960 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
BldgTypeTwnhsE 1157.0 0.067416 0.250849 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
BldgTypeTwnhs 1157.0 0.030251 0.171350 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HouseStyle2Story 1157.0 0.311150 0.463164 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0
HouseStyle1Story 1157.0 0.489196 0.500099 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0
HouseStyle1.5Fin 1157.0 0.108902 0.311651 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HouseStyle1.5Unf 1157.0 0.009507 0.097083 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HouseStyleSFoyer 1157.0 0.025065 0.156390 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HouseStyleSLvl 1157.0 0.044944 0.207270 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HouseStyle2.5Unf 1157.0 0.005186 0.071857 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HouseStyle2.5Fin 1157.0 0.006050 0.077580 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
RoofStyleGable 1157.0 0.787381 0.409337 0.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
RoofStyleHip 1157.0 0.191011 0.393268 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
RoofStyleGambrel 1157.0 0.008643 0.092605 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
RoofStyleMansard 1157.0 0.001729 0.041559 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
RoofStyleFlat 1157.0 0.011236 0.105448 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HeatingGasA 1157.0 0.980121 0.139645 0.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
HeatingGasW 1157.0 0.009507 0.097083 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HeatingGrav 1157.0 0.006050 0.077580 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HeatingWall 1157.0 0.002593 0.050877 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HeatingOthW 1157.0 0.001729 0.041559 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HeatingQCEx 1157.0 0.499568 0.500216 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0
HeatingQCGd 1157.0 0.168539 0.374506 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
HeatingQCTA 1157.0 0.297321 0.457277 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0
HeatingQCFa 1157.0 0.034572 0.182773 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0

113 rows × 8 columns

One noticeable to see in the stats above is the difference in the scale of the values. later in this tutorial we will introduce a technique called normalisation used to fix this issue by putting all the features on the same scale between -1 and 1 and centered on 0.

### Split features from labels¶

Separate the target value, or “label”, from the features. This label is the value that you will train the model to predict.

In [25]:
train_labels = train_dataset.pop('SalePrice')
test_labels = test_dataset.pop('SalePrice')


### Normalize the data¶

Look again at the train_stats block above and note how different the ranges of each feature are.

It is good practice to normalize features that use different scales and ranges. Although the model might converge without feature normalization, it makes training more difficult, and it makes the resulting model dependent on the choice of units used in the input.

Note: Although we intentionally generate these statistics from only the training dataset, these statistics will also be used to normalize the test dataset. We need to do that to project the test dataset into the same distribution that the model has been trained on.

In [26]:
def norm(x):
return (x - train_stats['mean']) / train_stats['std']
normed_train_data = norm(train_dataset)
normed_test_data = norm(test_dataset)

In [27]:
normed_train_data.shape

Out[27]:
(1157, 113)

Sometimes if you have not been careful in the first steps, you may end up having features with a mean and a standard deviation equal to zero which will cause issues in the calculation of the normalised value. to test if nothing as such happened, check if the normalized dataset has any NaN values.

In [28]:
normed_train_data.isna().values.any()

Out[28]:
False

This normalized data is what we will use to train the model.

Caution: The statistics used to normalize the inputs here (mean and standard deviation) need to be applied to any other data that is fed to the model, along with the one-hot encoding that we did earlier. That includes the test set as well as live data when the model is used in production.

## The model¶

### Build the model¶

Let’s build our model. Here, we’ll use a Sequential model with two densely connected hidden layers, and an output layer that returns a single, continuous value. The model building steps are wrapped in a function, build_model, since we’ll create a second model, later on.

In [29]:
def build_model():
model = keras.Sequential([
layers.Dense(64, activation=tf.nn.relu, input_shape=[len(train_dataset.keys())]),
layers.Dense(64, activation=tf.nn.relu),
layers.Dense(1)
])

optimizer = tf.keras.optimizers.RMSprop(0.001)

model.compile(loss='mean_squared_error',
optimizer=optimizer,
metrics=['mean_absolute_error', 'mean_squared_error'])
return model

In [30]:
model = build_model()

WARNING:tensorflow:From /anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/tensorflow/python/ops/resource_variable_ops.py:435: colocate_with (from tensorflow.python.framework.ops) is deprecated and will be removed in a future version.
Instructions for updating:
Colocations handled automatically by placer.
WARNING:tensorflow:From /anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/tensorflow/python/keras/utils/losses_utils.py:170: to_float (from tensorflow.python.ops.math_ops) is deprecated and will be removed in a future version.
Instructions for updating:


### Inspect the model¶

Use the .summary method to print a simple description of the model

In [31]:
model.summary()

_________________________________________________________________
Layer (type)                 Output Shape              Param #
=================================================================
dense (Dense)                (None, 64)                7296
_________________________________________________________________
dense_1 (Dense)              (None, 64)                4160
_________________________________________________________________
dense_2 (Dense)              (None, 1)                 65
=================================================================
Total params: 11,521
Trainable params: 11,521
Non-trainable params: 0
_________________________________________________________________


Now try out the model. Take a batch of 10 examples from the training data and call model.predict on it.

In [32]:
example_batch = normed_train_data[:10]
example_result = model.predict(example_batch)
example_result

Out[32]:
array([[-0.18740621],
[-0.37517387],
[ 0.44027066],
[-0.13944644],
[-0.05899712],
[ 0.1826899 ],
[-0.03595413],
[-0.02398375],
[ 0.01398684],
[-2.5624623 ]], dtype=float32)

It seems to be working, and it produces a result of the expected shape and type.

### Train the model¶

Train the model for 1000 epochs, and record the training and validation accuracy in the history object.

In [33]:
# Display training progress by printing a single dot for each completed epoch
class PrintDot(keras.callbacks.Callback):
def on_epoch_end(self, epoch, logs):
if epoch % 100 == 0: print('')
print('.', end='')

EPOCHS = 1000

history = model.fit(
normed_train_data, train_labels,
epochs=EPOCHS, validation_split = 0.2, verbose=0,
callbacks=[PrintDot()])

WARNING:tensorflow:From /anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/tensorflow/python/ops/math_ops.py:3066: to_int32 (from tensorflow.python.ops.math_ops) is deprecated and will be removed in a future version.
Instructions for updating:

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Visualize the model’s training progress using the stats stored in the history object.

In [34]:
hist = pd.DataFrame(history.history)
hist['epoch'] = history.epoch
hist.tail()

Out[34]:
loss mean_absolute_error mean_squared_error val_loss val_mean_absolute_error val_mean_squared_error epoch
995 3.335265e+08 10503.631836 333526464.0 1.893144e+09 23414.792969 1.893144e+09 995
996 3.334866e+08 10488.290039 333486560.0 1.893136e+09 23418.982422 1.893135e+09 996
997 3.335728e+08 10476.440430 333572864.0 1.894983e+09 23419.917969 1.894983e+09 997
998 3.330735e+08 10474.593750 333073504.0 1.897619e+09 23411.398438 1.897619e+09 998
999 3.331989e+08 10465.067383 333198944.0 1.891481e+09 23421.921875 1.891481e+09 999
In [35]:
def plot_history(history):
hist = pd.DataFrame(history.history)
hist['epoch'] = history.epoch

plt.figure()
plt.xlabel('Epoch')
plt.ylabel('Mean Abs Error [SalePrice]')
plt.plot(hist['epoch'], hist['mean_absolute_error'],
label='Train Error')
plt.plot(hist['epoch'], hist['val_mean_absolute_error'],
label = 'Val Error')
#plt.ylim([0,5])
plt.legend()

plt.figure()
plt.xlabel('Epoch')
plt.ylabel('Mean Square Error [$SalePrice^2$]')
plt.plot(hist['epoch'], hist['mean_squared_error'],
label='Train Error')
plt.plot(hist['epoch'], hist['val_mean_squared_error'],
label = 'Val Error')
#plt.ylim([0,20])
plt.legend()
plt.show()

plot_history(history)


This graph shows little improvement in the validation error after about 100 epochs. Let’s update the model.fit call to automatically stop training when the validation score doesn’t improve. We’ll use an EarlyStopping callback that tests a training condition for every epoch. If a set amount of epochs elapses without showing improvement, then automatically stop the training.

In [36]:
model = build_model()

# The patience parameter is the amount of epochs to check for improvement
early_stop = keras.callbacks.EarlyStopping(monitor='val_loss', patience=10)

history = model.fit(normed_train_data, train_labels, epochs=EPOCHS,
validation_split = 0.2, verbose=0, callbacks=[early_stop, PrintDot()])

plot_history(history)

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....

The graph shows that on the validation set, the average error is usually around +/- 30K \$. Is this good? We’ll leave that decision up to you.

Let’s see how well the model generalizes by using the test set, which we did not use when training the model. This tells us how well we can expect the model to predict when we use it in the real world.

In [37]:
loss, mae, mse = model.evaluate(normed_test_data, test_labels, verbose=0)

print("Testing set Mean Abs Error: {:5.2f} SalePrice".format(mae))

Testing set Mean Abs Error: 22823.59 SalePrice


### Make predictions¶

Finally, predict House price values using data in the testing set:

In [38]:
test_predictions = model.predict(normed_test_data).flatten()

plt.scatter(test_labels, test_predictions)
plt.xlabel('True Values [SalePrice]')
plt.ylabel('Predictions [SalePrice]')
plt.axis('equal')
plt.axis('square')
plt.xlim([0,plt.xlim()[1]])
plt.ylim([0,plt.ylim()[1]])
_ = plt.plot([-1000000, 1000000], [-1000000, 1000000])


It looks like our model predicts reasonably well. Let’s take a look at the error distribution.

In [39]:
error = test_predictions - test_labels
plt.hist(error, bins = 50)
plt.xlabel("Prediction Error [SalePrice]")
_ = plt.ylabel("Count")
#_ = plt.plot([-10000, 10000], [-10000, 10000])


It’s not quite gaussian, but we might expect that because the number of samples is very small. Also you can see that the distribution is centered around zero(definitely not zero if the scale is changed, but I am happy with that). which is a very good indication that our model isn’t far from ground truth in most cases.

## Conclusion¶

This notebook introduced a few techniques to handle a regression problem.

• Mean Squared Error (MSE) is a common loss function used for regression problems (different loss functions are used for classification problems).
• Similarly, evaluation metrics used for regression differ from classification. A common regression metric is Mean Absolute Error (MAE).
• When numeric input data features have values with different ranges, each feature should be scaled independently to the same range.
• If there is not much training data, one technique is to prefer a small network with few hidden layers to avoid overfitting.
• Early stopping is a useful technique to prevent overfitting.