Author Archives: jamesdmccaffrey

I recently revisited multi-class classification using PyTorch. My demo was to predict a person’s political type (conservative, moderate, liberal) based on sex, age, state (michigan, nebraska, oklahoma), and annual income. See jamesmccaffrey.wordpress.com/2022/09/01/multi-class-classification-using-pytorch-1-12-1-on-windows-10-11/. My demo computed overall model accuracy. I decided … Continue reading →

There are frequent updates to the PyTorch neural network library, and I’m continuously learning new techniques and best practices. I figured it was time to update one of my standard binary classification demos for the current PyTorch version 1.12.1. I … Continue reading →

I ran across an interesting PyTorch function that I hadn’t seen before. The torch.nn.utils.prune.custom_from_mask() function can mask out weights and biases in a neural layer. This allows you to create layers that are not fully connected. I checked the PyTorch … Continue reading →

A PyTorch weight matrix has shape [num_out, num_in] rather than the more logical [num_in, num_out]. This seems a bit strange. Furthermore, when computing a set of output nodes, the weight matrix must be transposed before applying matrix multiplication. This seems … Continue reading →

I wrote an article titled “Multi-Class Classification Using PyTorch, Part 1: New Best Practices” in the September 2022 edition of Microsoft Visual Studio Magazine. See https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2022/09/06/multi-class-pytorch.aspx. A multi-class classification problem is one where the goal is to predict a discrete … Continue reading →