# Chapter 5: Back Propagation for a Two layered Neural Network

Let’s take the simple neural network and walk through the same, first going through the maths and then the implementation.

Let’s write the equation of the following two layer neural network

x is the Input
y is the Output.
l is the number of layers of the Neural Network.
a is the activation function ,(we use sigmoid here)
$x \rightarrow a^{l-1} \rightarrow a^{l} \rightarrow y$

Repeating here the previous equation’s that we derived in the previous chapter

$\mathbf{ \frac {\partial C}{\partial w^2} = a^1* \sigma' (z^{2})*(a^2-y) \quad \rightarrow (A) }$ $\mathbf{ \frac {\partial C}{\partial w^1} =a^0* \sigma'(z^1)*(a^2-y).\sigma'(z^2).w^2 \quad \rightarrow \mathbb (B) }$

Note that weight is a Vector and we need to use the Vector product /dot product where weights are concerned. We will do an implementation to test out these equations to be sure.

With equations (A) and (B) we can calculate the gradient of the Loss function with respect to weights in any layel - in this example $\frac {\partial C}{\partial w^1},\frac {\partial C}{\partial w^2}$

So using the above gradients we get the new weights iteratively like below. If you notice this is exactly what is happening in gradient descent as well; only chain rule is used to calculate the gradients here. Backpropagation is the algorithm that helps calculate the gradients for each layer.

$W^{l-1}_{new} = W^{l-1}_{old} - learningRate* \delta C_0/ \delta w^{l-1}$

## Implementation

With this clear, this is not so difficult to code up. Let’s do this. I am following the blog and code here http://iamtrask.github.io/2015/07/12/basic-python-network/ adding little more explanation for each of the steps, from what we have learned.

We will use matrices to represent input and weight matrices.

x = np.array(
[
[0,0,1],
[0,1,1],
[1,0,1],
[1,1,1]
])

This is a 4*3 matrix. Note that each row is an input. lets take all this 4 as ‘training set’

y = np.array(
[
[0],
[1],
[1],
[0]
])

This is a 4*1 matrix that represent the expected output. That is for input [0,0,1] the output is [0] and for [0,1,1] the output is [1] etc.

A neural network is implemented as a set of matrices representing the weights of the network.

Let’s create a two layered network. Before that please not the formula for the neural network

So basically the output at layer l is the dot product of the weight matrix of layer l and input of the previous layer.

Now let’s see how the matrix dot product works based on the shape of matrices.

[m*n].[n*x] = [m*x]
[m*x].[x*y] = [m*y]

We take the $[mn]$ as the input matrix this is a $[43]$ matrix.

Similarly the output $y$ is a $[41]$ matrix; so we have $[my] =[4*1]$

So we have

m=4
n=3
x=?
y=1

Lets then create our two weight matrices of the above shapes, that represent the two layers of the neural network.

w0 = x
w1 = np.random.random((3,4))
w2 = np.random.random((4,1))

We can have an array of the weights to loop through, but for the time being let’s hard-code these. Note that ‘np’ stands for the popular numpy array library in Python.

We also need to code in our non linearity.We will use the Sigmoid function here.

def sigmoid(x):
return 1/(1+np.exp(-x))

# derivative of the sigmoid
def derv_sigmoid(x):
return x*(1-x)

With this we can have the output of first, second and third layer, using our equation of neural network forward propagation.

a0 = x
a1 = sigmoid(np.dot(a0,w1))

a2 = sigmoid(np.dot(a1,w2))

a2 is the calculated output from randomly initialized weights. So lets calculate the error by subtracting this from the expected value and taking the MSE.

$C = \frac{1}{2} \|y-a^l\|^2$
c0 = ((y-a2)**2)/2

Now we need to use the back-propagation algorithm to calculate how each weight has influenced the error and reduce it proportionally via Gradient Descent.

Giving below the full code with comments.

#---------------------------------------------------------------
# Boiler plate code for calculating Sigmoid, derivative etc
#---------------------------------------------------------------

import numpy as np
# seed random numbers to make calculation deterministic
np.random.seed(1)

# pretty print numpy array
np.set_printoptions(formatter={'float': '{: 0.3f}'.format})

# let us code our sigmoid funciton
def sigmoid(x):
return 1/(1+np.exp(-x))

# let us add a method that takes the derivative of x as well
def derv_sigmoid(x):
return x*(1-x)

#---------------------------------------------------------------

# Two layered NW. Using from (1) and the equations we derived as explanation's
#---------------------------------------------------------------

# set learning rate as 1 for this toy example
learningRate = 1

# input x, also used as the training set here
x = np.array([ [0,0,1],[0,1,1],[1,0,1],[1,1,1] ])

# desired output for each of the training set above
y = np.array([[0,1,1,0]]).T

# Explanation - as long as input has two ones, but not three, output is One
"""
Input [0,0,1]  Output = 0
Input [0,1,1]  Output = 1
Input [1,0,1]  Output = 1
Input [1,1,1]  Output = 0
"""

# Randomly initialized weights
weight1 =  np.random.random((3,4))
weight2 =  np.random.random((4,1))

# Activation to layer 0 is taken as input x
a0 = x

iterations = 1000
for iter in range(0,iterations):

# Forward pass - Straight Forward
z1= np.dot(x,weight1)
a1 = sigmoid(z1)
z2= np.dot(a1,weight2)
a2 = sigmoid(z2)
if iter == 0:
print("Initial Output \n",a2)

# Backward Pass - Backpropagation

#---------------------------------------------------------------
# Calculating change of Cost/Loss wrto weight of 2nd/last layer
# Eq (A) ---> dC_dw2 =a1.(a2-y)*derv_sigmoid(a2)
#---------------------------------------------------------------

k2 = (a2-y)*derv_sigmoid(a2)
dC_dw2 = a1.dot(k2)
if iter == 0:
print("Shape dC_dw2",np.shape(dC_dw2)) #debug

#---------------------------------------------------------------
# Calculating change of Cost/Loss wrto weight of 2nd/last layer
# Eq (B)---> dC_dw1 =a0.derv_sigmoid(a1)*(a2-y)*derv_sigmoid(a2)*weight2
#---------------------------------------------------------------

t1 = k2.dot(weight2.T)*derv_sigmoid(a1)
dC_dw1 = a0.T.dot(t1)

# debug - Following above from iamtrask.
# What I do in commented section is not working
#t2 = weight2 * k2
#t1 = derv_sigmoid(a1) *t2
#dC_dw1 = a0.T.dot(t1)

#---------------------------------------------------------------
#---------------------------------------------------------------

weight2 = weight2 - learningRate*dC_dw2
weight1 = weight1 - learningRate*dC_dw1

print("New output",a2)

#---------------------------------------------------------------
# Training is done, weight2 and weight2 are primed for output y
#---------------------------------------------------------------

# Lets test out, two ones in input and one zero, ouput should be One
x = np.array([[1,0,1]])
z1= np.dot(x,weight1)
a1 = sigmoid(z1)
z2= np.dot(a1,weight2)
a2 = sigmoid(z2)
print("Output after Training is \n",a2)

Reference

• https://cedar.buffalo.edu/~srihari/CSE574/Chap5/Chap5.3-BackProp.pdf