Lecture Pattern Analysis

Part 01: Introduction and First Sampling

Christian Riess
IT Security Infrastructures Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
28. April 2025
 Pattern Recognition Recap and Unsupervised Learning

• Remember the steps of the classical pattern recognition pipeline:

Prepro- Feature Classi-

(Data) Sampling (Class)
cessing Extraction fication

→x f (x) y

• Fundamental ML assumption: good feature representations map similar

objects to similar features
• Classifier training is almost always supervised,
i.e. a training sample is a tupel (xi , yi ) (cf. lecture “Pattern Recognition”)
• Unsupervised ML works without labels, i.e., it only operates on inputs (xi )
• Unsup. ML can be seen as representation or summary of a distribution
• So, “classification versus representation” could be a jingle to further distinguish
PR from PA (cf. our discussion in the joint meeting)

C. Riess | Part 01: Introduction and First Sampling 28. April 2025 1
 Further Aspects of Interest: Parameters and Hyperparameters

• Every machine learning model has parameters

• For example, linear regression predicts with d parameters βi a d-dimensional
hyperplane that predicts y for a d-dimensional input x̃ = (1, x1 , . . . , xd −1 )⊤ ,
d
X
⊤
y = β x̃ = βi · x̃i (1)
i =0

• Less parameters make the model more robust, more parameters make the
model more flexible
• To continue the example, consider linear regression on a basis expansion of
a scalar unknown x, e.g., fitting a d-dimensional polynomial to the vector
(1, x , x 2 , . . . , x d ): larger d enables more complex polynomials
• The dimension d is a hyperparameter, i.e., a parameter that somehow
parameterizes the choice of parameters
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 Further Aspects of Interest: Local Operators and High
Dimensional Spaces

• Thinking about model flexibility: more “local” models are more flexible, but
require more parameters and are less robust
• How can we find a good trade-off? This is the model selection problem

• Another issue: all local models perform poorly in higher dimensional spaces
• A probably surprising consequence is that high-dimensional methods must
be non-local along some direction

• Also summarization methods (clustering) performs poorly in higher

dimensional spaces

• All these points motivate to also look into dimensionality reduction

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 A Study of Distributions

• In PA, we look at data in feature spaces

• To understand and manipulate these data points, they are mathematically
commonly represented as probability distribution functions (PDFs)
• Additionally, inference allows to draw conclusions from distributions

• Common operations on distributions:

• Fitting a distribution model to the data (parametric or non-parametric)
represents the data as a distribution
• Sampling from a distribution creates new data points that follow the
distribution (i.e., they are plausible)
• Factorizing a distribution is a key technique for reducing the complexity

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 Recap on Probability Vocabulary

• Let X , Y denote two random variables

• Important vocabulary and equations are:
Joint distribution p (X , Y )

Conditional distribution of X given Y p(X |Y )

Sum rule / marginalization over Y p (X ) p(X , Y )

P
=
Y

Product rule p (X , Y ) = p(Y |X ) · p(X )

p(X |Y )·p(Y )
Bayes rule p(Y |X ) = p (X )
likelihood·prior
Bayes rule in the language of ML posterior = evidence

• Please browse the book by Bishop, Sec. 1.2.3, to refresh your mind if
necessary!

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 Sampling from a PDF

• Oftentimes, it is necessary to draw samples from a PDF

• Example:
• Logistic Regression fits a single regression curve to the data (cf. PR)
• Bayesian Logistic Regression fits a distribution of curves

The distribution is narrow at observations (crosses), and wider otherwise

• Sample curves from the distribution to obtain its spread (“uncertainty”)

• Special PDFs like Gaussians have closed-form solutions for sampling

• We look now at a sampling method that works on arbitrary PDFs
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 Idea of the Sampling Algorithm

• The key idea is to use the cumulative density function (CDF) P (z ) of p(X ),

Zz
P (z ) = p(X )dX (2)
−∞

• A sample uniformly drawn from the CDF y -axis intersects P (z ) at location z

• This z position is our random draw from p(x ):

1 1

p(X ) P (Z ) P (Z )

X z z

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 Sampling Algorithm

• Split the domain of p(X ) into discrete bins, enumerate the bins
• On these bins, calculate the cumulative density function (CDF) P (z ) of p(X )
• Draw a uniformly distributed number u between 0 and 1
• The sample from the PDF is

z∗ = argmin P (z ) ≥ u , (3)
z

i.e., the value where u intersects the CDF

• Note that the range of a CDF is always [0; 1]

• The CDF “warps” the uniform sample into a sample from distribution p(X ).

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 Practical Realization and Limitations

• Theoretically, we can split any space into bins

• In practice, however, it is not clear how small or large these bins shall be
• Do empty bins indicate that it is impossible to sample from there? Or do they
indicate a lack of observations?
• Hence, the method requires many observations (as a naive rule-of-thumb,
one can use 30 · b observations for b bins)
• Note that for a fixed bin width, the number of bins grows exponentially with
the dimensionality of the space

• These limitations make the method somewhat unattractive in practice.

We will look at more advanced sampling strategies later

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Lecture Pattern Analysis

Part 02: Non-Parametric Density Estimation

Christian Riess
IT Security Infrastructures Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
28. April 2025
 Introduction

• Density Estimation = create a PDF from a set of samples

• The lecture Pattern Recognition introduces parametric density estimation:
• There, a parametric model (e.g., a Gaussian) is fitted to the data
• Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimator:

θ ∗ = argmax p(x1 , . . . , xN |θ) (1)

θ

• Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) estimator:

Bayes p(x1 , . . . , xN |θ) · p(θ)

θ ∗ = argmax p(θ|x1 , . . . , xN ) = (2)
θ p(x1 , . . . , xN )

• Browse the PR slides if you like to know more

• Parametric density estimators require a good function representation

• Non-parametric density estimators can operate on arbitrary distributions
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 Non-Parametric Density Estimation: Histograms

• Non-parametric estimators do not use functions with a limited set of

parameters
• A simple non-parametric baseline is to create a histogram of samples1
• The number of bins is important to obtain a good fit

• Pro: Good for a quick visualization

• Pro: “Cheap” for many samples in low-dimensional space
• Con: Discontinuities at bin boundaries
• Con: Scales poorly to high dimensions (cf. curse of dimensionality later)
1
See introduction of Bishop Sec. 2.5

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 Improving on the Histogram Approach

• A kernel-based method and a nearest-neighbor method are slightly better

• Both variants share their mathematical framework:
• Let p(x) be a PDF in D-dim. space, and R a small region around x
R
→ The probability mass in R is p = p(x) dx
R
• Assumption 1: in R are many points → p is a relative frequency,
# points in R K
p = = (3)
total # of points N

• Assumption 2: R is small enough s.t. p(x) is approximately constant,

Z Z
p = p(x) dx = p(x) dx = p(x) · V (4)
R R

• Both assumptions together are slightly contradictory, but they yield

K # points in R
p(x) = = (5)
N·V total # of points · Volume of R
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 Kernel-based DE: Parzen Window Estimator (1/2)

• The Parzen window estimator fixes V and leaves K /N variable2

• D-dimensional Parzen window kernel function (a.k.a. “box kernel”):

1 if |ui | ≤ 12 ∀i = 1, . . . , D
k (u) = (6)
0 otherwise

• Calculate K with this kernel function:

N  
X x − xi
K (x) = k (7)
h
i =1

where h is a scaling factor that adjusts the box size

• Hence, the whole density is
N  
1 X 1 x − xi
p(x) = k (8)
N hD h
i =1

2
See Bishop Sec. 2.5.1

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 Kernel-based DE: Parzen Window Estimator (2/2)

• The kernel removes much of the discretization error of the fixed-distance

histogram bins, but it still leads to blocky estimates
• Replacing the box kernel by a Gauss kernel further smooths the result,

N D /2 ∥x − xi ∥22
 
1 X 1
p(x) = · exp − , (9)
N 2π h2 2
2h
i =1

where h is the standard deviation of the Gaussian

• Mathematically, also any other kernel is possible if these conditions hold:

k (u) ≥0 (10)

Z
k (u) du =1 (11)

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 K-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) Density Estimation

• Recall our derived equation for estimating the density

K # points in R
p(x) = = (12)
N·V total # of points · Volume of R

• The Parzen window estimator fixes V , and K varies

• The k-Nearest Neighbors estimator fixes K , and V varies
• k-NN calculates V from the distance of the K nearest neighbors3

• Note that both the Parzen window estimator and the k-NN estimator are
“non-parametric”, but they are not free of parameters
• The kernel scaling h and the number of neighbors k are hyper-parameters,
i.e., some form of prior knowledge to guide the model creation
• The model parameters are the samples themselves. Both estimators need to
store all samples, which is why they are also called memory methods
3
See Bishop Sec. 5.2.2

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 First Glance at the Model Selection Problem
• Optimizing the hyperparameters is also called Model Selection Problem
• Hyperparameters must be optimized on a held-out part of the training data,
the validation set:
train on training data with different hyperparameter sets hi , evaluate on
validation data to get the best performing set h∗ via maximum likelihood (ML)
• What if hyperparameters are optimized directly on the training data?
Then the most complex (largest, most flexible) model wins, because it
achieves the lowest training error
• When training data is limited, then cross validation (CV) may be a good
approximation for the generalization error
• In CV, the data is subdivided into k folds (partitions). Do k training/eval. runs
(using each fold once for validation and the rest for training), and select that
h∗ with ML across all folds
• The choice of k is a hyper-hyperparameter that trades computational time
and quality of the predicted error (cf. Hastie et al. Chap. 7)
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 Hyperparameter Tuning for Unsupervised Methods

• Unsupervised tasks do not predict labels and hence there is no performance

measure like accuracy
• This also affects model selection: how to decide for model A over model B?
• Hence, we need other ways to calculate a quantitative performance measure.
We will explore several approaches to performance measurement for
unsupervised methods

• One generic approach is to measure the success in a downstream

application of the unsupervised method
• For density estimation, this can be the likelihood that some held-out
observations are drawn from the predicted density
• Hence, the best hyperparameters for density estimation are maximum
likelihood estimates for producing these held-out observations

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 Hyperparameter Tuning for Densities on Limited Data

• Here is a specific instantiation of hyperparameter estimation for density

estimators in a cross-validation setting (i.e., on limited data)
• The trick is to optimize the DE hyperparameters by using the likelihood of
held-out samples as objective:
• Split the N samples xi from dataset S into J folds:
j j j
Stest = {x⌊N /J ⌋·j , . . . , x⌊N /J ⌋·(j +1)−1 } , Strain = S \ Stest
• Let α be the unknown hyperparameters, and
j
let pj (x|α) be the density estimate for samples Strain on hyperparams α
Then, the ML estimate is

J −1
Y Y
α∗ = argmax pj (x|α) (13)
α
j =0 x∈S j
test

• In practice, take the logarithm (“log likelihood”) to mitigate numerical issues

→ the product becomes a sum

C. Riess | Part 02: Non-Parametric Density Estimation 28. April 2025 9

Lecture Pattern Analysis

Part 03: Bias and Variance

Christian Riess
IT Security Infrastructures Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
28. April 2025
 Introduction

• The motivation behind the hyperparameter optimization is to aim for

generalization to new data
• For kernel density estimation, the pitfalls are:
• Too large kernel: covers all space with some probability mass, but the density
is too uniform (does not represent the structure)
• Too small kernel: closely represents the training data, but might assign too low
probabilities in areas without training data
• In contrast, the “optimal”1 kernel size: represents the structure of the training
data and also covers unobserved areas to some extent
• This is an instance of the bias-variance tradeoff2

1
This may sound as if there were a unique minimum, maybe even of a convex function — in practice, there is not that one single best solution; so read this as a
somewhat hypothetical statement
2
See PR lecture or Hastie/Tibshirani/Friedman Sec. 7-7.3 if more details are desired

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 Bias and Variance in Regression

• Bias is the square of the average deviation of an estimator from the ground
truth
• Variance denotes is the variance of the estimates, i.e., the expected squared
deviation from the estimated mean3
• Informal interpretation:
• High bias indicates model undercomplexity: we obtain a poor fit to the data
• High variance indicates model overcomplexity: the fit also models not just
the structure of the data, but also its noise
• Higher model complexity (= more model parameters) tends to lower bias and
higher variance
• We will usually not be able to get bias and variance simultaneously to 0
• Regularization increases bias and lowers variance

3
See Hastie/Tibshirani/Friedman Sec. 7.3 Eqn. (7.9) for a detailed derivation

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 Sketches for Model Undercomplexity and Overcomplexity

• Note that this example implicitly contains a smoothness assumption

• It does not claim that there is a universally best fit on arbitrary input
distributions (because of the No-Free-Lunch Theorem)
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 Transferring Bias and Variance to our Density Estimators

• Our kernel framework can directly replicate these investigations by

retargeting our kernels to regression or classification:
• Regression:
• Estimate f (x) at position x as a kernel-weighted sum of the neighbors or
• as a k -NN mean of k neighbors
• Classification:
• Estimate for classes c1 and c2 individual densities, evaluate pc1 (x) and pc2 (x),
and select the class with higher probability or
• Select the majority class within k nearest neighbors
• We will then observe that
• Larger kernel support / larger k increases bias and lowers variance
• Smaller kernel support / smaller k lowers bias and increases variance

• Analogously, we can use the notion of bias/variance also on our initial

unsupervised density estimation task

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