There are two components to working with data in neon. The first is a data iterator (NervanaDataIterator), that feeds the model with minibatches of data during training or evaluation. The second is a dataset (Dataset) class, which handles the loading and preprocessing of the data. When working with your own data, the latter is optional although highly recommended.

Data iterators are python iterables in that they implement the __iter__ method, which returns a new minibatch of data with each call.

• If your data is small enough to fit into memory:

• For image data or other data in the form of numpy arrays, use ArrayIterator.
• For specific modalities, neon includes specialized iterators (Text, Image Captioning, Q&A)
• If your data is too large:
• For data in the HDF5 format, use the HDF5Iterator to load chunks of data to send to the model. This approach is flexible for any type of data.
• For other types of data, use the macrobatching DataLoader, a specialized loader that loads macrobatches of data into memory, and then splits the macrobatches into minibatches to feed the model. This can be used for images, audio, video datasets and is recommended for large datasets or high-performance applications.

## ArrayIterator¶

The ArrayIterator class provides for iteration over minibatches of data that has been preloaded into memory as numpy arrays. This iterator supports classification, regression, and autoencoder tasks.

### Classification¶

Below is an example of a classification task with images where we load in 10,000 images. Each image is 32x32 pixels with 3 color channels (R, G, B), for a total of $$32\times32\times3=3,072$$ features.

from neon.data import ArrayIterator
import numpy as np

"""
X are the features and y are the labels.
The data in X must have shape (# examples, feature size)
"""
X = np.random.rand(10000,3072) # X.shape = (10000, 3072)
"""

For classification, the labels y must have shape (# examples, 1). y must also
consist of integers from 0 to nclass-1, where nclass is the number of categories.
"""
y = np.random.randint(0,10,10000) # y.shape = (10000, )

"""
The features X and labels y are passed to ArrayIterator be loaded into the backend
nclass, the number of classes, is set to 10
lshape, the local shape of the features, is set to (3,32,32) to represent
the the image dimensions: 32x32 pixels with 3 channels
"""
train = ArrayIterator(X=X, y=y, nclass=10, lshape=(3,32,32))


Importantly, the labels $$y$$ for classification should be integers from $$0$$ to $$K-1$$, where $$K$$ is the number of classes. These labels are stored in the backend in a one-hot representation. This means that if we have $$N$$ labels with $$K$$ classes, the labels will be stored in a $$N \times K$$ binary matrix. Each column will be all zeros except at the $$k$$-th element, which will be one. For example,

$\begin{split}y = (0,0,1,3,2,2) \rightarrow \left( \begin{array}{cccccc} 1 & 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0\\ 0 & 0& 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0& 0 & 0 & 1 & 1\\ 0 & 0& 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \end{array} \right).\end{split}$

### Regression¶

In regression, the model output for each training example is a vector $$\hat{y}$$ that is compared against a desired vector $$y$$ with a cost function (such as mean squared error). Below is a simple example implementing linear regression.

We first create the iterator. By default, ArrayIterator assumes classification, so for regression we must set make_onehot = False to turn off the one-hot representation.

from neon.data import ArrayIterator
import numpy as np

X = np.random.rand(1000, 1)
y = 2*X + 1 + 0.01*np.random.randn(1000, 1)  # y = 2X+1 with some gaussian noise
train = ArrayIterator(X=X, y=y, make_onehot=False)


We then fit a linear model with a bias term using stochastic gradient descent:

from neon.initializers import Gaussian
from neon.layers import Linear, Bias
from neon.layers import GeneralizedCost
from neon.transforms import SumSquared
from neon.models import Model
from neon.callbacks.callbacks import Callbacks

# Linear layer with one unit and a bias layer
init_norm = Gaussian(loc=0.0, scale=0.01)
layers = [Linear(1, init=init_norm), Bias(init=init_norm)]

mlp = Model(layers=layers)

# Loss function is the squared difference
cost = GeneralizedCost(costfunc=SumSquared())

# Learning rules

# run fit
mlp.fit(train, optimizer=optimizer, num_epochs=10, cost=cost,
callbacks=Callbacks(mlp))

# print weights
slope = mlp.get_description(True)['model']['config']['layers'][0]['params']['W']
print "slope = ", slope
bias_weight = mlp.get_description(True)['model']['config']['layers'][1]['params']['W']
print "bias = ", bias_weight


After training, the weights match what we expect:

slope =  [[ 2.01577163]]
bias =  [[ 1.01664519]]


### Autoencoders¶

Autoencoders are a special case of regression where the desired outputs $$y$$ are the input features $$X$$. For convenience, you can exclude passing the labels $$y$$ to the iterator:

# Example construction of ArrayIterator for Autoencoder task with MNIST
from neon.data import MNIST
from neon.data import ArrayIterator

mnist = MNIST()

(X_train, y_train), (X_test, y_test), nclass = mnist.load_data()

# Set input and target to X_train
train = ArrayIterator(X_train, lshape=(1, 28, 28))


For the full example, see examples/conv_autoencoder.py.

### Specialized ArrayIterators¶

Neon includes specialized iterators that subclass from NervanaDataIterator for specific modalities where the entire dataset can be directly loaded into memory.

Name Description
neon.data.Text Iterator for processing and feeding text data
neon.data.ImageCaption Iterator for feeding an image and a sentence for each training example
neon.data.QA Data iterator for taking a Q&A dataset, which has already been vectorized, and feeding data to training

For more information on usage of these iterators, see the API documentation.

### Sequence data¶

For sequence data, where data are fed to the model across multiple time steps, the shape of the input data can depend on your usage.

• Often, data such as sentences are encoded as a vector sequence of integers, where each integer corresponds to a word in the vocabulary. This encoding is often used in conjunction with embedding layers. In this case, the input data should be formatted to have shape $$(T, N)$$, where $$T$$ is the number of time steps and $$N$$ is the batch size. The embedding layer takes this input and provides as output to a subsequent recurrent neural network data of shape $$(F, T * N)$$, where $$F$$ is the number of features (in this case, the embedding dimension). For an example, see imdb_lstm.py.
• When the sequence data uses a one-hot encoding, the input data should be formatted to have shape $$(F, T*N)$$. For example, if sentences use a one-hot encoding with 50 possible characters, and each sentence is 60-characters long, the input data will have shape $$(F=50, 60*N)$$. See the Text class, or the char_lstm.py example.
• Time series data should be formatted to have shape $$(F, T * N)$$, where $$F$$ is the number of features. For an example, see timeseries_lstm.py.

## HDF5Iterator¶

For datasets that are too large to fit in memory the HDF5Iterator class can be used. This uses an HDF5 formatted data file to store the input and target data arrays so the data size is not limited by on-host and/or on-device memory capacity. To use the HDF5Iterator, the data arrays need to be stored in an HDF5 file with the following format:

• The input data is in an HDF5 dataset named input and the target output, if needed, in a dataset named output. The data arrays are of the same format as the arrays used to initialize the ArrayIterator class.
• The input data class also requires an attribute named lshape which specifies the shape of the flattened input data array. For mean subtraction, an additional dataset named mean can be included in the HDF5 file which includes either a channel-wise mean vector or a complete mean image to subtract from the input data.

For alternate target label formats, such as converting the targets to a one-hot vector, or for autoencoder data, the HDF5IteratorOneHot and HDF5IteratorAutoencoder subclasses are included. These subclasses demonstrate how to extend the HDF5Iterator to handle different input and target data formats or transformations.

See the example, examples/mnist_hdf5.py, for how to format the HDF5 data file for use with the HDF5Iterator class.

If your data is too large to load directly into memory, use a macrobatching approach. In macrobatching, the data is loaded in smaller batches, then split further into minibatches to feed the model. neon supports macrobatching with image, audio, and video datasets using the AeonDataLoader class.

Aeon is a new dataloader module we developed to load macrobatches of data with ease and low latency. This module uses a multithreaded library to hide the latency of decoding images, applying augmentation and/or transformations, and transferring the resulting outputs to device memory (if necessary). The module also adds optional functionality for applying transformations (scale, flip, and rotation).

Warning

The old DataLoader and ImageLoader classes were recently deprecated. Documentation for these classes can be found here.

Warning

In neon v2.2, we have moved to using a new version of aeon (v1.0+), which has a different manifest format, and also a different API in the provisioned data. We have provided a helper script in data/convert_manifest.py to assist in converting manifest files. In addition, by default the data loader object is wrapped with an adapter to convert the data from aeon v1.0 into the format expected the neon examples. See: AeonDataLoader in data/aeon_shim.py and data/dataloaderadapter.py for more details.

### Quick start guide¶

The user guide for aeon is found at http://aeon.nervanasys.com. Here we provide a quick start guide, but please consult the aeon user guide for important configurations and details.

Users interact with the aeon dataloader by providing two items:

1. Manifest file, a tab-separated file (*.tsv).
2. Configuration parameters, as a python dictionary.

Operations such as generating training/testing splits, or balancing labels for imbalanced datasets should be implemented outside of the dataloader by the user during ingest to create the appropriate manifest files. Several example ingest scripts are in the neon repository.

Manifest files

The manifest file contains UTF-8 text lines. Each line is one of header, comment, or record. For reference, please take a look at aeon documentation.

@FILE FILE
/image_dir/faces/naveen_rao.jpg     /labels/0.txt
/image_dir/faces/arjun_bansal.jpg   /labels/0.txt
/image_dir/faces/amir_khosrowshahi.jpg       /labels/0.txt
/image_dir/fruits/apple.jpg /labels/1.txt
/image_dir/fruits/pear.jpg  /labels/1.txt
/image_dir/animals/lion.jpg /labels/2.txt
/image_dir/animals/tiger.jpg        /labels/2.txt
...
/image_dir/vehicles/toyota.jpg      /labels/3.txt


Configuration parameters

Aeon is divided into separate providers for different modalities and problems. For image classification, we use the image,label provider. The configuration parameters include some base parameters for the dataloader itself, then a set of parameters for the input and target types of the provider. The configurations are provided as python dictionaries:

image_config = dict(height=40, width=50)
label_config = dict(binary=False)

config = dict(type="image,label",
image=image_config,
label=label_config,
manifest_filename='train.tsv',
minibatch_size=128)


For a full list of supported providers and their associated configurations, see documentation at: http://aeon.nervanasys.com.

Users often need to apply additonal transformations to the data being provided by aeon. Included in neon are several DataLoaderTransformer classes that can be used to wrap the aeon dataloader. For example, we know that the image,label provider yields a pair of data (input, label). For classification tasks, to transform the label data into a one-hot representation (see Classification section above to learn about one-hot), we use the OneHot class:
During run-time, OneHot will apply the one-hot transformation to the data in index=1`. Neon includes several useful dataloader transformers for these purposes: