I am making a kind of neural network, with neurons and "synapses". It kind of resembles turings type b nets, connections can go anywhere. It starts with a randomly generated net that has random connections between the neurons. There are both electrical and chemical variant with different effects on the neurons. To the point:
A net is basically a series of neurons with connections to other neurons. I cant figure out how to do "crossover" to form new generations of nets based on the best performing parents. More specifically, if I combine them based on single connections, I will break any potential "structure" or function that may have formed from a certain set of neurons and connections.
I considered splitting the network map, say, taking half from one parent and half from the other, but that may still break any potential functions that may have been created.
It is higly likely that I am missing something, I am learning this as I go.
Is there some way of doing this?
If you are evolving the network structure and weights, there is an excellent algorithm called NEAT.
If you are evolving the weights only, you have several possibilites, but the most basic one is use the weight matrix of the network graph as a genotype. Then, crossover can be done using any continuous GA crossover method, like SBX or BLX-alpha.
The problem of breaking functionality (most often by mutation) is common and can be solved by e.g. fitness sharing (NEAT uses it) or some other mechanism which protects modified individuals for certain amount of time.
Related
I am working on an implementation of the back propagation algorithm. What I have implemented so far seems working but I can't be sure that the algorithm is well implemented, here is what I have noticed during training test of my network :
Specification of the implementation :
A data set containing almost 100000 raw containing (3 variable as input, the sinus of the sum of those three variables as expected output).
The network does have 7 layers all the layers use the Sigmoid activation function
When I run the back propagation training process:
The minimum of costs of the error is found at the fourth iteration (The minimum cost of error is 140, is it normal? I was expecting much less than that)
After the fourth Iteration the costs of the error start increasing (I don't know if it is normal or not?)
The short answer would be "no, very likely your implementation is incorrect". Your network is not training as can be observed by the very high cost of error. As discussed in comments, your network suffers very heavily from vanishing gradient problem, which is inevitable in deep networks. In essence, the first layers of you network learn much slower than the later. All neurons get some random weights at the beginning, right? Since the first layer almost doesn't learn anything, the large initial error propagates through the whole network!
How to fix it? From the description of your problem it seems that a feedforward network with just a single hidden layer in should be able to do the trick (as proven in universal approximation theorem).
Check e.g. free online book by Michael Nielsen if you'd like to learn more.
so I do understand from that the back propagation can't deal with deep neural networks? or is there some method to prevent this problem?
It can, but it's by no mean a trivial challenge. Deep neural networks have been used since 60', but only in 90' researchers came up with methods how to deal with them efficiently. I recommend reading "Efficient BackProp" chapter (by Y.A. LeCun et al.) of "Neural Networks: Tricks of the Trade".
Here is the summary:
Shuffle the examples
Center the input variables by subtracting the mean
Normalize the input variable to a standard deviation of 1
If possible, decorrelate the input variables.
Pick a network with the sigmoid function f(x)=1.7159*(tanh(2/3x): it won't saturate at +1 / -1, but instead will have highest gain at these points (second derivative is at max.)
Set the target values within the range of the sigmoid, typically +1 and -1.
The weights should be randomly drawn from a distribution with mean zero and a standard deviation given by m^(-1/2), where m is the number of inputs to the unit
The preferred method for training the network should be picked as follows:
If the training set is large (more than a few hundred samples) and redundant, and if the task is classification, use stochastic gradient with careful tuning, or use the stochastic diagonal Levenberg Marquardt method.
If the training set is not too large, or if the task is regression, use conjugate gradient.
Also, some my general remarks:
Watch for numerical stability if you implement it yourself. It's easy to get into troubles.
Think of the architecture. Fully-connected multi-layer networks are rarely a smart idea. Unfortunately ANN are poorly understood from theoretical point of view and one of the best things you can do is just check what worked for others and learn useful patterns (with regularization, pooling and dropout layers and such).
I would like to know a bit more about Neural Network, I'm developing a C++ program to make a NN but I'm stuck with the BackPropagation algorithm, sorry for not offering some working code.
I know that there are so many libraries for creating a NN in many languages, but I prefer to make one from my self. The point is that I don't know how many layers and how many neurons should be necessary for achieving a particular goal such as pattern recognition, or functions approximations, or whatever.
My questions are: if I'd like to recognize some particulars patterns, like in image detection, how many layers and neurons-per-layer should be necessary? Let's say my images are all 8x8 pixels, I would start naturally with an input layer of 64 neurons, but I don't have any idea of how many neurons I have to put in hidden layers, and also in output layer. Let's say I have to distinguish from cats and dogs, or whatever you may think, how could be the output layer? I can imagine an output layer with only-one neuron outputting a value between 0 and 1 with the classical logistic function (1/(1+exp(-x)) and when it is near 0 the input was a cat and when approaches 1 it was a dog, but ... is it correct? What if I add a new pattern like a fish? and what if the input contains a dog and a cat ( ..and a fish)? This make me thinking that the logistic function in the output layer is not very suitable for pattern recognition like this, only because 1/(1+exp(-x)) has a range in (0,1). Do I have to change the activation function or maybe add some other neurons to the output layer? Are there some other activations function more accurate to do this? Do every neurons in every layers have the same activation function, or it is different from layer to layer?
Sorry for all of this questions, but this topic is not very clear to me.
I read a lot around internet, and I found libraries all-yet-implemented and hard to read from, and many explanations to what a NN can do, but not how it can do.
I read a lot from https://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/ and http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html, and here I understood how to approximate a function (because every neurons in a layer can be thought as a step-function with a particular step for weights and bias) and how back-propagation algorithm works, but other tutorials and similars were more focused on preexisting libraries. I also read this question Determining the proper amount of Neurons for a Neural Network but I would like to involve also the activation functions of a NN, which is the best and for what is the best.
Thanks in advance for your answers!
Your questions are quite general, so I can only give some general recommendations:
The number of layers you need depends on the complexity of the problem you want to solve. The more calculation is required to obtain an output from a given input, the more layers you need.
Only very simple problems can be solved with a single layer network. These are called linearly separable and are usually trivial. With two layers it gets better and with three layers, at least in theory, all kinds of classification tasks can be performed if you have enough cells within the layers. In practice, however it is often better to add a 4th or 5th layer to the network while reducing the number of cells within a single layer.
Be aware that the standard backpropagation algorithm performs badly with more than 4 or 5 layers. If you need more layers, have a look at Deep Learning.
The numbers of cells within each layer mainly depends on the number of inputs and, if you solve a classification task, the number of classes you want to detect. In practice it is quite common to reduce the number of cells from layer to layer, but there are exceptions.
Concerning your question about the output function: In most cases you should stick with one type of sigmoid function. The case you describe is not really an issue because you could add another output cell for your "fish" class. The choice of a specific activation function is not that critical. Basically you use one whose values and derivative can be calculated efficiently.
#Frank Puffer has already provided some nice information, but let me add my two cents. First off, much of what you're asking is in the area of hyperparameter optimization. Although there are various "rules of thumb", the reality is that determining the optimal architecture (number/size of layers, connectivity structure, etc.) and other parameters like the learning rate typically requires extensive experimentation. The good news is that the parameterization of these hyperparameters is among the simplest aspects of the implementation of a neural network. So I would recommend focusing on building your software such that the number of layers, size of layers, learning rate, etc., are all easily configurable.
Now you specifically asked about detecting patterns in an image. It's worth mentioning that using standard multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to perform classification on raw image data can be computationally expensive, especially for larger images. It's common to use architectures that are designed to extract useful, spacially-local features (i.e.: Convolutional Neural Networks or CNNs).
You could still use standard MLPs for this, but the computational complexity can make it an untenable solution. The sparse connectivity of CNNs for example dramatically reduce the number of parameters requiring optimization and simultaneously build a conceptual hierarchy of representations better suited for classification of images.
Regardless, I would recommend implementing backpropagation using stochastic gradient descent for optimization. This is still the approach typically used for training neural nets, CNNs, RNNs, etc.
Regarding the number of output neurons, this is one question that does have a simple answer: use "one-hot" encoding. For each class you want to recognize, you have an output neuron. In your example of the dog, cat, and fish classes, you have three neurons. For an input image representing a dog, you would expect a value of 1 for the "dog" neuron, and 0 for all the others. Then, during inference, you can interpret the output as a probability distribution reflecting the confidence of the NN. For example, if you get output dog:0.70, cat:0.25, fish:0.05, then you have a 70% confidence that the image is a dog, and so on.
For activation functions, the most recent research I've seen seems to indicate that Rectified Linear Units are generally a good choice since they're easy to differentiate and compute, and they avoid a problem that plagues deeper networks called the "vanishing gradient problem".
Best of luck!
I'm new to the Neural Network Toolbox (nntool) in Matlab. I have trained two networks using the same data set. One of these networks contains a higher number of neurons as the other one.
Now I'm wondering: how can I compare these networks? How can I say network A is better than network B?
Is it all about the number of correctly classified pattern in my test set? Lets say both networks were shown the same test set and network A classified more pattern correctly. Can I say network A is (in general) better than network B?
Or should I also look at the performance according to my performance function?
Are there any other measures for comparing two networks trained with different parameter?
That mainly depends on what is your concern. As I see, in most cases analyzing the predicted labels, or accuracy of the nets can lead to a good pickup decision, especially when your networks have shallow architectures,however there are some side-handed issues that may become more important when you decide to see the nets with wider eyes.
For example, in the training phase, adding even one hidden unit to the first hidden layer comes up with inserting d (dimension of input layer) free parameters (weights) to your model that should be estimated. In other hand, more free parameters your model has, more training data is required to come up with a reliable model. Therefore, bigger networks are well-accepted as long as you have enough data to compensate for the added free parameters. As rule of thumb, inserting more free parameters increase the chance of over-fitting which has been a vital problem in deep neural networks and many efforts has been made to resolve it.
Another case which is less important in shallow nets, is the computational cost imposed by extra hidden nodes. Since we are looking with wide eyes, mentioning this issue is somewhat necessary. In cases when your network goes deeper, this computational cost becomes more challenging. The computational cost in training phase is also an important issue when you use back-propagation to update the parameters.
One other thing that you may mainly see in deep neural networks is the memory requirements. As the number of layers or neurons increase, the number of free parameters grows dramatically such that in deep networks you may see millions of parameters. It is clear that loading this amount of parameters asks for sufficient hardware requirements.
hope it helps.
I'm a computer science student and for this years project, I need to create and apply a Genetic Algorithm to something. I think Neural Networks would be a good thing to apply it to, but I'm having trouble understanding them. I fully understand the concepts but none of the websites out there really explain the following which is blocking my understanding:
How the decision is made for how many nodes there are.
What the nodes actually represent and do.
What part the weights and bias actually play in classification.
Could someone please shed some light on this for me?
Also, I'd really appreciate it if you have any similar ideas for what I could apply a GA to.
Thanks very much! :)
Your question is quite complex and I don't think a small answer will fully satisfy you. Let me try, nonetheless.
First of all, there must be at least three layers in your neural network (assuming a simple feedforward one). The first is the input layer and there will be one neuron per input. The third layer is the output one and there will be one neuron per output value (if you are classifying, there might be more than one f you want to assign a "belong to" meaning to each neuron).. The remaining layer is the hidden one, which will stand between the input and output. Determining its size is a complex task as you can see in the following references:
comp.ai faq
a post on stack exchange
Nevertheless, the best way to proceed would be for you to state your problem more clearly (as weel as industrial secrecy might allow) and let us think a little more on your context.
The number of input and output nodes is determined by the number of inputs and outputs you have. The number of intermediate nodes is up to you. There is no "right" number.
Imagine a simple network: inputs( age, sex, country, married ) outputs( chance of death this year ). Your network might have a 2 "hidden values", one depending on age and sex, the other depending on country and married. You put weights on each. For example, Hidden1 = age * weight1 + sex * weight2. Hidden2 = country * weight3 + married * weight4. You then make another set of weights, Hidden3 and Hidden4 connecting to the output variable.
Then you get a data from, say the census, and run through your neural network to find out what weights best match the data. You can use genetic algorithms to test different sets of weights. This is useful if you have so many edges you could not try every possible weighting. You need to find good weights without exhaustively trying every possible set of weights, so GA lets you "evolve" a good set of weights.
Then you test your weights on data from a different census to see how well it worked.
... my major barrier to understanding this though is understanding how the hidden layer actually works; I don't really understand how a neuron functions and what the weights are for...
Every node in the middle layer is a "feature detector" -- it will (hopefully) "light up" (i.e., be strongly activated) in response to some important feature in the input. The weights are what emphasize an aspect of the previous layer; that is, the set of input weights to a neuron correspond to what nodes in the previous layer are important for that feature.
If a weight connecting myInputNode to myMiddleLayerNode is 0, then you can tell that myInputNode is not important to whatever feature myMiddleLayerNode is detecting. If, though, the weight connecting myInputNode to myMiddleLayerNode is very large (either positive or negative), you know that myInputNode is quite important (if it's very negative it means "No, this feature is almost certainly not there", while if it's very positive it means "Yes, this feature is almost certainly there").
So a corollary of this is that you want the number of your middle-layer nodes to have a correspondence to how many features are needed to classify the input: too few middle-layer nodes and it will be hard to converge during training (since every middle-layer node will have to "double up" on its feature-detection) while too many middle-layer nodes may over-fit your data.
So... a possible use of a genetic algorithm would be to design the architecture of your network! That is, use a GA to set the number of middle-layer nodes and initial weights. Some instances of the population will converge faster and be more robust -- these could be selected for future generations. (Personally, I've never felt this was a great use of GAs since I think it's often faster just to trial-and-error your way into a decent NN architecture, but using GAs this way is not uncommon.)
You might find this wikipedia page on NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) interesting. NEAT is one example of applying genetic algorithms to create the neural network topology.
The best way to explain an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is to provide the biological process that it attempts to simulate - a neural network. The best example of one is the human brain. So how does the brain work (highly simplified for CS)?
The functional unit (for our purposes) of the brain is the neuron. It is a potential accumulator and "disperser". What that means is that after a certain amount of electric potential (think filling a balloon with air) has been reached, it "fires" (balloon pops). It fires electric signals down any connections it has.
How are neurons connected? Synapses. These synapses can have various weights (in real life due to stronger/weaker synapses from thicker/thinner connections). These weights allow a certain amount of a fired signal to pass through.
You thus have a large collection of neurons connected by synapses - the base representation for your ANN. Note that the input/output structures described by the others are an artifact of the type of problem to which ANNs are applied. Theoretically, any neuron can accept input as well. It serves little purpose in computational tasks however.
So now on to ANNs.
NEURONS: Neurons in an ANN are very similar to their biological counterpart. They are modeled either as step functions (that signal out "1" after a certain combined input signal, or "0" at all other times), or slightly more sophisticated firing sequences (arctan, sigmoid, etc) that produce a continuous output, though scaled similarly to a step. This is closer to the biological reality.
SYNAPSES: These are extremely simple in ANNs - just weights describing the connections between Neurons. Used simply to weight the neurons that are connected to the current one, but still play a crucial role: synapses are the cause of the network's output. To clarify, the training of an ANN with a set structure and neuron activation function is simply the modification of the synapse weights. That is it. No other change is made in going from a a "dumb" net to one that produces accurate results.
STRUCTURE:
There is no "correct" structure for a neural network. The structures are either
a) chosen by hand, or
b) allowed to grow as a result of learning algorithms (a la Cascade-Correlation Networks).
Assuming the hand-picked structure, these are actually chosen through careful analysis of the problem and expected solution. Too few "hidden" neurons/layers, and you structure is not complex enough to approximate a complex function. Too many, and your training time rapidly grows unwieldy. For this reason, the selection of inputs ("features") and the structure of a neural net are, IMO, 99% of the problem. The training and usage of ANNs is trivial in comparison.
To now address your GA concern, it is one of many, many efforts used to train the network by modifying the synapse weights. Why? because in the end, a neural network's output is simply an extremely high-order surface in N dimensions. ANY surface optimization technique can be use to solve the weights, and GA are one such technique. The simple backpropagation method is alikened to a dimension-reduced gradient-based optimization technique.
Generally speaking what do you get out of extending an artificial neural net by adding more nodes to a hidden layer or more hidden layers?
Does it allow for more precision in the mapping, or does it allow for more subtlety in the relationships it can identify, or something else?
There's a very well known result in machine learning that states that a single hidden layer is enough to approximate any smooth, bounded function (the paper was called "Multilayer feedforward networks are universal approximators" and it's now almost 20 years old). There are several things to note, however.
The single hidden layer may need to be arbitrarily wide.
This says nothing about the ease with which an approximation may be found; in general large networks are hard to train properly and fall victim to overfitting quite frequently (the exception are so-called "convolutional neural networks" which really are only meant for vision problems).
This also says nothing about the efficiency of the representation. Some functions require exponential numbers of hidden units if done with one layer but scale much more nicely with more layers (for more discussion of this read Scaling Learning Algorithms Towards AI)
The problem with deep neural networks is that they're even harder to train. You end up with very very small gradients being backpropagated to the earlier hidden layers and the learning not really going anywhere, especially if weights are initialized to be small (if you initialize them to be of larger magnitude you frequently get stuck in bad local minima). There are some techniques for "pre-training" like the ones discussed in this Google tech talk by Geoff Hinton which attempt to get around this.
This is very interesting question but it's not so easy to answer. It depends on the problem you try to resolve and what neural network you try to use. There are several neural network types.
I general it's not so clear that more nodes equals more precision. Research show that you need mostly only one hidden layer. The numer of nodes should be the minimal numer of nodes that are required to resolve a problem. If you don't have enough of them - you will not reach solution.
From the other hand - if you have reached the number of nodes that is good to resolve solution - you can add more and more of them and you will not see any further progress in result estimation.
That's why there are so many types of neural networks. They try to resolve different types of problems. So you have NN to resolve static problems, to resolve time related problems and so one. The number of nodes is not so important like the design of them.
When you have a hidden layer is that you are creating a combined feature of the input. So, is the problem better tackled by more features of the existing input, or through higher-order features that come from combining existing features? This is the trade-off for a standard feed-forward network.
You have a theoretical reassurance that any function can be represented by a neural network with two hidden layers and non-linear activation.
Also, consider using additional resources for boosting, instead of adding more nodes, if you're not certain of the appropriate topology.
Very rough rules of thumb
generally more elements per layer for bigger input vectors.
more layers may let you model more non-linear systems.
If the kind of network you are using has delays in propagation , more layers may allow modelling of time series . Take care to have time jitter in the delays or it wont work very well. If this is just gobbledegook to you, ignore it.
More layers lets you insert recurrent features. This can be very useful for discrimination tasks. You ANN implementation my not permit this.
HTH
The number of units per hidden layer accounts for the ANN's potential to describe an arbitrarily complex function. Some (complicated) functions may require many hidden nodes, or possibly more than one hidden layer.
When a function can be roughly approximated by a certain number of hidden units, any extra nodes will provide more accuracy...but this is only true if the training samples used are enough to justify this addition - otherwise what will happen is "overconvergence". Overconvergence means that your ANN has lost its generalization abilities because it has overemphasized on the particular samples.
In general it is best to use the less hidden units possible, if the resulting network can give good results. The additional training patterns required to justify more hidden nodes can not be found easily in most cases, and accuracy is not the NNs' strong point.