Deep Genetic Network

Optimizing a neural network's performance is a tedious and time taking process, this iterative process does not have any defined solution which can work for all the problems. Optimization can be roughly categorized into - Architecture and Hyperparameter optimization. Many algorithms have been devised to address this problem. In this paper we introduce a neural network architecture (Deep Genetic Network) which will optimize its parameters during training based on its fitness. Deep Genetic Net uses genetic algorithms along with deep neural networks to address the hyperparameter optimization problem, this approach uses ideas like mating and mutation which are key to genetic algorithms which help the neural net architecture to learn to optimize its hyperparameters by itself rather than depending on a person to explicitly set the values. Using genetic algorithms for this problem proved to work exceptionally well when given enough time to train the network. The proposed architecture is found to work well in optimizing hyperparameters in affine, convolutional and recurrent layers proving to be a good choice for conventional supervised learning tasks.

Nth Absolute Root Mean Error

Neural network training process takes long time when the size of training data is huge, without the large set of training values the neural network is unable to learn features. This dilemma between time and size of data is often solved using fast GPUs, but we present a better solution for a subset of those problems. To reduce the time for training a regression model using neural network we introduce a loss function called Nth Absolute Root Mean Error (NARME). It helps to train regression models much faster compared to other existing loss functions. Experiments show that in most use cases NARME reduces the required number of epochs to almost one-tenth of that required by other commonly used loss functions, and also achieves great accuracy in the small amount of time in which it was trained.