Is there a limit on how many times one can train their CNN model? In the sense, say I have my CNN model and a training set.I train my model and using a unseen data test it. If I am not satisfied with the test accuracy, can I retrain my CNN as many times as possible (hypothetically) and test it again, till the performance is better?
I know other ways to improve the performance like, changing the structure of the network, filter size and number of filters, but say I want to have the structure and hyper-parameters fixed. Also I see when I train my CNN for the fifth or sixth time it gives me better test accuracy.
Is this correct?
Thanks for your time and help.
--Venkat
There is no limit on the number of times one can train a neural network, but the important thing would be to save the weights of your model after some iterations so that you can reload it whenever you want and continue from wherever the training left. This would help you in saving time as well as compute. Number of iterations required for a neural network varies from data to data and architecture to architecture, Ideally shallow models would need less iterations and deeper models would need more. I have both worked on models producing good results in a single iterations as well as models converging after fifty iterations.
Related
Consider the training process of deep FF neural network using mini-batch gradient descent. As far as I understand, at each epoch of the training we have different random set of mini-batches. Then iterating over all mini batches and computing the gradients of the NN parameters we will get random gradients at each iteration and, therefore, random directions for the model parameters to minimize the cost function. Let's imagine we fixed the hyperparameters of the training algorithm and started the training process again and again, then we would end up with models, which completely differs from each other, because in those trainings the changes of model parameters were different.
1) Is it always the case when we use such random based training algorithms?
2) If it is so, where is the guaranty that training the NN one more time with the best hyperparameters found during the previous trainings and validations will yield us the best model again?
3) Is it possible to find such hyperparameters, which will always yield the best models?
Neural Network are solving a optimization problem, As long as it is computing a gradient in right direction but can be random, it doesn't hurt its objective to generalize over data. It can stuck in some local optima. But there are many good methods like Adam, RMSProp, momentum based etc, by which it can accomplish its objective.
Another reason, when you say mini-batch, there is at least some sample by which it can generalize over those sample, there can be fluctuation in the error rate, and but at least it can give us a local solution.
Even, at each random sampling, these mini-batch have different-2 sample, which helps in generalize well over the complete distribution.
For hyperparameter selection, you need to do tuning and validate result on unseen data, there is no straight forward method to choose these.
I am trying to classify the four groups of images using SVM method, by randomly selecting training and testing data each time. When T run the program the performance varies due to randomly selecting data. How to get accurate performance of my algorithm and also how to calculate training and testing accuracy?
The formula I am using for performance is
Performance = sum(PredictedLabels == test_labels) / numel(PredictedLabels)
I am using multisvm function for classification.
My suggestion:
Actually the performance measure is acceptable, though there are some other slightly better choices like #Dan has mentioned.
More importantly, you need to deal with randomness.
1) Everytime you select your training data, test the trained model with multiple randomized test data and average the accuracy. (e.g. 10 times or so)
2) Use multiple trained model and average the performance to get general performance.
Remark:
1) You need to make sure the training data and test data do not overlap. Or it is no longer test data.
2) It is better to have the training data have the same number of samples from each class label. This means you can partition your dataset in advance.
I'm relatively new to Matlab ANN Toolbox. I am training the NN with pattern recognition and target matrix of 3x8670 containing 1s and 0s, using one hidden layer, 40 neurons and the rest with default settings. When I get the simulated output for new set of inputs, then the values are around 0 and 1. I then arrange them in descending order and choose a fixed number(which is known to me) out of 8670 observations to be 1 and rest to be zero.
Every time I run the program, the first row of the simulated output always has close to 100% accuracy and the following rows dont exhibit the same kind of accuracy.
Is there a logical explanation in general? I understand that answering this query conclusively might require the understanding of program and problem, but its made of of several functions to clearly explain. Can I make some changes in the training to get consistence output?
If you have any suggestions please share it with me.
Thanks,
Nishant
Your problem statement is not clear for me. For example, what you mean by: "I then arrange them in descending order and choose a fixed number ..."
As I understand, you did not get appropriate output from your NN as compared to the real target. I mean, your output from NN is difference than target. If so, there are different possibilities which should be considered:
How do you divide training/test/validation sets for training phase? The most division should be assigned to training (around 75%) and rest for test/validation.
How is your training data set? Can it support most scenarios as you expected? If your trained data set is not somewhat similar to your test data sets (e.g., you have some new records/samples in the test data set which had not (near) appear in the training phase, it explains as 'outlier' and NN cannot work efficiently with these types of samples, so you need clustering approach not NN classification approach), your results from NN is out-of-range and NN cannot provide ideal accuracy as you need. NN is good for those data set training, where there is no very difference between training and test data sets. Otherwise, NN is not appropriate.
Sometimes you have an appropriate training data set, but the problem is training itself. In this condition, you need other types of NN, because feed-forward NNs such as MLP cannot work with compacted and not well-separated regions of data very well. You need strong function approximation such as RBF and SVM.
I would like to ask for ideas what options there is for training a MATLAB ANN (artificial neural network) continuously, i.e. not having a pre-prepared training set? The idea is to have an "online" data stream thus, when first creating the network it's completely untrained but as samples flow in the ANN is trained and converges.
The ANN will be used to classify a set of values and the implementation would visualize how the training of the ANN gets improved as samples flows through the system. I.e. each sample is used for training and then also evaluated by the ANN and the response is visualized.
The effect that I expect is that for the very first samples the response of the ANN will be more or less random but as the training progress the accuracy improves.
Any ideas are most welcome.
Regards, Ola
In MATLAB you can use the adapt function instead of train. You can do this incrementally (change weights every time you get a new piece of information) or you can do it every N-samples, batch-style.
This document gives an in-depth run-down on the different styles of training from the perspective of a time-series problem.
I'd really think about what you're trying to do here, because adaptive learning strategies can be difficult. I found that they like to flail all over compared to their batch counterparts. This was especially true in my case where I work with very noisy signals.
Are you sure that you need adaptive learning? You can't periodically re-train your NN? Or build one that generalizes well enough?
I have created a neural network and the performance is good. By using nprtool, we are allow to test the network with an input data and target data. Here is my question, what is the purpose of testing a neural network with target data provided? Isn't it testing should not hav e target data so that we can know how well can the trained neural network perform without target data is given? Hope someone will respond to this, thanks =)
I'm not familiar with nprtool, but I suspect it would give the input data to your neural network, and then compare your NN's output data with the target data (and compute some kind of success rate based on that).
So your NN will never see the target data, it's just used to measure the performance.
It's like the "teacher's edition" of the exercise books in school. The student (i.e. the NN) doesn't have the solutions, but her/his answers will be compared against them by the teacher (i.e. nprtool). (Okay, the teacher probably/hopefully knows the subject, but you get the idea.)
The "target" data t is the desired y of y=net(x) used as example to train the network.
What nprtool do is to divide the training set into three groups: the training set, the validation set and the test set.
The first one is used to actually update the network.
The second one is used to determine the performances of the net (note: this set is NOT used in any way to update the network): as the NN "learns" the error (as difference between the t and net(x)) over the validation set decreases. The trend will eventually stop or even reverse: this phenomena is called "overfitting", which means the NN is now chasing the training set, "memorizing" it at the cost of the ability to generalize (meaning: to perform well with unseen data). So the purpose of this validation set is to determine when to stop the training before the NN starts overfitting. This should answer your question.
Finally third set is for external testing, to leave you a set of data untouched by the training procedure.
Even though the total data set [training, validation and testing] are inputs to the training algorithm, the testing data is in no way used to design (i.e., train and validate) the net
total = design + test
design = train + validate
The training data is used to estimate weights and biases
The validation data is used to monitor the design performance on nontraining data. REGARDLESS OF THE PERFORMANCE ON TRAINING DATA, if validation performance degrades continuously for 6 (default) epochs, training is terminated (VALIDATION STOPPING).
This mitigates the dreaded phenomenon of OVERTRAINING AN OVERFIT NET where performance on nontraining data degrades even if the training set performance is improving.
An overfit net has more unknown weights and biases than training equations, thereby allowing an infinite number of solutions. A simple example of overfitting with two unknowns but only one equation:
KNOWN: a, b, c
FIND: unique x1 and x2
USING: a * x1 + b * x2 = c
Hope this helps.
Greg