# Kaggle Speech Recognition Challenge

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the TensorFlow Speech Recognition Challenge on Kaggle. The task is to recognize a one-second audio clip, where the clip contains one of a small number of words, like “yes”, “no”, “stop”, “go”, “left”, and “right”.

In general, speech recognition is a difficult problem, but it’s much easier when the vocabulary is limited to a handful of words. We don’t need to use complicated language models to detect phonemes, and then string the phonemes into words, like Kaldi does for speech recognition. Instead, a convolutional neural network works quite well.

## First Steps

The dataset consists of about 64000 audio files which have already been split into training / validation / testing sets. You are then asked to make predictions on about 150000 audio files for which the labels are unknown.

Actually, this dataset had already been published in academic literature, and people published code to solve the same problem. I started with GCommandPytorch by Yossi Adi, which implements a speech recognition CNN in Pytorch.

The first step that it does is convert the audio file into a spectrogram, which is an image representation of sound. This is easily done using LibRosa.

Above: Sample spectrograms of “yes” and “no”

Now we’ve converted the problem to an image classification problem, which is well studied. To an untrained human observer, all the spectrograms may look the same, but neural networks can learn things that humans can’t. Convolutional neural networks work very well for classifying images, for example VGG16:

Above: A Convolutional Neural Network (LeNet). VGG16 is similar, but has even more layers.

## Voice Activity Detection

You might ask: if somebody already implemented this, then what’s there left to do other than run their code? Well, the test data contains “silence” samples, which contain background noise but no human speech. It also has words outside the set we care about, which we need to label as “unknown”. The Pytorch CNN produces about 95% validation accuracy by itself, but the accuracy is much lower when we add these two additional requirements.

For silence detection, I first tried the simplest thing I could think of: taking the maximum absolute value of the waveform and decide it’s “silence” if the value is below a threshold. When combined with VGG16, this gets accuracy 0.78 on the leaderboard. This is a crude metric because sufficiently loud noise would be considered speech.

Next, I tried running openSMILE, which I use in my research to extract various acoustic features from audio. It implements an LSTM for voice activity detection: every 0.05 seconds, it outputs a probability that someone is talking. Combining the openSMILE output with the VGG16 prediction gave a score of 0.81.

## More improvements

I tried a bunch of things to improve my score:

1. Fiddled around with the neural network hyperparameters which boosted my score to 0.85. Each epoch took about 10 minutes on a GPU, and the whole model takes about 2 hours to train. Somehow, Adam didn’t produce good results, and SGD with momentum worked better.
2. Took 100% of the data for training and used the public LB for validation (don’t do this in real life lol). This improved my score to 0.86.
3. Trained an ensemble 3 versions of the same neural network with same hyperparameters but different randomly initialized weights and took a majority vote to do prediction. This improved the score to 0.87. I would’ve liked to train more, but other people in my research group needed to use the GPUs.

In the end, the top scoring model had a score of 0.91, which beat my model by 4 percentage points. Although not enough to win a Kaggle medal, my model was in the top 15% of all submissions. Not bad!

My source code for the contest is available here.

# What if math contests were scored using Principal Component Analysis?

In many math competitions, all problems are weighted equally, even though the problems have very different difficulties. Sometimes, the harder problems are weighted more. But how should we assign weights to each problem?

Usually, the organizers make up weights based on how difficult they believe the problems are. However, they sometimes misjudge the difficulty of problems. Wouldn’t it be better if the weightings were determined from data?

Let’s try Principal Component Analysis!

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a statistical procedure that finds a transformation of the data that maximizes the variance. In our case, the first principal component gives a relative weighting of the problems that maximizes the variance of the total scores. This makes sense because we want to separate the good and bad students in a math contest.

## IMO 2017 Data

The International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) is an annual math competition for top high school students around the world. It consists of six problems, divided between two days: on each day, contestants are given 4.5 hours to solve three problems.

Here are the 2017 problems, if you want to try them.

Above: Score distribution for IMO 2017

This year, 615 students wrote the IMO. Problems 1 and 4 were the easiest, with the majority of contestants receiving full scores. Problems 3 and 6 were the hardest: only 2 students solved the third problem. Problems 2 and 5 were somewhere in between.

This is a good dataset to play with, because the individual results show what each student scored for every problem.

## Derivation of PCA for the 1-dimensional case

Let $X$ be a matrix containing all the data, where each column represents one problem. There are 615 contestants and 6 problems so $X$ has 615 rows and 6 columns.

We wish to find a weight vector $\vec u \in \mathbb{R}^{6 \times 1}$ such that the variance of $X \vec u$ is maximized. Of course, scaling up $\vec u$ by a constant factor also increases the variance, so we need the constraint that $| \vec u | = 1$.

First, PCA requires that we center $X$ so that the mean for each of the problems is 0, so we subtract each column by its mean. This transformation shifts the total score by a constant, and doesn’t affect the relative weights of the problems.

Now, $X \vec u$ is a vector containing the total scores of all the contestants; its variance is the sum of squares of its elements, or $| X \vec u |^2$.

To maximize $|X \vec u |^2$ subject to $|\vec u| = 1$, we take the singular value decomposition of $X = U \Sigma V^T$. Then, the leftmost column of $V$ (corresponding to the largest singular value) gives $\vec u$ that maximizes $| X \vec u|^2$. This gives the first principal axis, and we are done.

## Experiments

Running PCA on the IMO 2017 data produced interesting results. After re-scaling the weights so that the minimum possible score is 0 and the maximum possible score is 42 (to match IMO’s scoring), PCA recommends the following weights:

• Problem 1: 9.15 points
• Problem 2: 9.73 points
• Problem 3: 0.15 points
• Problem 4: 15.34 points
• Problem 5: 5.59 points
• Problem 6: 2.05 points

This is the weighting that produces the highest variance. That’s right, solving the hardest problem in the history of the IMO would get you a fraction of 1 point. P4 had the highest variance of the six problems, so PCA gave it the highest weight.

The scores and rankings produced by the PCA scheme are reasonably well-correlated with the original scores. Students that did well still did well, and students that did poorly still did poorly. The top students that solved the harder problems (2, 3, 5, 6) usually also solved the easier problems (1 and 2). The students that would be the unhappiest with this scheme are a small number of people who solved P3 or P6, but failed to solve P4.

Here’s a comparison of score distributions with the original and PCA scheme. There is a lot less separation between the best of the best students and the middle of the pack. It is easy to check that PCA does indeed produce higher variance than weighing all six problems equally.

Now, let me comment on the strange results.

It’s clearly absurd to give 0.15 points to the hardest problem on the IMO, and make P4, a much easier problem, be worth 100 times more. But it makes sense from PCA’s perspective. About 99% of the students scored zero on P3, so its variance is very low. Given that PCA has a limited amount of weight to “spend” to increase the total variance, it would be wasteful to use much of it on P3.

The PCA score distribution has less separation between the good students and the best students. However, by giving a lot of weight to P1 and P4, it clearly separates mediocre students that solve one problem from the ones who couldn’t solve anything at all.

In summary, scoring math contests using PCA doesn’t work very well. Although it maximizes overall variance, math contests are asymmetrical as we care about differentiating between the students on the top end of the spectrum.

## Source Code

If you want to play with the data, I uploaded it as a Kaggle dataset.

The code for this analysis is available here.

# Simple models in Kaggle competitions

This week I participated in the Porto Seguro Kaggle competition. Basically, you’re asked to predict a binary variable — whether or not an insurance claim will be filed — based on a bunch of numerical and categorical variables.

With over 5000 teams entering the competition, it was the largest Kaggle competition ever. I guess this is because it’s a fairly well-understood problem (binary classification) with a reasonably sized dataset, making it accessible to beginning data scientists.

Kaggle is a machine learning competition platform filled with thousands of smart data scientists, machine learning experts, and statistics PhDs, and I am not one of them. Still, I was curious to see how my relatively simple tools would fare against the sophisticated techniques on the leaderboard.

The first thing I tried was logistic regression. All you had to do was load the data into memory, invoke the glm() function in R, and output the predictions. Initially my logistic regression wasn’t working properly and I got a negative score. It took a day or so to figure out how to do logistic regression properly, which got me a score of 0.259 on the public leaderboard.

Next, I tried gradient boosted decision trees, which I had learned about in a stats class but never actually used before. In R, this is simple — I just needed to change the glm() call to gbm() and fit the model again. This improved my score to 0.265. It was near the end of the competition so I stopped here.

At this point, the top submission had a score of 0.291, and 0.288 was enough to get a gold medal. Yet despite being within 10% of the top submission in overall accuracy, I was still in the bottom half of the leaderboard, ranking in the 30th percentile.

The public leaderboard looked like this:

Above: Public leaderboard of the Porto Seguro Kaggle competition two days before the deadline. Line in green is my submission, scoring 0.265.

This graph illustrates the nature of this competition. At first, progress is easy, and pretty much anyone who submitted anything that was not “predict all zeros” got over 0.200. From there, you make steady, incremental progress until about 0.280 or so, but afterwards, any further improvements is limited.

The top of the leaderboard is very crowded, with over 1000 teams having the score of 0.287. Many teams used ensembles of XGBoost and LightGBM models with elaborate feature engineering. In the final battle for the private leaderboard, score differences of less than 0.001 translated to hundreds of places on the leaderboard and spelled the difference between victory and defeat.

Above: To run 90% as fast as Usain Bolt, you need to run 100 meters in 10.5 seconds. To get 90% of the winning score in Kaggle, you just need to call glm().

This pattern is common in Kaggle and machine learning — often, a simple model can do quite well, at least the same order of magnitude as a highly optimized solution. It’s quite remarkable that you can get a decent solution with a day or two of work, and then, 5000 smart people working for 2 months can only improve it by 10%. Perhaps this is obvious to someone doing machine learning long enough, but we should look back and consider how rare this is. The same does not apply to most activities. You cannot play piano for two days and become 90% as good as a concert pianist. Likewise, you cannot train for two days and run 90% as fast as Usain Bolt.

Simple models won’t win you Kaggle competitions, but we shouldn’t understate their effectiveness. Not only are they quick to develop, but they are also easier to interpret, and can be trained in a few seconds rather than hours. It’s comforting to see how far you can get with simple solutions — the gap between the best and the rest isn’t so big after all.

Read further discussion of this post on the Kaggle forums!