Neural Network test set performance low - matlab

I have implemented a neural network in Matlab R2013a for character recognition. I have used trainbr function for nn training. 80% samples were used for training and the rest for testing. When i plot the confusion matrix, i get 100% accuracy on the training set. But for the test set the accuracy is very low(around 60%). What could be possibly wrong?

Related

Linear Regression using Neural Network

I am working on a regression problem with the following sample training data .
As shown I have an input of only 4 parameters with only one of them changing which is Z so the rest have no real value while an output of 124 parameters denoted from O1 to O124
Noting that O1 changes with a constant rate of 20 [1000 then 1020 then 1040 ...] while O2 changes with a different rate which is 30 however still constant and same applies for all the 124 outputs ,all changes linearily in a constant way.
I believed it's a trivial problem and a very simple neural network model will reach a 100% accuracy on testing data but the results were the opposite.
I reached 100% test accuracy using a linear regressor and 99.99997% test accuracy using KNN regressor
I reached 41% test data accuracy in a 10 layered neural network using relu activation while all the rest activation functions failed and shallow relu also failed
Using a simple neural network with linear activation function and no hidden layers I reached 92% on the test data
My Question is how can I get the neural network to get 100% on test data like the linear Regressor?
It is supposed that using a shallow network with linear activation to be equivilant to the linear regressor but the results are different ,am I missing something ?
If you use linear activation a deep model is in principle the same as a linear regression / a NN with 1 layer. E.g a deep NN with linear activation the prediction is given as y = W_3(W_2(W_1 x))), which can be rewritten as y = (W_3 (W_2 W_1))x, which is the same as y = (W_4 x), which is a linear Regression.
Given that check if your NN without a hidden layer converges to the same parameters as your linear regression. If this is not the case then your implementation is probably wrong. If this is the case, then your larger NN probably converges to some solution to the problem, where the test accuracy is just worse. Try different random seeds then.

GA trained NN performs worse on Test Set than BP trained NN

I trained a Neural Network with a GA and with Backpropagation. The GA finds suitable weights for the training data but performs poorly on the test data. If I train the NN with BackPropagation, it performs much better on the test data even though the training error isn't much smaller than for the GA trained version. Even when I use the weights obtained by the GA as initial weights for Backpropagation, the NN performs worse on the test data than using only Backpropagation for training. Can anyone tell me where I could have made a mistake?
I suggest you read something about overfitting. In short you will be excelent at training set but poor at testing set(because NN follows anomaly and uncertainity and datas). Task of NN is generalize, but GA only perfect minimize error in training set(to be fair, this is GA task).
There are some methods how to deal with overfitting. I suggest you use validation set. First step is division your data into the three sets. Training testing and validation. Method is simple, you will train your NN with GA to minimalize error on training set, but you also run your NN on validation set, only run, not train. Error of network decrease on training set, but error should also decrease at validation set. So if error decrease at training set, but start increase at validation set, you must stop with learning(please don't stop at first iterations).
Hope it will be helpful.
I have encountered a similar problem, and the choice of the initial values of the neural network does not seem to affect the final classification accuracy. I used the feedforwardnet() function in matlab to compare the two cases. One is direct training, and the program gives random initial weights and bias values. One is to find the appropriate initial weights values and bias values through the GA algorithm, and then assign them to the neural network, and then start training. However, the latter approach does not improve the accuracy of neural network classification.

Neural network parameter selection

I am looking at (two-layer) feed-forward Neural Networks in Matlab. I am investigating parameters that can minimise the classification error.
A google search reveals that these are some of them:
Number of neurons in the hidden layer
Learning Rate
Momentum
Training type
Epoch
Minimum Error
Any other suggestions?
I've varied the number of hidden neurons in Matlab, varying it from 1 to 10. I found that the classification error is close to 0% with 1 hidden neuron and then grows very slightly as the number of neurons increases. My question is: shouldn't a larger number of hidden neurons guarantee an equal or better answer, i.e. why might the classification error go up with more hidden neurons?
Also, how might I vary the Learning Rate, Momentum, Training type, Epoch and Minimum Error in Matlab?
Many thanks
Since you are considering a simple two layer feed forward network and have already pointed out 6 different things you need to consider to reduce classification errors, I just want to add one thing only and that is amount of training data. If you train a neural network with more data, it will work better. Note that, training with large amount of data is a key to get good outcome from neural networks, specially from deep neural networks.
Why the classification error goes up with more hidden neurons?
Answer is simple. Your model has over-fitted the training data and thus resulting in poor performance. Note that, if you increase the number of neurons in hidden layers, it would decrease training errors but increase testing errors.
In the following figure, see what happens with increased hidden layer size!
How may I vary the Learning Rate, Momentum, Training type, Epoch and Minimum Error in Matlab?
I am expecting you have already seen feed forward neural net in Matlab. You just need to manipulate the second parameter of the function feedforwardnet(hiddenSizes,trainFcn) which is trainFcn - a training function.
For example, if you want to use gradient descent with momentum and adaptive learning rate backpropagation, then use traingdx as the training function. You can also use traingda if you want to use gradient descent with adaptive learning rate backpropagation.
You can change all the required parameters of the function as you want. For example, if you want to use traingda, then you just need to follow the following two steps.
Set net.trainFcn to traingda. This sets net.trainParam to traingda's default parameters.
Set net.trainParam properties to desired values.
Example
net = feedforwardnet(3,'traingda');
net.trainParam.lr = 0.05; % setting the learning rate to 5%
net.trainParam.epochs = 2000 % setting number of epochs
Please see this - gradient descent with adaptive learning rate backpropagation and gradient descent with momentum and adaptive learning rate backpropagation.

How to improve digit recognition prediction in Neural Networks in Matlab?

I've made digit recognition (56x56 digits) using Neural Networks, but I'm getting 89.5% accuracy on test set and 100% on training set. I know that it's possible to get >95% on test set using this training set. Is there any way to improve my training so I can get better predictions? Changing iterations from 300 to 1000 gave me +0.12% accuracy. I'm also file size limited so increasing number of nodes can be impossible, but if that's the case maybe I could cut some pixels/nodes from the input layer.
To train I'm using:
input layer: 3136 nodes
hidden layer: 220 nodes
labels: 36
regularized cost function with lambda=0.1
fmincg to calculate weights (1000 iterations)
As mentioned in the comments, the easiest and most promising way is to switch to a Convolutional Neural Network. But with you current model you can:
Add more layers with less neurons each, which increases learning capacity and should increase accuracy by a bit. Problem is that you might start overfitting. Use regularization to counter this.
Use batch Normalization (BN). While you are already using regularization, BN accelerates training and also does regularization, and is a NN specific algorithm that might work better.
Make an ensemble. Train several NNs on the same dataset, but with a different initialization. This will produce slightly different classifiers and you can combine their output to get a small increase in accuracy.
Cross-entropy loss. You don't mention what loss function you are using, if its not Cross-entropy, then you should start using it. All the high accuracy classifiers use cross-entropy loss.
Switch to backpropagation and Stochastic Gradient Descent. I do not know the effect of using a different optimization algorithm, but backpropagation might outperform the optimization algorithm you are currently using, and you could combine this with other optimizers such as Adagrad or ADAM.
Other small changes that might increase accuracy are changing the activation functions (like ReLU), shuffle training samples after every epoch, and do data augmentation.

Applying Neural Network to forecast prices

I have read this line about neural networks :
"Although the perceptron rule finds a successful weight vector when
the training examples are linearly separable, it can fail to converge
if the examples are not linearly separable.
My data distribution is like this :The features are production of rubber ,consumption of rubber , production of synthetic rubber and exchange rate all values are scaled
My question is that the data is not linearly separable so should i apply ANN on it or not? is this a rule that it should be applied on linerly separable data only ? as i am getting good results using it (0.09% MAPE error) . I have also applied SVM regression (fitrsvm function in MATLAB)so I have to ask can SVM be used in forecasting /prediction or it is used only for classification I haven't read anywhere about using SVM to forecast , and the results for SVM are also not good what can be the possible reason?
Neural networks are not perceptrons. Perceptron is on of the oldest ideas, which is at most a single building block of neural networks. Perceptron is designed for binary, linear classification and your problem is neither the binary classification nor linearly separable. You are looking at regression here, where neural networks are a good fit.
can SVM be used in forecasting /prediction or it is used only for classification I haven't read anywhere about using SVM to forecast , and the results for SVM are also not good what can be the possible reason?
SVM has regression "clone" called SVR which can be used for any task NN (as a regressor) can be used. There are of course some typical characteristics of both (like SVR being non parametric estimator etc.). For the task at hand - both approaches (as well as any another regressor, there are dozens of them!) is fine.