Quickstart

Using PyCave is really intuitive as its API closely aligns with Sklearn and PyTorch.

Installation

PyCave is available on PyPi and can simply be installed as follows:

>>> pip install pycave

Example

In order to train a Gaussian Mixture Model, you can initialize it as follows:

from pycave.bayes import GMM
gmm = GMM(num_components=16, num_features=32, covariance='spherical')

Consider now that you have some data data represented by a torch.Tensor with size (10000, 32).

If the data is very far from normal, you might consider initializing the GMM using K-Means. Note that this step is optional and deteriorates the performance as it needs to be run on the CPU.

gmm.reset_parameters(data)

Subsequently, the GMM can be fit to the data:

history = gmm.fit(data)

If a GPU is available, this call will automatically use it. (If this behavior is undesired, pass gpu=False as keyword argument to the fit method.) The returned history object carries, amongst others, the per-datapoint log-likelihood of the fitted model over the course of the EM-algorithm:

history.neg_log_likelihood

In case the data to train on is too large to fit on the GPU (or even in RAM), training can also be done in batches. For that, any iterable of batches of datapoints can be passed to the fit method. Commonly you would use a PyTorch data loader for that but it is also possible to just pass a list of two-dimensional tensors.

The fitted GMM now provides instance methods for inference:

  • gmm.evaluate computes the negative log-likelihood of some data.

  • gmm.predict returns the probability distribution for some data and all components - an argmax operation yields the most likely components for the data.

  • gmm.sample samples a given number of samples from the GMM.

Consult the package reference for GMMs for more information about the GMM.