Understanding the Feedforward Artificial Neural Network Model From the Perspective of Network Flow

In recent years, deep learning based on artificial neural network (ANN) has achieved great success in pattern recognition. However, there is no clear understanding of such neural computational models. In this paper, we try to unravel "black-box" structure of Ann model from network flow. Specifically, we consider the feed forward Ann as a network flow model, which consists of many directional class-pathways. Each class-pathway encodes one class. The class-pathway of a class is obtained by connecting the activated neural nodes in each layer from input to output, where activation value of neural node (node-value) is defined by the weights of each layer in a trained ANN-classifier. From the perspective of the class-pathway, training an ANN-classifier can be regarded as the formulation process of class-pathways of different classes. By analyzing the the distances of each two class-pathways in a trained ANN-classifiers, we try to answer the questions, why the classifier performs so? At last, from the neural encodes view, we define the importance of each neural node through the class-pathways, which is helpful to optimize the structure of a classifier. Experiments for two types of ANN model including multi-layer MLP and CNN verify that the network flow based on class-pathway is a reasonable explanation for ANN models.