Alpine Data Labs presents a deep dive into our implementation of Multinomial Logistic Regression with Apache Spark. Machine Learning Engineer DB Tsai takes us through the technical implementation details step by step. First, he explains how the state of the art Machine Learning on Hadoop is not doing fulfilling the promise of Big Data. Next, he explains how Spark is a perfect match for machine learning through their in-memory cache-ing capability demonstrating 100x performance improvement. Third, he takes us through each aspect of a multinomial logistic regression and how this is developed with Spark APIs. Fourth, he demonstrates an extension of MLOR and training parameters. Finally, he benchmarks MLOR with 11M rows, 123 features, 11% non-zero elements with a 5 node Hadoop cluster. Finally, he shows Alpine's unique visual environment with Spark and verifies the performance with the job tracker. In conclusion, Alpine supports the state of the art Cloudera and Pivotal Hadoop clusters and performances at a level that far exceeds its next nearest competitor.

1. Multinomial Logistic Regression
with Apache Spark
DB Tsai
Machine Learning Engineer
May 1st
, 2014

2. Machine Learning with Big Data
● Hadoop MapReduce solutions
● MapReduce is scaling well for batch processing
● However, lots of machine learning algorithms
are iterative by nature.
● There are lots of tricks people do, like training
with subsamples of data, and then average the
models. Why big data with approximation?
+ =

3. Lightning-fast cluster computing
● Empower users to iterate through the data by
utilizing the in-memory cache.
● Logistic regression runs
up to 100x faster than
Hadoop M/R in memory.
● We're able to train
exact model without doing any approximation.

4. Binary Logistic Regression
d =
ax1+bx2+cx0
√a2
+b2
where x0=1
P( y=1∣⃗x , ⃗w)=
exp(d )
1+exp(d )
=
exp(⃗x ⃗w)
1+exp(⃗x ⃗w)
P ( y=0∣⃗x , ⃗w)=
1
1+exp(⃗x ⃗w)
log
P ( y=1∣⃗x , ⃗w)
P( y=0∣⃗x , ⃗w)
=⃗x ⃗w
w0=
c
√a2
+b2
w1=
a
√a2
+b2
w2=
b
√a2
+b2
wherew0 iscalled as intercept

5. Training Binary Logistic Regression
● Maximum Likelihood estimation
From a training data
and labels
● We want to find that maximizes the
likelihood of data defined by
● We can take log of the equation, and minimize
it instead. The Log-Likelihood becomes the
loss function.
X =( ⃗x1 , ⃗x2 , ⃗x3 ,...)
Y =( y1, y2, y3, ...)
⃗w
L( ⃗w , ⃗x1, ... , ⃗xN )=P ( y1∣⃗x1 , ⃗w)P ( y2∣⃗x2 , ⃗w)... P( yN∣ ⃗xN , ⃗w)
l( ⃗w ,⃗x)=log P(y1∣⃗x1 , ⃗w)+log P( y2∣⃗x2 , ⃗w)...+log P( yN∣ ⃗xN , ⃗w)

6. Optimization
● First Order Minimizer
Require loss, gradient of loss function
– Gradient Decent is step size
– Limited-memory BFGS (L-BFGS)
– Orthant-Wise Limited-memory Quasi-Newton
(OWLQN)
– Coordinate Descent (CD)
– Trust Region Newton Method (TRON)
● Second Order Minimizer
Require loss, gradient and hessian of loss function
– Newton-Raphson, quadratic convergence. Fast!
● Ref: Journal of Machine Learning Research 11 (2010) 3183-
3234, Chih-Jen Lin et al.
⃗wn+1=⃗wn−γ ⃗G , γ
⃗wn+1=⃗wn−H−1 ⃗G

7. Problem of Second Order Minimizer
● Scale horizontally (the numbers of training
data) by leveraging Spark to parallelize this
iterative optimization process.
● Don't scale vertically (the numbers of training
features). Dimension of Hessian is
● Recent applications from document
classification and computational linguistics are
of this type.
dim(H )=[(k−1)(n+1)]
2
where k is numof class ,nis num of features

8. L-BFGS
● It's a quasi-Newton method.
● Hessian matrix of second derivatives doesn't
need to be evaluated directly.
● Hessian matrix is approximated using gradient
evaluations.
● It converges a way faster than the default
optimizer in Spark, Gradient Decent.
● We love open source! Alpine Data Labs
contributed our L-BFGS to Spark, and it's
already merged in Spark-1157.

9. Training Binary Logistic Regression
l( ⃗w ,⃗x) = ∑
k=1
N
log P( yk∣⃗xk , ⃗w)
= ∑k=1
N
yk log P ( yk=1∣⃗xk , ⃗w)+(1−yk )log P ( yk =0∣⃗xk , ⃗w)
= ∑k=1
N
yk log
exp( ⃗xk ⃗w)
1+exp( ⃗xk ⃗w)
+(1−yk )log
1
1+exp( ⃗xk ⃗w)
= ∑k=1
N
yk ⃗xk ⃗w−log(1+exp( ⃗xk ⃗w))
Gradient : Gi (⃗w ,⃗x)=
∂l( ⃗w ,⃗x)
∂ wi
=∑k=1
N
yk xki−
exp( ⃗xk ⃗w)
1+exp( ⃗xk ⃗w)
xki
Hessian: H ij (⃗w ,⃗x)=
∂∂l( ⃗w ,⃗x)
∂wi ∂w j
=−∑k=1
N
exp( ⃗xk ⃗w)
(1+exp( ⃗xk ⃗w))2
xki xkj

10. Overfitting
P ( y=1∣⃗x , ⃗w)=
exp(zd )
1+exp(zd )
=
exp(⃗x ⃗w)
1+exp(⃗x ⃗w)

11. Regularization
● The loss function becomes
● The loss function of regularizer doesn't
depend on data. Common regularizers are
– L2 Regularization:
– L1 Regularization:
● L1 norm is not differentiable at zero!
ltotal (⃗w ,⃗x)=lmodel (⃗w ,⃗x)+lreg( ⃗w)
lreg (⃗w)=λ∑i=1
N
wi
2
lreg (⃗w)=λ∑i=1
N
∣wi∣
⃗G (⃗w ,⃗x)total=⃗G(⃗w ,⃗x)model+⃗G( ⃗w)reg
̄H ( ⃗w ,⃗x)total= ̄H (⃗w ,⃗x)model+ ̄H (⃗w)reg

12. Mini School of Spark APIs
● map(func) : Return a new distributed dataset
formed by passing each element of the source
through a function func.
● reduce(func) : Aggregate the elements of the
dataset using a function func (which takes two
arguments and returns one). The function
should be commutative and associative so
that it can be computed correctly in parallel.
No “key” thing here compared with Hadoop
M/R.

13. Example – No More “Word Count”!
Let's compute the mean of numbers.
3.0
2.0
1.0
5.0
Executor 1
Executor 2
map
map
(1.0, 1)
(5.0, 1)
(3.0, 1)
(2.0, 1)
reduce
(5.0, 2)
reduce (11.0, 4)
Shuffle

14. ● The previous example using map(func) will
create new tuple object, which may cause
Garbage Collection issue.
● Like the combiner in Hadoop Map Reduce,
for each tuple emitted from map(func), there is
no guarantee that they will be combined
locally in the same executor by reduce(func).
It may increase the traffic in shuffle phase.
● In Hadoop, we address this by in-mapper
combiner or aggregating the result in global
variables which have scope to entire partition.
The same approach can be used in Spark.

15. Mini School of Spark APIs
● mapPartitions(func) : Similar to map, but runs
separately on each partition (block) of the
RDD, so func must be of type Iterator[T] =>
Iterator[U] when running on an RDD of type T.
● This API allows us to have global variables on
entire partition to aggregate the result locally
and efficiently.

16. Better Mean
of Numbers
Implementation
3.0
2.0
Executor 1
reduce (11.0, 4)
Shuffle
var counts = 0
var sum = 0.0
loop
var counts = 2
var sum = 5.0
3.0
2.0
(5.0, 2)
1.0
5.0
Executor 2
var counts = 0
var sum = 0.0
loop
var counts = 2
var sum = 6.0
1.0
5.0
(6.0, 2)
mapPartitions

17. More Idiomatic Scala Implementation
● aggregate(zeroValue: U)(seqOp: (U, T) => U,
combOp: (U, U) => U): U zeroValue is a neutral "zero value"
with type U for initialization. This is
analogous to
in previous example.
var counts = 0
var sum = 0.0
seqOp is function taking
(U, T) => U, where U is aggregator
initialized as zeroValue. T is each
line of values in RDD. This is
analogous to mapPartition in
previous example.
combOp is function taking
(U, U) => U. This is essentially
combing the results between
different executors. The
functionality is the same as
reduce(func) in previous example.

18. Approach of Parallelization in Spark
Spark Driver
JVM
Time
Spark Executor 1
JVM
Spark Executor 2
JVM
1) Find available resources in
cluster, and launch executor JVMs.
Also initialize the weights.
2) Ask executors to load the data
into executors' JVMs
2) Trying to load the data into memory. If the data is bigger
than memory, it will be partial cached.
(The data locality from source will be taken care by Spark)
3) Ask executors to compute loss, and
gradient of each training sample
(each row) given the current weights.
Get the aggregated results after
the Reduce Phase in executors.
5) If the regularization is enabled,
compute the loss and gradient of
regularizer in driver since it doesn't
depend on training data but only
depends on weights. Add them into
the results from executors.
3) Map Phase:
Compute the loss and gradient of each row of training data
locally given the weights obtained from the driver. Can either
emit each result or sum them up in local aggregators.
4) Reduce Phase:
Sum up the losses and gradients emitted from the Map Phase
Taking a rest!
6) Plug the loss and gradient from
model and regularizer into optimizer
to get the new weights. If the
differences of weights and losses
are larger than criteria,
GO BACK TO 3)
Taking a rest!
7) Finish the model training! Taking a rest!

19. Step 3) and 4)
● This is the implementation of step 3) and 4) in
MLlib before Spark 1.0
● gradient can have implementations of
Logistic Regression, Linear Regression, SVM,
or any customized cost function.
● Each training data will create new “grad”
object after gradient.compute.

20. Step 3) and 4) with mapPartitions

21. Step 3) and 4) with aggregate
● This is the implementation of step 3) and 4) in
MLlib in coming Spark 1.0
● No unnecessary object creation! It's helpful
when we're dealing with large features training
data. GC will not kick in the executor JVMs.

22. Extension to Multinomial Logistic Regression
● In Binary Logistic Regression
● For K classes multinomial problem where labels
ranged from [0, K-1], we can generalize it via
● The model, weights becomes
(K-1)(N+1) matrix, where N is number of features.
log
P( y=1∣⃗x , ̄w)
P ( y=0∣⃗x , ̄w)
=⃗x ⃗w1
log
P ( y=2∣⃗x , ̄w)
P ( y=0∣⃗x , ̄w)
=⃗x ⃗w2
...
log
P ( y=K −1∣⃗x , ̄w)
P ( y=0∣⃗x , ̄w)
=⃗x ⃗wK −1
log
P( y=1∣⃗x , ⃗w)
P ( y=0∣⃗x , ⃗w)
=⃗x ⃗w
̄w=(⃗w1, ⃗w2, ... , ⃗wK −1)T
P( y=0∣⃗x , ̄w)=
1
1+∑
i=1
K −1
exp(⃗x ⃗wi )
P( y=1∣⃗x , ̄w)=
exp(⃗x ⃗w2)
1+∑
i=1
K −1
exp(⃗x ⃗wi)
...
P( y=K −1∣⃗x , ̄w)=
exp(⃗x ⃗wK −1)
1+∑i=1
K −1
exp(⃗x ⃗wi )

23. Training Multinomial Logistic Regression
l( ̄w ,⃗x) = ∑
k=1
N
log P( yk∣⃗xk , ̄w)
= ∑k=1
N
α( yk)log P( y=0∣⃗xk , ̄w)+(1−α( yk ))log P ( yk∣⃗xk , ̄w)
= ∑k=1
N
α( yk)log
1
1+∑
i=1
K −1
exp(⃗x ⃗wi)
+(1−α( yk ))log
exp(⃗x ⃗w yk
)
1+∑
i=1
K−1
exp(⃗x ⃗wi)
= ∑
k=1
N
(1−α( yk ))⃗x ⃗wyk
−log(1+∑
i=1
K−1
exp(⃗x ⃗wi))
Gradient : Gij ( ̄w ,⃗x)=
∂l( ̄w ,⃗x)
∂wij
=∑k=1
N
(1−α( yk )) xkj δi , yk
−
exp( ⃗xk ⃗w)
1+exp( ⃗xk ⃗w)
xkj
α( yk )=1 if yk=0
α( yk )=0 if yk≠0
Define:
Note that the first index “i” is for classes, and the second index “j” is for features.
Hessian: H ij ,lm( ̄w ,⃗x)=
∂∂l ( ̄w ,⃗x)
∂wij ∂wlm

24. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
0.3
0.35
0.4
0.45
0.5
0.55
0.6
0.65
0.7
Logistic Regression with a9a Dataset (11M rows, 123 features, 11% non-zero elements)
16 executors in INTEL Xeon E3-1230v3 32GB Memory * 5 nodes Hadoop 2.0.5 alpha cluster
L-BFGS Dense Features
L-BFGS Sparse Features
GD Sparse Features
GD Dense Features
Seconds
Log-Likelihood/NumberofSamples
a9a Dataset Benchmark

25. a9a Dataset Benchmark
-1 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15
0.3
0.35
0.4
0.45
0.5
0.55
0.6
0.65
0.7
Logistic Regression with a9a Dataset (11M rows, 123 features, 11% non-zero elements)
16 executors in INTEL Xeon E3-1230v3 32GB Memory * 5 nodes Hadoop 2.0.5 alpha cluster
L-BFGS
GD
Iterations
Log-Likelihood/NumberofSamples

26. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
Logistic Regression with rcv1 Dataset (6.8M rows, 677,399 features, 0.15% non-zero elements)
16 executors in INTEL Xeon E3-1230v3 32GB Memory * 5 nodes Hadoop 2.0.5 alpha cluster
LBFGS Sparse Vector
GD Sparse Vector
Second
Log-Likelihood/NumberofSamples
rcv1 Dataset Benchmark

27. news20 Dataset Benchmark
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
1.2
Logistic Regression with news20 Dataset (0.14M rows, 1,355,191 features, 0.034% non-zero elements)
16 executors in INTEL Xeon E3-1230v3 32GB Memory * 5 nodes Hadoop 2.0.5 alpha cluster
LBFGS Sparse Vector
GD Sparse Vector
Second
Log-Likelihood/NumberofSamples

28. Alpine Demo

29. Alpine Demo

30. Alpine Demo

31. Conclusion
● Alpine supports state of the art Cloudera CDH5
● Spark runs programs 100x faster than Hadoop
● Spark turns iterative big data machine learning problems
into single machine problems
● MLlib provides lots of state of art machine learning
implementations, e.g. K-means, linear regression,
logistic regression, ALS, collaborative filtering, and
Naive Bayes, etc.
● Spark provides ease of use APIs in Java, Scala, or
Python, and interactive Scala and Python shell
● Spark is Apache project, and it's the most active big data
open source project nowadays.