# Comparing a Machine Learning algorithm implemented in F Sharp and OCaml

(UPDATE: please see the next post: Stop the Presses: OCaml wins in terms of speed in which it is shown that there were some serious flaws in my OCaml implementation below. I’ll keep this post around for reference.)

I’ve been dabbling with OCaml for the last several years and so when I saw a recent Meetup notice about an F# machine learning code dojo being led by Mathias Brandewinder within walking distance of my house I thought I’d check it out. I’m one of those Linux guys who tends to eschew IDEs, prefers to use vim, and considers .NET to be some very foreign territory. F# is based on OCaml, so I figured I’d have a bit of a headstart in the language area even if I haven’t done any .NET development.

Also, I was curious as I had been hearing rumors on twitter that F# programs were running on Mono faster than the equivalent OCaml versions. I was also taking Andrew Ng’s Coursera Machine Learning course so the timing seemed good. So I loaded up mono, monodevelop and F#. As it turns out none of it worked on the day of the dojo, so I looked on with someone with a Windows laptop and Visual Studio.

The code dojo itself was a great way of learning F#. Check out Mathias’ Digits Recognizer code Dojo code and instructions which in turn was based on a Kaggle Machine Learning challenge. The task was to implement a k-NN (K Nearest Neighbor; in this case K=1) algorithm for recognizing handwritten digits from a dataset that was provided: A training set of 5000 labeled examples and a validation set of 500 labeled examples. Each digit example is a set of 28X28 grayscale pixels (784 integer values from 0 to 255). We wrote a classifier that reads in the training set and then compares each of the 500 validation samples against those 5000 training exmples and returns the label associated with the closest match (the vector with the shortest distance from a training example). k-NN is one of the simplest machine learning algorithms, even so, we were able to get a 94.4% accuracy rate.

After the Dojo, I spent some time getting Monodevelop and F# running on my Ubuntu 12.04 laptop. Turns out I needed to get Monodevelop 4.0 (built from source) and F# 3.0 (initially tried F# 3.1, but Monodevelop 4.0 wasn’t happy with that version). Then I set about reimplementing the algorithm in F# and after I got that working I reimplemented the same algorithm in OCaml.

Here’s my F# implementation:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58  module classifyDigits.Main open System open System.IO type LabelPixels = { Label: int; Pixels: int[] } let slurp_file file = File.ReadAllLines(file).[1..] |> Array.map (fun line -> line.Split(',')) |> Array.map (fun numline -> Array.map (fun (x:string) -> Convert.ToInt32(x)) numline) |> Array.map (fun line -> { Label= line.[0]; Pixels=line.[1..] }) //load the trainingsample let trainingset = slurp_file("/home/phil/devel/f_sharp/Dojo-Digits-Recognizer/Dojo/trainingsample.csv") // COMPUTING DISTANCES // We need to compute the distance between images // Math reminder: the euclidean distance is // distance [ x1; y1; z1 ] [ x2; y2; z2 ] = // sqrt((x1-x2)*(x1-x2) + (y1-y2)*(y1-y2) + (z1-z2)*(z1-z2)) let distance (p1: int[]) (p2: int[]) = Math.Sqrt (float(Array.sum (Array.map2 ( fun a b -> (pown (a-b) 2)) p1 p2) )) // WRITING THE CLASSIFIER FUNCTION // We are now ready to write a classifier function! // The classifier should take a set of pixels // (an array of ints) as an input, search for the // closest example in our sample, and predict // the value of that closest element. let classify (pixels: int[]) = fst (trainingset |> Array.map (fun x -> (x.Label, (distance pixels x.Pixels ) )) |> Array.minBy (fun x -> snd x )) // EVALUATING THE MODEL AGAINST VALIDATION DATA // Now that we have a classifier, we need to check // how good it is. // This is where the 2nd file, validationsample.csv, // comes in handy. // For each Example in the 2nd file, // we know what the true Label is, so we can compare // that value with what the classifier says. // You could now check for each 500 example in that file // whether your classifier returns the correct answer, // and compute the % correctly predicted. let _ = Console.WriteLine("start...") let validationsample = slurp_file("/home/phil/devel/f_sharp/Dojo-Digits-Recognizer/Dojo/validationsample.csv") let num_correct = (validationsample |> Array.map (fun p -> if (classify p.Pixels ) = p.Label then 1 else 0) |> Array.sum) Printf.printf "Percentage correct:%f\n" ((float(num_correct)/ (float(Array.length validationsample)))*100.0)

Timing when running this on my Dell XPS 13 (i7 Haswell, 8GB RAM):

real        0m22.180s
user        0m22.253s
sys         0m0.116s


And the OCaml implementation:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76  (* OCaml version compile with: ocamlopt str.cmxa -o classifyDigits classifyDigits.ml *) let read_lines name : string list = let ic = open_in name in let try_read () = try Some (input_line ic) with End_of_file -> None in let rec loop acc = match try_read () with | Some s -> loop (s :: acc) | None -> close_in ic; List.rev acc in loop [] type labelPixels = { label: int; pixels: int list } let slurp_file file = List.tl (read_lines file) |> List.map (fun line -> Str.split (Str.regexp ",") line ) |> List.map (fun numline -> List.map (fun (x:string) -> int_of_string x) numline) |> List.map (fun line -> { label= (List.hd line); pixels=(List.tl line) }) let trainingset = slurp_file("./trainingsample.csv") (* // COMPUTING DISTANCES // We need to compute the distance between images // Math reminder: the euclidean distance is // distance [ x1; y1; z1 ] [ x2; y2; z2 ] = // sqrt((x1-x2)*(x1-x2) + (y1-y2)*(y1-y2) + (z1-z2)*(z1-z2)) *) let list_sum lst = List.fold_left (fun x acc -> x+.acc) 0.0 lst let distance (p1: int list) (p2: int list) = sqrt (list_sum (List.map2 ( fun a b -> (float_of_int(a-b)**2.0)) p1 p2) ) (* // WRITING THE CLASSIFIER FUNCTION // We are now ready to write a classifier function! // The classifier should take a set of pixels // (an array of ints) as an input, search for the // closest example in our sample, and predict // the value of that closest element. *) let minBy f lst = let smallest = ref (List.hd lst) in List.iter (fun x -> if (f x) < (f !smallest) then smallest := x ) (List.tl lst) ; !smallest ;; let classify (pixels: int list) = fst ((List.map (fun (x: labelPixels) -> (x.label, (distance pixels x.pixels) )) trainingset) |> minBy (fun x -> snd x) ) (* // EVALUATING THE MODEL AGAINST VALIDATION DATA // Now that we have a classifier, we need to check // how good it is. // This is where the 2nd file, validationsample.csv, // comes in handy. // For each Example in the 2nd file, // we know what the true Label is, so we can compare // that value with what the classifier says. // You could now check for each 500 example in that file // whether your classifier returns the correct answer, // and compute the % correctly predicted. *) let validationsample = slurp_file("./validationsample.csv") let num_correct = (validationsample |> List.map (fun p -> if (classify p.pixels ) = p.label then 1. else 0.) |> list_sum) let _ = Printf.printf "Percentage correct:%f\n" (((num_correct)/. (float_of_int(List.length validationsample)))*.100.0)

The code is very similar. The OCaml version is a bit longer because I needed to implement some functions that are built into the F# library, specifically, minBy (Array.minBy is built in to thd F# standard lib), list_sum (Array.sum is the F# builtin function) and read_lines (File.ReadAllLines is the F# builtin). One difference that could possibly effect performance: The F# version reads the data into *Array*s whereas the OCaml version reads the data into *List*s. The OCaml version was just easier to read into a List and OCaml’s List module has a map2 function whereas OCaml’s Array module does not (F# apparently has a map2 for both Array and List).

(EDIT: But as it turns out, using a List here instead of an Array is probably responsible for about half of the performance difference between the F# and the OCaml version. See the update

I was surprised how much less performant the OCaml version was:

real    0m47.311s
user    0m46.881s
sys     0m0.135s


The F# implementation was slightly more than twice as fast o_O.

Next, I recalled from the dojo that it’s very easy to parallelize the maps in F#; instead of Array.map you use Array.parallel.map. So after a couple of edits to add parallel maps, I rebuilt and ran with the following time:

real    0m16.400s
user    0m47.135s
sys     0m0.240s


So after that very simple change the F# version was very nearly 3X faster than the OCaml version. And in top I could see that the CPU usage was up to 360% as it ran.

Ah, but what about OCaml’s Parmap? I modified my OCaml version to use Parmap… but it took a lot longer to get it working than parallelizing the F# version. Probably about 30 minutes by the time I got it figured out (including figuring out how to compile it).

Here’s the OCaml version of the classify function and num_correct that uses Parmap:

 1 2 3 4 5 6 7  let classify (pixels: int list) = let label_dist = Parmap.parmap ~chunksize:50 ~ncores:4 (fun x -> (x.label, (distance pixels x.pixels) )) (Parmap.L trainingset) in let min = minBy (fun x y -> compare (snd x) (snd y)) label_dist in fst min let num_correct = (Parmap.L validationsample) |> Parmap.parmap ~ncores:4 (fun p -> if (classify p.pixels ) = p.label then 1. else 0.) |> list_sum 
Notice that you have to tell it how many cores you have.

After I got it to compile I ran it with much anticipation…

real    1m43.140s
user    5m38.809s
sys     0m42.811s


… over twice as slow as the original OCaml implementation. I noticed in top that this version launched 4 different classifyDigitPar processes so I’m guessing that it uses sockets to communicate between the processes. For this particular problem that doesn’t appear to be effective. Perhaps it would be for a longer running example, but I’m not sure. F# certainly wins in the parallelization department.

### Observations

Other than performance (where F# on Mono seems to win handily) I noticed the following:

1. The Array slicing syntax in F# is quite nice.
2. F#’s standard library is just more comprehensive. I could have probably used Janestreet’s Core library for OCaml which is quite comprehensive, but I wanted to stick with the standard library for both.
3. Monodevelop has a vi editing mode. It’s kind of ok. But it’s missing a lot of keybindings that you’d have in native vi.
4. I have no idea what F#’s (or Monodevelop’s) equavilent to opam is. I’m guessing OCaml wins in the package management department.
5. F#’s polymorphic math operators were nice (no need for +., etc.).

You can find the code above in my github

### Next Time

I want to implement the algorithm in Julia. I’m going to guess that Julia’s vectorization support means that it will beat both OCaml and F#.