How to apply some features into a deep learning model?

Question

i am trying to build an MLP model that takes a dataset consists of 9 columns this is a sample (patient number, time in mill/sec., normalization of XY and Z, kurtosis, skewness, pitch, roll and yaw, label) respectively.

1,15,-0.248010047716,0.00378335508419,-0.0152548459993,-86.3738760481,0.872322164158,-3.51314800063,0

1,31,-0.248010047716,0.00378335508419,-0.0152548459993,-86.3738760481,0.872322164158,-3.51314800063,0

1,46,-0.267422664673,0.0051143782875,-0.0191247001961,-85.7662354031,1.0928406847,-4.08015176908,0

1,62,-0.267422664673,0.0051143782875,-0.0191247001961,-85.7662354031,1.0928406847,-4.08015176908,0

and this is my code, there is no error in my code but the results with and without features are the same .. so i am asking if i used the right way to fed those features into the model.

from keras.models import Sequential
from keras.layers import Dense, Dropout, Activation
import numpy as np
from scipy import signal
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import itertools
import math
np.random.seed(7)

train = np.loadtxt("featwithsignalsTRAIN.txt", delimiter=",")
test = np.loadtxt("featwithsignalsTEST.txt", delimiter=",")

x_train = train[:,[2,3,4,5,6,7]]
x_test = test[:,[2,3,4,5,6,7]]
y_train = train[:,8]
y_test = test[:,8]

model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(500, input_dim=6, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dense(300,  activation='relu'))
model.add(Dense(1, activation='sigmoid'))

model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy' , optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
# Fit the model
batch_size = 128
epochs = 10

hist = model.fit(x_train, y_train,
      batch_size=batch_size,
      epochs=epochs,
      verbose=2,
      )
avg = np.mean(hist.history['acc'])
print('The Average Testing Accuracy is', avg)
##Evaluate the model
score=model.evaluate(x_test, y_test, verbose=2)
print(score)

Answer 1

There is nothing wrong with your model, but it's possible that your model doesn't learn anything useful. It could be that you are using a learning too high or too small, that you need more epochs, or that simply your features are not useful.

Here are some advices :

You can directly add a validation set to your fit method, which will compute the same metrics on this set at the end of each epoch and will allow you to see if your model learn something useful or if it's just overfitting on the training set without having to wait for the model to finish its training. (make sure you use verbose = 1 or 2 to see the training process).

model.fit( ... , validation_data = (x_test , y_test) , ...)

I see that you used the history callback. A good practice is to see how the accuracy is changing from an epoch to another instead of taking the mean. This allows you to see if your network is effectively learning something. A network rarely converge on the firsts epochs.

Do you have an idea of the 'usefulness' of your feature ? You can get an idea of that by performing an exploratory analysis before creating your model or by fitting a more 'conventional' model (linear regression, decision trees, random forest ...). It's Highly recommended before fitting a neural network, and this also allows you to compare different types of models and to see if you realy need to use neural networks.

If you are sure that your features would at least perform better than a random guess, try playing with the learning rate. A high learnign rate could cause the model to overshoot the minimum, and a learning rate too small could cause the model to learn very slowly or to get stuck in a local minima. You could also try to tune the number of epochs.