Articles by MSiA

Ethen Liu

All the Python code associated with this blog post is on my GitHub account for those whose wish to follow along, dive deeper or modify it for their own needs. [K-means] and [Gaussian Mixture Model]

K-means

Clustering algorthims are a typical example of unsupervised clustering. Its task is to gathering similar samples (we’ll need to define which similarity or distance (dissimilarity) measure we want to use) into groups based on the data attributes (features) alone. Let’s start by creating a simple, 2-dimensional, synthetic dataset.

In the scatter plot above, we can see 4 separate groups of data points and we would like to recover them using clustering – think of “discovering” the class labels that we’ve taken for granted in a classification task. Even though the groups are pretty obvious here, it becomes hard to find them when the data lives in a high-dimensional space, where we simply can’t visualize them in a single scatterplot.

Now we will use one of the simplest clustering algorithms, K-means. This is an iterative algorithm which searches for 4 cluster centroids (we need to specify the number of clusters before we run the algorithm) such that the distance from each point to its cluster is minimized.

It starts by choosing an initial set of centroids μj (in our case j will count up to 4, since we want to have 4 clusters). A common practice is to choose randomly from the data points. After initialization, the K-means algorithm iterates between the following two steps:

1. Assign each data point xi to the closest centroid zi using standard euclidean distance.

2. Revise each centroids as the mean of the assigned data points.

Where nj is the number of data points that belongs to cluster j.

One sidenote, the standard implementation of K-means uses the Euclidean distance, thus we need to make sure all our variables are measured on the same scale if we are working with real-world datastets. Or else our distance measure will get dominated by features that have a large scale, leading to unexpected results.

The following scatter plot is the algorithm’s clustering result.

Assessing Convergence

One weakness of K-means is, the algorithm’s performance is closely tied with the randomly generated initial centroids’ quality. If the algorithm starts with a set of bad inital centers, it will get stuck in a local minimum.

Before we get into that, we need to take a step back and ask ourselves how can we tell if the K-means algorithm is converging? Well, we can look at the cluster assignments and see if they stabilize over time. In fact, that’s what we did in the toy implementation above, we ran the algorithm until the cluster assignments stop changing at all. But after running the clustering algorithm we want to have a measure that assesses the algorithm’s performance. Hence, we’ll introduce an additional measurement, Total within Sum of Squares (or refered to as inertia or heterogeneity). Mathematically, this is defined as:

Where k denotes the total number of clusters, xi is the ith data point, μj is the jth cluster, and  denotes the squared L2 norm (Euclidean distance) between the two vectors.

The formula computes the sum of all squared distances between data points and its centroids. It computation
can be divided into two small parts. The within sum of squares for a single cluster,  is the squared distance (note that it is “squared” distance!, do not square root it like we usually do for euclidean distance) of each point in the cluster from that cluster’s centroid. And the total within sum of squares, , is the sum of the within sum of squares of all the clusters.

It might be a bit confusing, as to why, in the objective function we’re using, , the squared L2 norm (euclidean distance) between the two vectors, while earlier in the cluster assignment section, we use , the euclidean distance (without squaring it). The fact that we can use still use euclidean distance (without squaring) it to assign data points to its closest cluster centers is because squaring or not squaring the distance doesn’t affect the order, and it saves us a computation to square it back to squared euclidean distance.

To see that the convergence of this algorithm is not guaranteed, we’ll run K-means multiple times. Each time, we use a different random seeds to get different set of initial centroids.

seed = 0, heterogeneity = 212.00599621083518
seed = 1000, heterogeneity = 212.00599621083518
seed = 8181, heterogeneity = 523.7150139149792
seed = 555, heterogeneity = 528.0315740282444
seed = 10000, heterogeneity = 212.00599621083518
seed = 120000, heterogeneity = 528.5562600476272

Notice the variation in heterogeneity for different initializations. This shows K-means does in fact get stuck at a bad local minimum from time to time. So, the next question is, is there anything we can do about this?

K-means++

One effective way to counter this issue is to use K-means++ to provide a smart initialization. This method tries to spread out the initial set of centroids so that they are not too close together. It is known to improve the quality of local optima and lower average runtime (link to the original paper if you’re interested in the theoretical guarantee K-means++: The Advantages of Careful Seeding).

The workflow of K-means++ is as follows:

1. Choose a data point at random from the dataset, this serves as the first centroid
2. Compute the squared euclidean distance of all other data points to the randomly chosen first centroid
3. To generate the next centroid, each data point is chosen with the probability (weight) of its squared distance to the chosen center of this round divided by the the total squared distance (to make sure the probability adds up to 1). Roughtly speaking, a new centroid should be as far as from the other centroids as possible
4. Next, recompute the probability (weight) of each data point as the minimum of the distance between it and all the centers that are already generated (e.g. for the second iteration, compare the data point’s distance between the first and second center and choose the smaller one)
5. Repeat step 3 and 4 until we have K centers

Let’s now rerun K-means using the same set of seeds as before, but this time we will always using K-means++ to initialize the centroid. Then, we’ll compare the set of cluster heterogeneities we got from using K-means++ initialization versus using random initialization.

seed = 0, heterogeneity = 212.00599621083518
seed = 1000, heterogeneity = 212.00599621083518
seed = 8181, heterogeneity = 212.00599621083518
seed = 555, heterogeneity = 212.00599621083518
seed = 10000, heterogeneity = 212.00599621083518
seed = 120000, heterogeneity = 212.00599621083518

K-means average: 369.38680610389275
K-means++ average: 212.0059962108352

From the result, we can see that random initialization results in a worse clustering heterogeneity than K-means++ on average.

Although it looks like K-means++ worked pretty well in this simple example, it is not a panacea. It can still get stuck at local minima from time to time. Thus, in practice, we should run K-means at least a few times with different initializations and then return the best one (one that resulted in the lowest heterogeneity). For scikit-learn’s Kmeans, the default behavior is to run the algorithm for 10 times (n_init parameter) using the kmeans++ (init parameter) initialization.

Elbow Method for Choosing K

Another “short-comings” of K-means is that we have to specify the number of clusters before running the algorithm, which we often don’t know apriori. For example, let’s have a look what happens if we set the number of clusters to 3 in our synthetic dataset.

K-means can still run perfectly fine, but this the probably not the result we’re looking for.

There’re many different heuristics for choosing the suitable K, the simplest one being the Elbow method. The way it works is we run the algorithm using different values of K and plot the heterogeneity. This measure will decrease as the number of clusters increases, because each cluster will be smaller and tighter. And what we’re hoping for is the measure will keep on decreasing up till the optimal cluster number, and the decrease will start to flat out after that.

As we can see, the plot suggests we should choose 4 as our cluster number, since starting from K = 4 the magnitude of the decease starts dropping (it looks like the pit of an elbow, that’s why it was given the name the elbow method), which makes sense given our visual expection of the dataset previously. In practice, this “elbow” can sometimes be hard to see and can be quite subjective.

Now that we gotten a bit familiar with how K-means works, we’ll start addressing the assumption that K-means is making and its caveats.

K-means Caveats

Different algorithm makes different assumptions, hence the quality and interpretability of the result will depend on whether these assumptions are valid for our goal. For K-means clustering, the model assumes that all clusters have equal, spherical variance. To let the notion sink in, let’s look at some cases where K-means will generate results that might not match our intuition.

Suppose our data looks like the following:

Here we randomly generated three cluster of data points drawn from three different normal distribution, each having 20, 100 and 500 data points. Let’s try K-means on this dataset.

Ouch. In its quest to minimize the within-cluster sum of squares, K-means algorithm will give more “weight” to larger clusters. As we can see from the plot, a lot of data points from the smaller cluster (of size 20) end up being far away from any centroid, while the larger cluster (of size 500) gets chopped in half. This is because K-means assumes all clusters have equal, spherical variance, meaning that each cluster has roughly equal number of observations and the cluster’s will tend to form a sphere shape.

Let’s fit a different kind of clustering algorithm, Gaussian Mixture Model and visualize its clustering result:

In general, there is no guarantee that structure found by a clustering algorithm has anything to do with what we were interested in. And there will always be edge cases where a clustering algorithm might lead to unintuitive results (for higher dimensions where we can’t visualize the dataset easily, we might not even know whether the result matches our intuition or not). For visualization of comparing different clustering algorithms on toy 2d datasets, refer to the following link, scikit-learn doc: Plot cluster comparison.

The take away message for this section is that: K-means is usually “go-to” clustering algorithm for many, because it is fast, easy to understand, and available in lots of statistical or machine learning toolkit. If we have an EXTREMELY LARGE dataset then K-means might be our only option. But we must also understand that it is still making some assumptions and sometimes these assumptions can lead to unsatisfying or misleading results.

Gaussian Mixture Model

The title of the blog post was “K-means Shouldn’t Be Our Only Choice”. So now we’ll dive into a different kind of clustering algorithm.

Clustering methods such as K-means have hard boundaries, meaning a data point either belongs to that cluster or it doesn’t. On the other hand, clustering methods such as Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) have soft boundaries, where data points can belong to multiple cluster at the same time but with different degrees of belief. e.g. a data point can have a 60% of belonging to cluster 1, 40% of belonging to cluster 2.

Apart from using it in the context of clustering, one other thing that GMM can be useful for is outlier detection: Due to the fact that we can compute the likelihood of each point being in each cluster, the points with a “relatively” low likelihood (where “relatively” is a threshold that we just determine ourselves) can be labeled as outliers. But here we’ll focus on the clustering application.

Gaussian Distribution

In GMM, each cluster corresponds to a probability distribution, in this case the Gaussian distribution. What we want to do is to learn the parameters of these distributions, which is the Gaussian’s mean μ (mu), and the variance o2 (sigma).

The mathematical form of the Gaussian distribution in 1-dimension (univariate Gaussian) can be written as:

• This is also referred to as the probability density function (pdf).
• Gaussian distribution is commonly referred to as the normal distribution, hence that’s where the N
  comes from.
• x refers to the random observation over which this distribution is placed.
• The mean μ, controls the gaussian’s “center position” and the variance 2, controls its “shape”. To be precise, it is actually the standard deviation , i.e. the square root of the variance that controls the distribution’s shape.

But that was in one dimension, what about two, three, four . . . It turns out the univariate (one-dimensional) Gaussian can be extended to the multivariate (multi-dimensional) case. The form of a d-dimensional Gaussian:

In higher dimensions, a Gaussian is fully specified by a mean vector μ and a d-by-d covariance matrix,  (do not confused this symbol with P, which is used for denoting summing a bunch of stuff). || refers to the determinant of the covariance matrix e.g. In two dimension, the Gaussian’s parameters might look like this:


The mean vector, containing elements μ1 and μ1 centers the distribution along every dimension. On the other hand, the covariance matrix specifies the spread and orientation of the distribution. Along the diagonal of this covariance matrix we have the variance terms  and   representing the shape (spread) along each of the dimensions. But then we also have the off-diagonal terms, and (these two thing actually take the same value because this a symmetric matrix) that specify the correlation structure of the distribution.

Let’s look at a few examples of covariance structures that we could specify.

One way to view a Gaussian distribution in two dimensions is what’s called a contour plot. The coloring represents the region’s intensity, or how high it was in probability. So in the plot above, the center area that has dark red color is the region of highest probability, while the blue area corresponds to a low probability.

The first plot is refered to as a Spherical Gaussian, since the probability distribution has spherical (circular) symmetry. The covariance matrix is a diagonal covariance with equal elements along the diagonal. By specifying a diagonal covariance, what we’re seeing is that there’s no correlation between our two random variables, because the off-diagonal correlations takes the value of 0. Furthermore, by having equal values of the variances along the diagonal, we end up with a circular shape to the distribution because we are saying that the spread along each one of these two dimensions is exactly the same.

In contrast, the middle plot’s covariance matrix is also a diagonal one, but we can see that if we were to specify different variances along the diagonal, then the spread in each of these dimensions is different and so what we end up with are these axis-aligned ellipses. This is referred to as a Diagonal Gaussian.

Finally, we have the Full Gaussian. A full covariance matrix allows for correlation between our two random variables (non zero off diagonal value) we can provide these non-axis aligned ellipses. So in this example that we’re showing here, these two variables are negatively correlated, meaning if one variable is high, it’s more likely that the other value is low.

Parameter Estimation

Now that that’s covered, we’ll start introducing the algorithm using a 1-dimension data. Suppose we have a bunch of data points and we know that these data points come from two separate Gaussian sources. Given these data, can we infer back what were the Gaussian sources that generated the data? Or to paraphrase the question. The guassian distribution has two parameters the mean and the variance, can we estimate them from our data?

 

Well, since we know which data came from which Gaussian distribution, all we need to do is to compute the mean and the variance for both groups and lo and behold we get our estimates for the two Gaussian.

That’s great!! But this is all based on knowing which points came from which distribution. Now, what if we have just a bunch of data points, we don’t know which one came from which source. Can we trace back these Gaussian sources? Hmm . . . , a bit trickier isn’t it? On the other hand, what if someone came along and actually told us the parameters for the Gaussian, then we could actually figure out which points is more likely to come from which Gaussian. Given these information, we know have a chicken and egg problem. If someone told us which point came from which source, we can easily estimate the means and variance. Or if someone told us the mean and the variance for the Gaussians then we can figure out the probability of each point coming from each Gaussians. Unfortunately, we have neither . . . ..

This is the exact situation we’re in when doing GMM. We have a bunch of data points, we suspect that they came from K different guassians, but we have no clue which data points came from which guassian. To solve this problem, we use the EM algorithm. The way it works is that it will start by placing guassians randomly (generate random mean and variance for the guassian). Then it will iterate over these two steps until it converges.

• E step: With the current means and variances, it’s going to figure out the probability of each data point xi coming from each guassian.
• M step: Once it computed these probability assignments it will use these numbers to re-estimate the guassians’ mean and variance to better fit the data points.

E Step

We’ll now formalize this. Recall that GMM’s goal is to output a set of soft assignments per data point (allocating the probability of that data point belonging to each one of the clusters). To begin with, let’s just assume we actually know the parameters k, μk and k (from some random initialization) and we need a formula to compute the soft assignments having fixed the values of all the other parameters.

Let’s break this down piece by piece. The soft assignments are quantified by the responsibility vector r. For each observation i, we form a responsibility vector with elements ri1, ri2, all the way up to riK. Where K is the total number of clusters, or often refered to as the number of components. The cluster responsibilities for a single data point i should sum to 1.

The name Mixture of Gaussians comes from the notion that, in order to model more complex data distribution, we can use a linear combination of several Gaussians instead of using just one. To compute the mixture of Gaussians, we introduce a set of cluster weights, k, one for each cluster k. Where and  (meaning that the sum must add up to one and each of them is between 0 and 1). This parameter tells us what’s the prior probability that the data point in our data set x comes from the kth cluster. We can think it as controlling each cluster’s size.

The next part of the equation,  tells us: Given that we knew that the observation comes from the kth cluster, what is the likelihood of observing our data point xi coming from this cluster. After multiplying the prior and the likelihood, we need to normalize over all possible cluster assignments so that the responsibility vector becomes a valid probability. And this is essentially the computation that’s done for the E step.

M Step

After computing the responsibility vector for the current iteration, we then use it to update GMM’s parameter.

First, the cluster weights k, show us how much each cluster is represented over all data points (each cluster’s relative size). This weight is given by the ratio of the soft count  over the total number of data points N.

When updating our parameters’ estimates for each cluster k, we need to account for the associated weights rik for every one of our observation. So every time we’re touching a data point xi it’s going to be multiplied by rik.

Another thing that’s worth noticing is that, when we’re updating the parameter ˆμk and ˆk, instead of dividing the summation with the raw count of the total number of data points in that cluster Nk, we will use the effective number of observations in that cluster (the sum of the responsibilities in that cluster) as the denominator. This is denoted as .

Assessing Convergence

Apart from training the model, we also want a way to monitor the convergence of the algorithm. We do so by computing the log likelihood of the data given the current estimates of our model parameters and responsibilities.

Recall that during the E step of the algorithm, we used the formula:

To compute the weighted probability of our data point xi coming from each cluster j and summed up all the weighted probability. If we were to assume the observed data points were generated independently, the likelihood of the data can be written as:

This basically means that we multiply all the probability for every data point together to obtain a single number that estimates the likelihood of the data fitted under the model’s parameter. We can take the log of this likelihood so that the product becomes a sum and it makes the computation a bit easier:

Given this formula, we can use it and say: If the log likelihood of the data occuring under the current model’s parameter does not improve by a tolerance value that we’ve pre-specified, then the algorithm is deemed converged.

Implementing the EM algorithm

To help us develop and test our implementation, we first generate some observations from a mixture of Gaussians.

Just like with K-means, it is important to ask how we obtain an initial configuration of mixing weights and component parameters. In this simple case, we can take three random points to be the initial cluster means, use the empirical covariance of the data to be the initial covariance in each cluster (a clear overestimate), and set the initial mixing weights to be uniform across clusters. On the other hand, a better way to initial the GMM parameters is to use K-means as a first step and use its mean/cov of those clusters to initialize EM.

Note. Like K-means, EM is prone to converging to a local optimum if the initial set of parameters are sub-par. In practice, we may want to run EM multiple times with different random initialization.

With that in mind, we will run our EM algorithm to discover the mixture components and visualize its output. When working with low-dimensional data, one useful way of testing our implementation is to visualize the Gaussian components over the data at different points in the algorithm’s execution:

• At initialization
• After running the algorithm to completion (convergence)

From the plot of different iterations in the EM algorithms, one can see that the Gaussian model is incrementally updated and refined to fit the data and the algorithm converged before it reached the maximum iteration that we’ve specified.

How many Gaussians?

Just like with K-means, GMM requires the user to specify the number of components (clusters) before training the model. Here, we can use the Aikaki Information Criterion (AIC) or the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) to aid us in this decision. Let L be the maximum value of the likelihood function for the model, p be the number of estimated parameters in the model and N be the total number of data points.

Then the AIC value of the model is the following:

AIC = 2 · p − 2 · ln(L)

And the BIC value is denoted as:

BIC = −2 · ln(L) + p · ln(N)

For both evaluation criteron, the lower the better.

It appears that for both the AIC and BIC, 3 components is preferred.

 

Advice taken from Notes: AIC vs. BIC.

In general, it might be best to use AIC and BIC together in model selection. Most of the times they will agree on the preferred model. The main differences between the two is that BIC penalizes model complexity more heavily. Thus if they do disagree. e.g. If BIC points to a three-class model and AIC points to a five-class model, it makes sense to select from models with 3, 4 and 5 latent classes and see which one leads to a more suitable result.

Things to Note

One drawback of GMM is that there are lot parameters to fit, and usually requires lots of data and many iterations to get good results. An unconstrained model with K-mixtures (or simply K clusters) and D-dimensional data involves fitting D ×D ×K +D ×K +K parameters (K covariance matrices each of size D × D, plus K mean vectors of length D, plus a weight vector of length K). That could be a problem for datasets with large number of dimensions (e.g. text data), because with the number of parameters growing roughly as the square of the dimension, it may quickly become impossible to find a sufficient amount of data to make good inferences. So it is common to impose restrictions and assumption to simplify the problem (think of it as introducing regularization to avoid overfitting problems).

One common way to avoid this problem is to fix the covariance matrix of each component to be diagonal (off-diagonal value will be 0 and will not be updated). To acheive this, we can change the covariance_type parameter in scikit-learn’s GMM to diag.

The following link includes an example of comparing GMM using different covariance matrices on a toy dataset, sckit-learn docs: GMM classification.

Reference

K-means:

• Pycon 2015 Clustering: K-Means In-Depth
• Blog: K-means clustering is not a free lunch
• Blog: Improved Seeding For Clustering With K-Means++
• SciPy 2016 Scikit-learn Tutorial Unsupervised Learning Part 2 – Clustering

GMM:

• Notes: Gaussians
• Notes: AIC vs. BIC
• Youtube: Mixture Models Lecture
• Coursera: Washington Clustering & Retrieval
• Notebooks: Density Estimation Gaussian Mixture Models
• Stackoverflow: Understanding concept of Gaussian Mixture Models

Dr. Ellick Chan

Recent research has shown that popular computer vision algorithms can struggle with recognizing certain types of stylized or artistic photos posted on services such as Instagram because they alter key properties of the image such as color, shape, texture, and other informative features needed for accurate recognition. MSiA students Kapil Bhatt, Ke Huang, Mengshan Jin, Balamurali Natarajan, and Elena Smith devised a way to significantly improve the recognition rate on stylized images by devising a system that removes certain kinds of style transformations before the image is recognized by a conventional system. Their work was featured at the annual Deep Learning and Data Visualization Poster Session.

The team used a sophisticated analytics technology called Deep Learning to remove artificial style transformations from photographs that were distorted by artistic effects such as Instagram’s Kelvin and Nashville filters. To accomplish this task, the team developed a custom version of a denoising autoencoder that takes a distorted image and produces a clean version of it. Using this technique, the team then fed the denoised images into a standard convolutional neural network for image recognition and managed to classify many stylized images correctly.

The team used Keras, a popular deep learning library, to develop a custom convolutional denoising autoencoder based on one of the samples published on the Keras blog. They made many helpful improvements to the example code including: adding leaky ReLU activations, switching to the Adagrad optimizer and augmenting their training data by adding more training samples specific to the filters used.

This work comes at a very transformative time for NU, as new initiatives in data science are transforming the way that NU does research in broad areas including the arts. The project was part of a new course on Deep Learning (MSiA 490-30) taught by Dr. Ellick Chan. Technology developed from this project could be very useful in a time and age when people are increasingly posting stylized photos on the Internet. Many deep learning image recognition systems are currently trained on a variety of natural images, but as this project shows, new techniques may need to be developed to handle unexpected variations in images including the use of stylizers and other ways to manipulate images. This effort is just one step in developing more robust recognizers.

Please see below for the team’s poster:

Dr. Ellick Chan

MSiA students Jen Kung, Rene Li, Kedi Wu, and Luyao Yang satisfied deep cravings for understanding food and restaurant images using Deep Learning and took home the second-place prize at the Deep Learning and Data Visualization Poster Session.

The team used a sophisticated analytics technology called Deep Learning to extract information out of restaurant photos posted on Yelp. Unlike tradition computer vision approaches which try to classify images of food such as pizza and hot dogs, their model predicted more contextual information about a restaurant such as price, outdoor seating, and suitability for lunch or dinner. These attributes are not easily inferred from a single image, and often times even a human requires information from multiple images to successfully determine if a restaurant has these attributes. The team developed a custom version of a deep neural network using the Keras deep learning library that considers nine images at a time and performs a joint classification based off multiple data points. Using this technique, the team managed to extract semantic context from restaurant reviews automatically.

This work comes at a very transformative time for NU, as new initiatives in data science are transforming the way that NU does research in broad areas including the arts. The project was part of a new course on Deep Learning (MSiA 490-30) taught by Dr. Ellick Chan. Technology developed from this project could be very useful in a time and age when people are posting Yelp photos on their mobile phones instead of writing lengthy reviews on desktop PCs. Such images are hard to process using traditional textual search algorithms, and new approaches to inferring such information from images will be necessary.

Please see below for the team’s research poster:

Dr. Ellick Chan

MSiA students Kate Overstreet, Alyssa Everding, Patty Lu and Kelsey DeMott took home the grand prize in the Deep Learning and Data Visualization Poster Session. The team used a sophisticated analytics technology called Deep Learning to generate original musical lyrics by teaching the computer to read thousands of songs and learn the structure of lyrics using the Keras deep learning library. The generated lyrics exhibited a great deal of creativity and humor, as well as being mostly grammatically correct.  Occasionally, the computer would even invent new but plausible slang terms and create chorus-like segments. Their project was appreciated by over 50 participants in the first annual Deep Learning competition, and attendees were invited to test a live demo of their system generating musical lyrics for various topics.

This work comes at a very transformative time for Northwestern, as new initiatives in data science are transforming the way that the University does research in broad areas including the arts. The project was part of a new course on Deep Learning (MSiA 490-30) taught by Dr. Ellick Chan. The team was both pleased and surprised to find that Google has recently been working on a similar project to create computer music using Deep Learning: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3077977/data-center-cloud/googles-magenta-project-just-wrote-its-first-piece-of-music-and-thankfully-its-not-great.html​.​

Please see below for the team’s winning research poster:

Jamie Green

What’s the difference between NASCAR and philosophy? According to xkcd’s Randall Munroe, only 5 Wikipedia pages.

Randall Munroe, a former NASA astronaut-turned-web cartoonist, is best known for his humorous takes on subjects ranging from math and science to love and poetry.  His primary outlet, www.xkcd.com, pulls in an estimated 2.8 million views per day.

Back in 2011, he set his comedic sights on Wikipedia, highlighting how reliant we’ve all become on the crowd-sourced encyclopedia for our knowledge about even the most basic things. The comic itself doesn’t stand out as particularly noteworthy, but with every comic, Mr. Munroe includes a “hover-text”—hover your mouse over the images on his site, and you’ll be rewarded with an additional joke or anecdote. In this case, we can see the following:

“Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at ‘Philosophy’.”                   

When I first read this, of course I was intrigued. I immediately opened Wikipedia in a new browser window and began to test. I opened a page that certainly couldn’t have any connection to Philosophy—“NASCAR”—and began to follow his instructions.

If I wanted to prove Mr. Munroe wrong, I did not get off to a good start. The first non-italicized, non-parenthetical link on the NASCAR page is “business.” Business leads to Entity, Entity leads to Existence, Existence leads to Ontology, and sure enough, Ontology connects to Philosophy.

What Randall Munroe discovered (along with millions of his readers shortly afterwards) is a phenomenon known as “wiki loops.” A wiki loop occurs when, by following the rule of “click the first link in a Wikipedia article not in parentheses or italics, and repeat,” you find yourself coming back to the same sequence of entries over and over, ad infinitum. In the case of Philosophy, it’s actually part of a much larger loop:

Philosophy > Pre-Socratic Philosophy > Ancient Greek Philosophy > Hellenistic Period > Ancient Greece > Civilization > Complex society > Anthropology > Human > Homo > Genus > Taxonomy (biology) > Science > Knowledge > Awareness > Consciousness > Quality (philosophy) > Philosophy

As we can see, Munroe’s choice of “Philosophy” was at least somewhat arbitrary—if every page leads to Philosophy, it also leads to Pre-Socratic Philosophy, or to Human, or to Knowledge, etc.

At this point, you are probably feeling a little dubious. How could it be possible that every link eventually connects to this wiki loop? Surely somewhere you’ll find another such loop that will link back to itself, never reaching one of the seventeen pages in the Philosophy loop? In this case, your intuition is correct. While many common topics on Wikipedia tend to relate to something that will connect to these categories (think about how many pages could quickly relate to humans, biology, science, or civilizations), there are certainly others out there.

A small example is the wiki loop of Coffee > Coffee Preparation > Coffee, which you can get trapped in if you begin with, say, “Espresso.” This loop, at least to me, feels somehow unsatisfying – it seems the only way to be stuck in it is to be in the world of coffee already, whereas reaching Philosophy can happen from seemingly anywhere (“James Bond” hits the loop after fourteen clicks, “Melinda Gates” after six, and “Bell Bottoms” after a measly four clicks).

I wanted to know more. First, what other loops can we find? Second, how likely are we to get into the Philosophy loop compared with other wiki loops?

For answering these questions, we turn to an incredibly helpful (and incredibly fun) resource: WikiLoopr. Plug in any starting Wikipedia page, and it will do the hard work for you. (Special thanks to Northwestern alumnus Sean Gransee ’14 for making the page available!) I played around with this for a little while with various inputs. Some interesting patterns: “President of the United States” ends on Philosophy, but “List of Presidents of the United States” gets stuck on “United States Constitution.” Until recently, all of the presidential hopefuls’ pages led to Philosophy except for Donald Trump’s page; this changed when he became the presumptive nominee.  One particularly appropriate loop: “Narcissism” leads to “Vanity” and then back to “Narcissism.” As fun as this exploration was, I needed a dataset, so I looked toward automation.

I wrote a Python script that automated going to WikiLoopr with a random Wikipedia page (luckily, Wikipedia had my back with a page randomizer). Using the “selenium” package to load javascript objects, “beautifulsoup4” to parse and read the html, and the standard “re” package for regular expressions, I collected the results from 1,000 rounds of wiki looping. In order to visualize the results in R, I turned them into a network (using libraries “igraph,” “GGally,” and “ggplot2”), and…:

…The results weren’t terribly surprising. Mr. Munroe was essentially right. Of the 1,000 starting nodes, 981 ended in the Philosophy loop, suggesting that on average you have a 98% chance of ending on that loop if you’re picking random starting points. Of the 2,996 Wikipedia pages visited by my script (including intermediate steps), 2,928 – or 97.7% – of the pages ended up leading to the Philosophy loop.

In terms of basic graph theory, all points that lead to the same loop form a “component” – the maximal set of nodes (pages) in which all nodes are indirectly connected to each other. Of all the pages visited, only 68 websites (including intermediate steps and the loops themselves) were parts of other components. These components are shown above as colored nodes, whereas the main component is represented in black. The resulting graph highlights just how dominant the Philosophy loop really is—with almost every node in black, the colored (non-Philosophy loop) nodes are quite literally edge cases.

Okay, so far we’ve succeeded in confirming the general rule that you should expect to find yourself at Philosophy. We can also see what some of the other loops are by visualizing just the loops themselves, without all the points that lead to them:

Now we’re getting somewhere. There are two major differences between the Philosophy loop and all the others. First, the sizes of the loops themselves: the Philosophy loop has seventeen nodes in total; no other loop has more than three. It makes logical sense that with so many more ways to get stuck in the loop, it would be likely to catch more than smaller loops.

Secondly, the majority of the terms in the Philosophy loop are incredibly general. It has words like “Civilization,” “Knowledge,” “Science,” “Genus,” and of course, “Philosophy.” On the other hand, we have loops like Cebuana Lhuillier > Philippe Jones Lhuillier > Jean Henri Lhuillier (a Philippine-based pawn shop  chain, its current CEO Philippe, and Philippe’s father Jean, who was the former chairman for Cebuana Lhuillier). These are incredibly specific. We can make the reasonable assumption that one of the keys to a loop’s success is having general terms, especially ones that involve entire branches of human cognition.

If a thousand starting seeds shows us eighteen loops, then it stands to reason that increasing the number of seeds can find a number of other hidden loops. Wikipedia has over 5 million articles in the English language alone, and it only takes two articles to form a loop. It would be cool to see if a larger loop can be found with a larger sample size. In case anyone else out there is as curious as I am, I’ve posted my code for data scraping and visualizing on my github account. However, until proven otherwise, it seems fair to say that with few exceptions, all roads lead to philosophy.