Manifold learning on handwritten digits with Isomap

The Isomap algorithm is an approach to manifold learning. Isomap seeks a lower dimensional embedding of a set of high dimensional data points estimating the intrinsic geometry of a data manifold based on a rough estimate of each data point’s neighbors.
The scikit-learn library provides a great implmentation of the Isomap algorithm and a dataset of handwritten digits. In this post we'll see how to load the dataset and how to compute an embedding of the dataset on a bidimentional space.
Let's load the dataset and show some samples:

from pylab import scatter,text,show,cm,figure
from pylab import subplot,imshow,NullLocator
from sklearn import manifold, datasets

# load the digits dataset
# 901 samples, about 180 samples per class 
# the digits represented 0,1,2,3,4
digits = datasets.load_digits(n_class=5)
X = digits.data
color = digits.target

# shows some digits
figure(1)
for i in range(36):
 ax = subplot(6,6,i)
 ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(NullLocator()) # remove ticks
 ax.yaxis.set_major_locator(NullLocator())
 imshow(digits.images[i], cmap=cm.gray_r) 

The result should be as follows:

Now X is a matrix where each row is a vector that represent a digit. Each vector has 64 elements and it has been obtained using spatial resampling on the above images. We can apply the Isomap algorithm on this data and plot the result with the following lines:

# running Isomap
# 5 neighbours will be considered and reduction on a 2d space
Y = manifold.Isomap(5, 2).fit_transform(X)

# plotting the result
figure(2)
scatter(Y[:,0], Y[:,1], c='k', alpha=0.3, s=10)
for i in range(Y.shape[0]):
 text(Y[i, 0], Y[i, 1], str(color[i]),
      color=cm.Dark2(color[i] / 5.),
      fontdict={'weight': 'bold', 'size': 11})
show()

The new embedding for the data will be as follows:

We computed a bidimensional version of each pattern in the dataset and it's easy to see that the separation between the five classes in the new manifold is pretty neat.

Analyzing your Gmail with Matplotlib

Lately, I read this post about using Mathematica to analyze a Gmail account. I found it very interesting and I worked a with imaplib and matplotlib to create two of the graph they showed:

• A diurnal plot, which shows the date and time each email was sent (or received), with years running along the x axis and times of day on the y axis.
• And a daily distribution histogram, which represents the distribution of emails sent by time of day.

In order to plot those graphs I created three functions. The first one, retrieve the headers of the emails we want to analyze:

from imaplib import IMAP4_SSL
from datetime import date,timedelta,datetime
from time import mktime
from email.utils import parsedate
from pylab import plot_date,show,xticks,date2num
from pylab import figure,hist,num2date
from matplotlib.dates import DateFormatter

def getHeaders(address,password,folder,d):
 """ retrieve the headers of the emails 
     from d days ago until now """
 # imap connection
 mail = IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com')
 mail.login(address,password)
 mail.select(folder) 
 # retrieving the uids
 interval = (date.today() - timedelta(d)).strftime("%d-%b-%Y")
 result, data = mail.uid('search', None, 
                      '(SENTSINCE {date})'.format(date=interval))
 # retrieving the headers
 result, data = mail.uid('fetch', data[0].replace(' ',','), 
                         '(BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (DATE)])')
 mail.close()
 mail.logout()
 return data

The second one, make us able to make the diurnal plot:

def diurnalPlot(headers):
 """ diurnal plot of the emails, 
     with years running along the x axis 
     and times of day on the y axis.
 """
 xday = []
 ytime = []
 for h in headers: 
  if len(h) > 1:
   timestamp = mktime(parsedate(h[1][5:].replace('.',':')))
   mailstamp = datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp)
   xday.append(mailstamp)
   # Time the email is arrived
   # Note that years, month and day are not important here.
   y = datetime(2010,10,14, 
     mailstamp.hour, mailstamp.minute, mailstamp.second)
   ytime.append(y)

 plot_date(xday,ytime,'.',alpha=.7)
 xticks(rotation=30)
 return xday,ytime

And this is the function for the daily distribution histogram:

def dailyDistributioPlot(ytime):
 """ draw the histogram of the daily distribution """
 # converting dates to numbers
 numtime = [date2num(t) for t in ytime] 
 # plotting the histogram
 ax = figure().gca()
 _, _, patches = hist(numtime, bins=24,alpha=.5)
 # adding the labels for the x axis
 tks = [num2date(p.get_x()) for p in patches] 
 xticks(tks,rotation=75)
 # formatting the dates on the x axis
 ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(DateFormatter('%H:%M'))

Now we got everything we need to make the graphs. Let's try to analyze the outgoing mails of last 5 years:

print 'Fetching emails...'
headers = getHeaders('iamsupersexy@gmail.com',
                      'ofcourseiamsupersexy','inbox',365*5)

print 'Plotting some statistics...'
xday,ytime = diurnalPlot(headers)
dailyDistributioPlot(ytime)
print len(xday),'Emails analysed.'
show()

The result would appear as follows

We can analyze the outgoing mails just using selecting the folder '[Gmail]/Sent Mail':

print 'Fetching emails...'
headers = getHeaders('iamsupersexy@gmail.com',
                     'ofcourseiamsupersexy','[Gmail]/Sent Mail',365*5)

print 'Plotting some statistics...'
xday,ytime = diurnalPlot(headers)
dailyDistributioPlot(ytime)
print len(xday),'Emails analysed.'
show()

And this is the result: