# What is .NET Jupyter Notebook

In this blog post, we are going to explore the main features in the new C# Juypter Notebook. For those who used Notebook from other programming languages like Python or R, this would be an easy task. First of all, the Notebook concept provides a quick, simple and straightforward way to present a mix of text and $\Latex$, source code implementation and its output. This means you have a full-featured platform to write a paper or blog post, presentation slides, lecture notes, and other educated materials.

The notebook consists of cells, where a user can write code or markdown text. Once he completes the cell content confirmation for cell editing can be achieved by Ctrl+Enter or by press run button from the notebook toolbar. The image below shows the notebook toolbar, with a run button. The popup combo box shows the type of cell the user can define. In the case of text, Markdown should be selected, for writing source code the cell should be Code.

To start writing code to C# Notebook, the first thing we should do is install NuGet packages or add assembly references and define using statements. In order to do that, the following code installs several nuget packages, and declare several using statements. But before writing code, we should add a new cell by pressing + toolbar button.

The first few NuGet packages are packages for ML.NET. Then we install the XPlot package for data visualization in .NET Notebook, and then we install a set of Daany packages for data analytics. First, we install Daany.DataFrame for data exploration and analysis, and then Daany.DataFrame.Ext set of extensions for data manipulation used with ML.NET.

//ML.NET Packages
#r "nuget:Microsoft.ML.LightGBM"
#r "nuget:Microsoft.ML"
#r "nuget:Microsoft.ML.DataView"

//Install XPlot package
#r "nuget:XPlot.Plotly"

//Install Daany.DataFrame
#r "nuget:Daany.DataFrame"
#r "nuget:Daany.DataFrame.Ext"
using System;
using System.Linq;

//Daany data frame
using Daany;
using Daany.Ext;

//Plotting functionalities
using XPlot.Plotly;

//ML.NET using
using Microsoft.ML;
using Microsoft.ML.Data;
using Microsoft.ML.Trainers.LightGbm;


The output for the above code:

Once the NuGet packages are installed successfully, we can start with data exploration. But before this declare few using statements:

We can define classes or methods globally. The following code implements the formatter method for displaying Daany.DataFrame in the output cell.

// Temporal DataFrame formatter for this early preview
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Html;
Formatter<DataFrame>.Register((df, writer) =>
{

//renders the rows
var rows = new List<List<IHtmlContent>>();
var take = 20;

//
for (var i = 0; i < Math.Min(take, df.RowCount()); i++)
{
var cells = new List<IHtmlContent>();
foreach (var obj in df[i])
{
}
}

var t = table(
tbody(
rows.Select(
r => tr(r))));

writer.Write(t);
}, "text/html");


For this demo we will used famous Iris data set. We will download the file from the internet, load it by using Daany.DataFrame, a display few first rows. In order to do that we run the folloing code:

var url = "https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/iris/iris.data";
var cols = new string[] {"sepal_length","sepal_width", "petal_length", "petal_width", "flower_type"};
var df = DataFrame.FromWeb(url, sep:',',names:cols);


The output looks like this:

As can be seen, the last line from the previous code has no semicolon, which means the line should be displayed in the output cell. Let’s move on, and implement two new columns. The new columns will be sepal and petal area for the flower. The expression we are going to use is:

$$PetalArea = petal_width \cdot petal_length;\ SepalArea = sepal_width \cdot sepal_length;$$

As can be seen, the $\LaTeX$ is fully supported in the notebook.

The above formulea is implemented in the following code:

//calculate two new columns into dataset
df.AddCalculatedColumn("SepalArea", (r, i) => Convert.ToSingle(r["sepal_width"]) * Convert.ToSingle(r["sepal_length"]));
df.AddCalculatedColumn("PetalArea", (r, i) => Convert.ToSingle(r["petal_width"]) * Convert.ToSingle(r["petal_length"]));


The data frame has two new columns. They indicate the area for the flower. In order to see basic statistics parameters for each of the defined columns, we call Describe method.

//see descriptive stats of the final ds
df.Describe(false)


From the table above, we can see the flower column has only 3 values. The most frequent value has a frequency equal to 50, which is an indicator of a balanced dataset.

# Data visualization

The most powerful feature in Notebook is a data visualization. In this section, we are going to plot some interesting charts.

In order to see how sepal and petal areas are spread in 2D plane, the following plot is implemented:

//plot the data in order to see how areas are spread in the 2d plane
//XPlot Histogram reference: http://tpetricek.github.io/XPlot/reference/xplot-plotly-graph-histogram.html

var faresHistogram = Chart.Plot(new Graph.Histogram(){x = df["flower_type"], autobinx = false, nbinsx = 20});
var layout = new Layout.Layout(){title="Distribution of iris flower"};
faresHistogram.WithLayout(layout);
display(faresHistogram);


The chart is also an indication of a balanced dataset.

Now lets plot areas depending on the flower type:

// Plot Sepal vs. Petal area with flower type

var chart = Chart.Plot(
new Graph.Scatter()
{
x = df["SepalArea"],
y = df["PetalArea"],
mode = "markers",
marker = new Graph.Marker()
{
color = df["flower_type"].Select(x=>x.ToString()=="Iris-virginica"?1:(x.ToString()=="Iris-versicolor"?2:3)),
colorscale = "Jet"
}
}
);

var layout = new Layout.Layout(){title="Plot Sepal vs. Petal Area & color scale on flower type"};
chart.WithLayout(layout);
chart.WithLegend(true);
chart.WithLabels(new string[3]{"Iris-virginica","Iris-versicolor", "Iris-setosa"});
chart.WithXTitle("Sepal Area");
chart.WithYTitle("Petal Area");
chart.Width = 800;
chart.Height = 400;

display(chart);


As can be seen from the chart above, flower types are separated almost linearly, since we used petal and sepal areas instead of width and length. With this transformation, we can get a 100% accurate ml model.

# Machine Learning

Once we finished with data transformation and visualization we can define the final data frame before machine learning application. To end this we are going to select only two columns for features and one label column which will be flower type.

//create new data-frame by selecting only three columns
var derivedDF = df["SepalArea","PetalArea","flower_type"];


Since we are going to use ML.NET, we need to declare Iris in order to load the data into ML.NET.

//Define an Iris class for machine learning.
class Iris
{
public float PetalArea { get; set; }
public float SepalArea { get; set; }
public string Species { get; set; }
}
//Create ML COntext
MLContext mlContext = new MLContext(seed:2019);


Then load the data from Daany data frame into ML.NET:

//Load Data Frame into Ml.NET data pipeline
{
//convert row object array into Iris row

var prRow = new Iris();
prRow.SepalArea = Convert.ToSingle(oRow["SepalArea"]);
prRow.PetalArea = Convert.ToSingle(oRow["PetalArea"]);
prRow.Species = Convert.ToString(oRow["flower_type"]);
//
return prRow;
}));


Once we have data, we can split it into train and test sets:

//Split dataset in two parts: TrainingDataset (80%) and TestDataset (20%)
var trainTestData = mlContext.Data.TrainTestSplit(dataView, testFraction: 0.2);
var trainData = trainTestData.TrainSet;
var testData = trainTestData.TestSet;


The next step in prepare the data for training is define pipeline for dtaa transformation and feature engineering:

//one encoding output category column by defining KeyValues for each category
IEstimator<ITransformer> dataPipeline =
mlContext.Transforms.Conversion.MapValueToKey(outputColumnName: "Label", inputColumnName: nameof(Iris.Species))

//define features columns
.Append(mlContext.Transforms.Concatenate("Features",nameof(Iris.SepalArea), nameof(Iris.PetalArea)));


Once we completes the preparation paert, we can perform the training part. The training start by calling Fit to the pipeline:

%%time
// Define LightGbm algorithm estimator
IEstimator<ITransformer> lightGbm = mlContext.MulticlassClassification.Trainers.LightGbm();
//train the ML model
TransformerChain<ITransformer> model = dataPipeline.Append(lightGbm).Fit(trainData);


Once the training is completes, we have trained model which can be evaluated. In order to print the evaluation result with formatting, we are going to install Daany DataFrame extension which has implementation of printing results


//evaluate train set
var predictions = model.Transform(trainData);
var metricsTrain = mlContext.MulticlassClassification.Evaluate(predictions);
ConsoleHelper.PrintMultiClassClassificationMetrics("TRAIN Iris DataSet", metricsTrain);
ConsoleHelper.ConsoleWriteHeader("Train Iris DataSet Confusion Matrix ");
ConsoleHelper.ConsolePrintConfusionMatrix(metricsTrain.ConfusionMatrix);


//evaluate test set
var testPrediction = model.Transform(testData);
var metricsTest = mlContext.MulticlassClassification.Evaluate(testPrediction);
ConsoleHelper.PrintMultiClassClassificationMetrics("TEST Iris Dataset", metricsTest);
ConsoleHelper.ConsoleWriteHeader("Test Iris DataSet Confusion Matrix ");
ConsoleHelper.ConsolePrintConfusionMatrix(metricsTest.ConfusionMatrix);


As can be seen, we have a 100% accurate model for Iris flower recognition. Now, let’s add a new column into the data frame called Prediction to have a model prediction in the data frame.
In order to do that, we are evaluating the model on the train and the test data set. Once we have a prediction for both sets, we can join them and add as a separate column in Daany data frame. The following code does exactly what we described previously.

var flowerLabels = DataFrameExt.GetLabels(predictions.Schema).ToList();
var p1 = predictions.GetColumn<uint>("PredictedLabel").Select(x=>(int)x).ToList();
var p2 = testPrediction.GetColumn<uint>("PredictedLabel").Select(x => (int)x).ToList();
//join train and test
var p = p1.Select(x => (object)flowerLabels[x-1]).ToList();
var dic = new Dictionary<string, List<object>> { { "PredictedLabel", p } };


The output above shows the first few rows in the data frame. To see the few last rows from the data frame we call a Tail method.

dff.Tail()


In this blog post, we saw how can we be more productive when using .NET Jupyter Notebook with Machine Learning and Data Exploration and transformation, by using ML.NET and Daany – DAtaANalYtics library. Complete source code for this notebook can be found at GitHub repo: https://github.com/bhrnjica/notebooks/blob/master/net_jupyter_notebook_part2.ipynb

Yesterday at Ignite conference .NET team has announced the Jupyter Notebook for .NET languages C# and F#. This is a huge step ahead for all data scientists who want to do data science and machine learning on the .NET platform. With C# Jupyter Notebook you can perform data exploration and transformation, training, evaluation and testing your Ml models. All operations are performed by code block and you can quickly see the result without running and debugging application every time you want to change something. In order to see how it looks like, in this blog post we are going to explore some of the basic functionalities in C# Jupyter Notebook.

## How to Install .NET Jupyter Notebook

In order to install Jupyter Notebook you can see the official blog post, anyhow here I am going to present this process because it is very short and easy. Before install .NET Jupyter components, you have to install the latest version of .NET SDK and Anaconda. Once you have Anaconda installed on your machine, open Anaconda Prompt from Windows Start Menu.

To run Anaconda Prompt you have two options:

• to open power shell or
• to open classic command prompt.

Select Anaconda Powershell Prompt, and the powershell window will pop up. Once the powershell prompt is opened we can start with the installation of Jupyter Notebook components. The first step is to install the dotnet try global tool.

Type this to cmd:

dotnet tool install -g dotnet-try


After some time you should get the following message:

Then we need to install .NET Kernel by typing the following command:

dotnet try jupyter install


Then the following message should appear:

In case you have any problems with the installation please refer to official blog post or post an Issue at https://github.com/dotnet/try/issues.

Also note that this version of Jupyter Notebook is in preview, so not all actions will work as you expected. Now that you have installed C# Jupyter, you can open Jupyter notebook from the Anaconda navigator, or just type Jupyter Notebook in to Anaconda Prompt. Once we did that, your default bowers pops up and shows the starting directory in the Jupyter Notebook. If you click New button, you can see option to create C# and F# notebooks. Press C#, and the new C# notebook will appeared in the browser.

Try some basic stuff in notebook.

In the next blog post we are going to explore more and see some of the coolest features in C# Jupyter Notebook.

# Create CIFAR-10 Deep Learning Model With ANNdotNET GUI Tool

With ANNdotNET 1.2 the user is able to create and train deep learning models for image classification. Image classification module provides minimum of GUI actions in order to fully prepare data set. In this post, we are going to create and train deep learning model for CIFAR-10 data set, and see how it easy to do that with ANNdotNET v1.2.

In order to prepare data we have to download CIFAR-10 data set from official web site . The CIFAR-10 data set is provided in 6 binary batch files that should be extracted and persisted on your local machine. Number 10 in the name means that data set is created for 10 labels.The following image shows 10 labels of CIFAR-10 data set each label with few sample images.

The data set contains 60 000 (50 000 for training and validation, and 10 000 for test) tinny colored images dimensions of 32×32. There is also bigger version of the data set CIFAR-100 with 100 labels. Our task is to create deep learning model capable of recognizing only one of 10 predefined labels from each image.

## Data preparation

In order to prepare images, we need to do the following:

The following image shows extracted data set persisted in 10 label folders. The bird folder is opened and shows all images labeled for bird. The test folder contains all images created for testing the model once the model is trained.

In order to properly save all images, we need to create simple C# Console application which should extract and save all 60 000 images. Complete C# program can be downloaded from here.

In order to successfully extract the images, we have to see how those images are stored in binary files. From the official site we can see that there are 5 for training and 1 for test binary files: data_batch_1.bin, data_batch_2.bin, …, data_batch_5.bin, as well as test_batch.bin.

Each of these files is formatted as follows so that the first byte of the array is label index, and the next 3072 bytes represent the image. Each batch contains 10 000 images.

Important to know is that images are stored in CHW format which means that 1d image array is created so that the first 1024 bytes are the red channel values, the next 1024 the green, and the final 1024 the blue. The values are stored in row-major order, so the first 32 bytes are the red channel values of the first row of the image. To end this, all those information have been carried out when implementing the Extractor application. The most important methods are reshaping the 1D byte array into [3, height, width] image tensor, and creating the image from the byte tensor. The following implementation shows how 1D byte array is transformed into 3channel bitmap tensor.

static int[][][] reshape(int channel, int height, int width,  byte[] img)
{
var data = new int[channel][][];
int counter = 0;
for(int c = 0; c < channel; c++)
{
data[c] = new int[height][];
for (int y = 0; y < height; y++)
{
data[c][y] = new int[width];
for (int x = 0; x < width; x++)
{
data[c][y][x] = img[counter];
counter++;
}
}
}
return data;
}

Once the 1D byte array is transformed into tensor, the image can be created and persisted on disk. The following method iterates through all 10000 images in one batch file, extract them and persist on disk.

public static void extractandSave(byte[] batch, string destImgFolder, ref int imgCounter)
{
var nStep = 3073;//1 for label and 3072 for image
//
for (int i = 0; i < batch.Length; i += nStep)
{
var l = (int)batch[i];
var img = new ArraySegment<byte>(batch, i + 1, nStep - 1).ToArray();
// data in CIFAR-10 dataset is in CHW format, which means CHW: RR...R, GG..G, BB..B;

// while HWC: RGB, RGB, ... RGB
var reshaped = reshape(3, 32, 32, img);
var image = ArrayToImg(reshaped);
//check if folder exist
var currentFolder = destImgFolder + classNames[l];

if (!Directory.Exists(currentFolder))
Directory.CreateDirectory(currentFolder);

//save image to specified folder
image.Save(currentFolder + "\\" + imgCounter.ToString() + ".png");

imgCounter++;
}
}

Run Cifar-Extractor console application and the process of downloading, extracting and saving images will be finished in few minutes. The most important is that CIFAR-10 data set will be stored in c://sc/datasets/cifar-10 path. This is important later, when we create image classifier.

Now that we have 60000 tiny images on disk arranged by labels we can start creating deep learning model.

## Create new image classification project file in ANNdotNET

Open the latest ANNdotNET v1.2 and select New-> Image Classification project. Enter CIFAR project name and press save button. The following image shows CIFAR new ann-project:

Once we have new project, we can start defining image labels by pressing Add button. For each 10 labels we need to add new label item in the list. In each item the following fields should be defined:

• Image label
• Path to images with the label.
• Query – in case we need to get all images within the specified path with certain part of the name. In case all images withing the specified path are images that indicate one label, query should be empty string.

Beside Label item, image transformation should be defined in order to define the size of the images, as well as how many images create validation/test data set.

Assuming the CIFAR-10 data set is extracted at c:/sc/datasets/cifar-10 folder, the following image shows how label items should be defined:

In case label item should be removed from the list, this is done by selecting the item, and then pressing Remove button. Beside image properties, we should defined how many images belong to validation data set. As can be seen 20% of all extracted images will be created validation data set. Notice that images from the test folder are not part of those two data set. they will be used for testing phase once the model is trained. Now that we done with data preparation we can move to the next step: creating mlconifg file.

## Create mlconfig in ANNdotNET

By selecting New MLConfig command the new mlconfig file is created within the project explorer. Moreover by pressing F2 key on selected mlconfig tree item, we can easily change the name into “CIRAF-10-ConvNet”. The reason why we gave such name is because we are going to use convolution neural networks.

In order to define mlconfig file we need to define the following:

• Network configuration using Visual Network Designer
• Define Learning parameters
• Define training parameters

## Create Network configuration

By using Visual Network Designer (VND) we can quickly create network model. For this CIFAR-10 data set we are going to create 11 layers model with 4 Constitutional, 2 Pooling, 1 DropOut and 3 Dense layer, all followed by Scale layer:

Scale (1/255)->Conv2D(32,[3,3])->Conv2D(32,[3,3])->Pooling2d([2,2],2)->Conv2D(64,[3,3])->Conv2D(64,[3,3])->Pooling2d([2,2],2)->DropOut(0.5)->Dense(64, TanH)->Dense(32, TanH)->Dense(10,Softmax)

This network can be created so that we select appropriate layer from the VND combo box and click on Add button. The first layer is Scale layer, since we need to normalize the input values to be in interval (0,1). Then we created two sequence of Convolution, Pooling layers. Once we done with that, we can add two Dense layers with 64 and 32 neurons with TanH activation function. The last layer is output layer that must follow the output dimension, and Softmax activation function.

Once network model is defined, we can move to the next step: Setting learning and training parameters.

Learning parameters can be defined through the Learning parameters interface: For this model we can select:

• AdamLearner with 0.005 rate and 0.9 momentum value. Loss function is Classification Error, and the evaluation function is Classification Accuracy

In order to define the training parameters we switch to Training tab page and setup:

• Number of epoch
• Minibatch size
• Progress frequency
• Randomize minibatch during training

Now we have enough information to start model training. The training process is started by selecting Run command from the application ribbon. In order to get good model we need to train the model at least few thousands epoch. The following image shows trained model with training history charts.

The model is trained with exactly of 4071 epochs, with network parameters mentioned above. As can be seen from the upper chart, mini-batch loss function was CrossEntropyWithSoftmax, while the evaluation function was classification accuracy.  The bottom chart shows performance of the training and validation data sets for each 4071 epoch. We can also recognize that validation data set has roughly the same accuracy as training data set which indicates the model is trained well.  More details about model performance can be seen on the next image:

Upper charts of the image above show actual and predicted values for training (left) and validation (right). Most of the point values are blue and overlap the orange which indicates that most of value are correctly predicted. The charts can be zoomed and view details of each value.The bottom part of the evaluation show performance parameters of the model for corresponded data set. As can be seen the trained model has 0.91 overall accuracy for training data set and 0.826 overall accuracy for validation data set, which indicate pretty good accuracy of the model. Moreover, the next two images shows confusion matrix for the both data sets, which in details shows how model predict all 10 labels.

The last part of the post is testing model for test data set. For that purpose we selected 10 random images from each label of the test set, and evaluate the model. The following images shows the model correctly predicted all 10 images.

## Conclusion

ANNdotNET v1.2 image classification module offers complete data preparation and model development for image classification. The user can prepare data for training, create network model with Neural Network Designer, and perform set of statistical tools against trained model in order to validate and evaluate model. The important note is that the data set of images must be stored on specific location in order to use this trained model shown in the blog post. The trained model, as well as mlcofig files, can be load directly into ANNdotNET project explorer by doublick on CIFAR-10.zip feed example.

ANNdotNET as open source project provides outstanding way in complete development of deep learning model.

# How to visualize CNTK network in C#

When building deep learning models, it is often required to check the model for consistency and proper parameters definition. In ANNdotNET, ml network models are designed using Visual Network Designer (VND), so it is easy to see the network configuration. Beside VND, in ANNdotNET there are several visualization features on different level: network preparation, model training phase, post training evaluation, performance analysis, and export results. In this blog post we will learn how to use those features when working with deep learning models

## Visualization during network preparation and model training

When preparing network and training parameters, we need information about data sets, input format and output type. This information is relevant for selecting what type of network model to configure, what types of layers we will use, and what learner to select. For example the flowing image shows  network configuration containing of 2 embedding layers, 3 dense layers and 2 dropout layers. This network configuration is used to train CNTK model for mushroom data set. As can be seen network layers are arranged as listbox items, and the user has possibility to see, on the highest level, how neural networks looks like, which layers are included in the network, and how many dimensions each layer is defined. This is very helpful, since it provides the way of building network very quickly and accurately, and it requires much less times in comparisons to use traditional way of coding the network in python, or other programming language.

ANNdotNET Network Settings page provides pretty much information about the network, input and output layers, what data set are defined, as well as whole network configuration arranged in layers. Beside network related information, the Network Settings tab page also provides the learning parameters for the network training. More about Visual Network Designer the ready can find on one of the previous blog post.

Since ANNdotNET implements MLEngine which is based on CNTK, so all CNTK related visualization features could be used. The CNTK  library provides rich set of visualizations. For example you can use Tensorboard in CNTK  for visualization not just computational graph, but also training history, model evaluation etc. Beside Tensorboard, CNTK provides logger module which uses Graphviz tool for visualizing network graph. The bad news of this is that all above features cannot be run on C#, since those implementation are available only in python.

This is one of the main reason why ANNdotNET provides rich set of visualizations for .NET platform. This includes: training history, model evaluation for training and validation data set, as well as model performance analysis. The following image show some of the visualization features: the training history (loss and evaluation) of minibatches during training of mushroom model:

Moreover, the following image shows evaluation of training and validation set for each iteration during training:

Those graphs are generated during training phase, so the user can see what is happening with the model.  This is of tremendous help, when deciding when to stop the training process, or are training parameters produce good model at all, or this can be helpful in case when can stop and change parameters values. In case we need to stop the training process immediately, ANNdotNET provides Stop command which stops training process at any time.

## Model performance visualization

Once the model is trained, ANNdotNET provides performance analysis tool for all three types of ML problems: regression, binary and multi class classification.

Since the mushrooms project is binary ML problem the following image shows the performance of the trained model:

## Using Graphviz to visualize CNTK network graph in C#

We have seen that ANNdotNET provides all types of visualizations CNTK models, and those features are provided by mouse click through the GUI interfaces. One more feature are coming to ANNdotNET v1.1 which uses Grpahviz to visualize CNTK network graph. The feature is implemented based on original CNTK python implementation with some modification and style.

In order to use Graphviz to visualize network computation graph the following requirements must be met:

• Install Graphviz on you machine.
• Register Graphviz path as system variable. (See image below)

Now that you have install Graphviz tool, you can generate nice image of your network model directly in ANNdotNET just by click on Graph button above the Visual Network Designer (see image 1).

Here is some of nice graphs which can be generate from ANNdotNET preclaculated models.

In case you like this nice visualization features go to http://github.com/bhrnjica/anndotnet, download the latest version from release section or just download the source code and try it with Visual Studio, but don’t forget to give a star.

In the next blog post I will show you how visualization of CNTK computational graph is implemented, so you will be able to use it in your custom solutions.

# Export options in ANNdotNET

ANNdotNET v1.0 has been release a few weeks ago, and the feedback is very positive. Also up to now there is no any blocking or serious bug in the release which makes me very happy. For this blog post we are going through Export options in ANNdotNET.

The ANNdotNET supposed to be an application which can offer whole life-cycle for  machine learning project: from the defining raw data set, cleaning and features engineering, to training and evaluation of the model. Also with different mlconfig files within the same project, the user has ability to create as many ml configurations as wants. Once the user select the best ml configuration, and the training and evaluation process completes, the next step in ML project life-cycle is the model deployment/export.

Currently, ANNdotNET defines three export options:

• Export model result to CSV file,
• Export model and model result to Excel, and
• Export model in CNTK file format.

With those three export option, we can achieve many ML scenarios.

## Export to CSV

Export to CSV provides exporting actual and predicted values of testing data set to comma separated txt file. In case the testing data set is not provided, the result of validation data set will exported. In case nor testing nor validation dataset are not provided the export process is terminated.

The export process starts by selecting appropriate mlconfig file. The network model must be trained prior to be exported.

Once the export process completes, the csv file is created on disk. We can import the exported result in Excel, and similar content will be shows as image below:

Exported result is shows in two columns. The actual and predicted values. In case the classification result is exported, in the header the information about class values are exported.

## Export to Excel

Export to Excel option is more than just exporting the result. In fact, it is deployment of the model into Excel environment. Beside exporting all defined data sets (training, Validation, and Test) the model is also exported. Predicted values are calculated by using ANNdotNET Excel Add-in, which the model evaluation looks like calling ordinary Excel formula.  More information how it works can be found here.

Exported xlsx file can be opened, and the further analysis for the model and related data sets can be continued. The following image shows exported model for Concrete Slum Test example. Since only two data sets are defined (training and validation) those data sets are exported. As can be seen the predicted column is not filled, only the row is filled with the formula that must be evaluated by inserting equal sign “=” in front of the formula.

Once the formula is evaluated for the first row, we can use Excel trick to copy it on other rows.

The same situation is for other data sets separated in Excel Worksheets.

## Export to CNTK

The last option allows to export CNTK trained model in CNTK format. Also ONNX format will be supported as soon as being available on CNTK for C# library. This option is handy in situation where trained CNTK model being evaluated in other solutions.

For this blog post, there is a short video which the reader can see all three options in actions.

# Sentiment Analysis using ANNdotNET

The October 2018 issue of MSDN magazine brings the article “Sentiment Analysis Using CNTK” written by James McCaffrey. I was wondering if I can implement this solution in ANNdotNET as Dr. McCaffrey written in the magazine. Indeed I have implemented complete solution in less than 5 minutes.

In this blog post I am going to walk you through this very good and well written MSDN article example. I am not going to repeat the text written in the MSDN article, so it is recommendation to read the article first, and back here and implement the example in ANNdotNET. Since the ANNdotNET is GUI tool, it is interesting to see all great visualizations during the model training and evaluation. Also the ANNdotNET provides complete binary model evaluation by providing the confusion matrix, ROC Curve, and other binary performance parameters, this example makes more interesting and valuable to read.

Whole example is implemented in five steps.

## Step 1: Prepare files and folder structure

First we need to create several folders and files in order to create empty annproject. This manual creation of folders are necessary because ANNdotNET v1.0 has not option to create Empty project. This will be added in the next version.

So first, create the following set of hierarchically ordered folders:

• SentimentAnalysis
• MoveReview
• data

The following figure shows this set of folder.

Only thing we need from the MSDN article is train and test data sets. The data can be downloaded from the MSDN sample: Code_McCaffreyTestRun1018.zip. Once the zip file is downloaded unzip the sample, and copy files: imdb_sparse_train_50w.txt and indb_sparse_test_50w.txt to data folder as image above shows.

## Step 3: Create MoviewReview.ann and LSTM-Net.mlconfig files

• Open Notepad and create file with the following content:
project:|Name:MovieReview |Type:NoRawData |MLConfigs:LSTM-Net
data:|RawData:MovieReview_rawdata.txt


Save file in SentimenAnalysis folder as MovieReview.ann. The following picture shows saved annproject file on disk.

Now open Notepad again, create a new empty file. The empty file is supposed to be  mlconfig file with the content shown below. Don’t worry about the content of the file, since all those details will be visible once we open it with ANNdotNET. If you want to know more about structure of the mlconfig file, please refer to this wiki page of the ANNdotNET project.

configid:msdn-oct-2018-issue-sentiment-analysis-article
features:|x 129892 1
labels:|y 2 0
network:|Layer:Embedding 50 0 0 None 0 0 |Layer:LSTM 25 25 0 TanH 1 1 |Layer:Dense 2 0 0 Softmax 0 0
learning:|Type:AdamLearner |LRate:0.01 |Momentum:0.85 |Loss:CrossEntropyWithSoftmax |Eval:ClassificationAccuracy |L1:0 |L2:0
training:|Type:Default |BatchSize:250 |Epochs:400 |Normalization:0 |RandomizeBatch:0 |SaveWhileTraining:0 |FullTrainingSetEval:1 |ProgressFrequency:1 |ContinueTraining:0 |TrainedModel:
paths:|Training:data\imdb_sparse_train_50w.txt |Validation:data\imdb_sparse_test_50w.txt |Test:data\imdb_sparse_test_50w.txt |TempModels:temp_models |Models:models |Result:LSTM-Net_result.csv |Logs:log<span id="mce_SELREST_end" style="overflow:hidden;line-height:0;"></span>


The file should be saved in the MovieReview folder with LSTM-Net.mlconfig file name. The next image shows where mlconfig file is stored.

## Step 4. Open annproject file with ANNdotNET GUI tool

Now we have setup everything in order to open and train sentiment analysis example with ANNdotNET. Since ANNdotNET implements MLEngine which is based on CNTK, data sets are compatible and can be read by the trainer. In order to get better result we have changed learning parameter a little bit. Instead of SGD we used AdamLearner.

In case you don’t have ANNdotNET tool installed on your machine, just go to release section and download the latest version. Or clone the GitHub repository and run it within the Visual Studio. All information about how to run ANNdotNET as standalone application or as the Visual Studio solution can be found at GitHub page https://github.com/bhrnjica/anndotnet.

After simple unzipping binaries of the ANNdotNET on your machine, run it by simply selecting anndotnet.wnd.exe file. Once the ANNdotNET is running, click the Open application command and select the MoveReview.ann file. In a second the application loads the project with corresponded mlconfig file. From the project explorer, click on LSTM-NET three item, and similar content as image below should be appeared.

Everything we have written into mlconfig file are now shown in the Network settings tab page.

1. Input layer with 129892 dimensions
2. Output layer with 2 dimension (binary problem)
3. Learning parameters:
1. AdamLearner, with 0.01 lr and 0.85 momentum,
2. Loss Function is CrossEntropywithSoftmax
3. Evaluation function is ClassificationAccuracy
4. NNetwork Designer shows typical LSTM recurrent network

## Step 5. Training and Evaluation of the Example

Now that we reviewed the network settings, we can switch to the train tab page, and review the training parameters. Since we already setup training parameters in the mlconfig file, we don’t need to change anything.

Start training process by click on the Run application command. After some time we should see the following result:

If we switch to Evaluation page we can perform some statistics analysis in order to evaluate if the model is good or not. Once the evaluation tab page is shown, click on Refresh button to evaluate the model against training and validation data stets.

The left statistics are for the training dataset, and the left side is for the validation data set. As can be seen, the model perfectly predicted all data from the training data set, and about 70% of accuracy described the validation data set. Off cource, the model is not good as we expected for the production, but for this demonstration is good enough. There are also two buttons to show ROC curve, and other binary performance parameters, for both data sets, which the reader my taste.

That’s all needed in order to have complete Sentiment Analysis exemple setup and running. In case you want complete ANNdotNET project, it can be downloaded from here.

# ANNdotNET v1.0 has been released

Half year ago, in this post announced the new open source project ANNdotNET, which was ANN part of the GPdotNET v4 – artificial intelligence tool. On that day I finished my new book about machine learning and genetic programming when also released the new version of GPdotNET V5.0 genetic programming tool, without ANN and other non GP related modules. Now my second big open source project achieved the first stable released.

ANNdotNET (http://github.com/bhrnjica/anndotnet) is deep learning tool on .NET platform, which has similar workflow as GPdotNET. Both projects share several modules, mostly for data preparation, and model evaluation since all that stuff are same.

ANNdotNET is project which is more than GUI tool, since it contains CMD tool, which can be part of bigger cloud solution. There are several key concepts of the project which is worth to mention here:

## 1. Machine Learning Configuration mlconfig file

The ANNdotNET is based on so called machine learning configuration file, where everything about data, training and learning parameters, as well as neural network layers are store in the file so called mlconfig file. Along mlconfig file, there are several other file types generated during development of the ml solution. The mlconfig file can be shared between cloud services in order to prepare and transform data, train, evaluate or export ml models. If you want to see more information about files in ANNdotNET you can look at the wiki page of the project. Since the mlconfig file is independent of the tool, it can be executed with GUI or CMD tool, or any other custom tool, implemented on anndotnet API.

## 2. Machine Learning Project Explorer

In order to start developing ml solution with ANNdotNET, the first thing you do is create annproject file, by selecting New option from the Application command. Under annproject the user can create as many mlconfig files as he/she want. The annproject and related mlconfig files are presented in the ML Project Explorer, where the user can manage them as ordinary list items.

## 3. ANNdotNET MLEngine – Machine Learning Engine

ANNdotNET introduces the ANNdotNET Machine Learning Engine (MLEngine) which is responsible for training and evaluation models defined in the mlconfig files.The ML Engine relies on Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, CNTK open source library which is proved to be one of the best open source library for deep learning. Through all application’s components ML Engine exposed all great features of the CNTK e.g. GPU support for training and evaluation, different kind of learners, but also extends CNTK features with more Evaluation functions (RMSE, MSE, Classification Accuracy, Coefficient of Determination, etc.), Extended Mini-batch Sources, Trainer and Evaluation models.

MLEngine is build on top of CNTK and .NET, with ability to provide backed component for any cloud/on-premise  ML solution.

## 4. Visual Neural Network Designer

ML Engine also contains the implementation of neural network layers which supposed to be high level CNTK API very similar as layer implementation in Keras and other python based deep learning APIs. With this implementation the ANNdotNET implements the Visual Neural Network Designer called ANNdotNET NNDesigner which allows the user to design neural network configuration of any size with any type of the layers. In the first release the following layers are implemented:

• Normalization Layer – takes the numerical features and normalizes its values before getting to the network. More information can be found here.
• Dense – classic neural network layer with activation function,
• LSTM – LSTM layer with option for peephole and self-stabilization.
• Embedding – Embedding layer.
• Drop – drop layer.

More layer types will be added in the future release. More information about Visual Network Designer can be found on previous blog post.

## 5. Data Transformation

Along the ml related stuff, ANNdotNET implement set of components for data transformation from raw dataset into mlready datasets. The user doesn’t worry about complex CNTK file format, one-hot encoding, and other data and variable transformation e.g handling missing values, data normalization etc. Data transformation starts loading raw data file into ANNdotNET, then with set of GUI related options the data can be completely prepared to mlready dataset. There are set of short videos about how to quickly transform raw dataset into mlready dataset.

## 5. Model Evaluation, Saving Good Models & Retraining Trained Models

Once the model is trained, ANNdotNET provides basic evaluation tool for evaluating trained models. The MLEvaluator contains set of basic options in order to evaluate regression, binary or multi-class classification models. Without leaving ANNdotNET the user has ability to decide if the model is good or not by performing set of statistics measures agains model and related datasets (training, validation and test). Beside evaluation, ANNdotNET offers instantly evaluation during training phase, by providing an option for saving good models during training phase. On this way ANNdotNET has ability to select best trained model regardless of the number of iterations. Different strategy for selecting the best model among set of saved models will be implemented in the future. Also any previous trained models can be trained again from the last check point. This is important option in various scenario. For example to change some parameters and continue training. Also this option has ability to start training model on one machine or environment, and then continue with training on different machine or environment.

## Summary

ANNdotNET – is an open source project for deep learning on .NET Platform. This is complete GUI solution for data preparation, training, evaluation and deployment ml models. ANNdotNET introduces the ANNdotNET Machine Learning Engine ( MLEngine) which is responsible for training and evaluation models defined in the mlconfig files. The MLEngine relies on Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, CNTK open source library which is proved to be one of the best open source library for deep learning. Through all application’s components MLEngine exposed all great features of the CNTK e.g. GPU support for training and evaluation, different kind of learners. MLEngine also extends CNTK features with more evaluation functions (RMSE, MSE, Classification Accuracy, Coefficient of Determination, etc.), Extended Mini-batch Sources, Trainer and Evaluation models.
The process of creating, training, evaluating and exporting models is provided from the GUI Application and does not require knowledge for supported programming languages.

The ANNdotNET is ideal in several scenarios:

• more focus on network development and training process using classic desktop approach, instead of focusing on coding,
• less time spending on debugging source code, more focusing on different configuration and parameter variants,
• ideal for engineers/users who are not familiar with programming languages,
• in case the problem requires coding custom models, or training process, ANNdotNET CMD provides high level of API for such implementation,
• all ml configurations developed with GUI tool,can be handled with CMD tool and vice versa.

In case you like this project star it on GitHub at http://github.com/bhrnjica/anndotnet. In case you want to use it in you academic paper, please cite it appropriate as specified at this link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1461722