Sampling weights of deep neural networks

We introduce a probability distribution, combined with an efficient sampling algorithm, for weights and biases of fully-connected neural networks. In a supervised learning context, no iterative optimization or gradient computations of internal network parameters are needed to obtain a trained network. The sampling is based on the idea of random feature models. However, instead of a data-agnostic distribution, e.g., a normal distribution, we use both the input and the output training data of the supervised learning problem to sample both shallow and deep networks. We prove that the sampled networks we construct are universal approximators. We also show that our sampling scheme is invariant to rigid body transformations and scaling of the input data. This implies many popular pre-processing techniques are no longer required. For Barron functions, we show that the $L^2$-approximation error of sampled shallow networks decreases with the square root of the number of neurons. In numerical experiments, we demonstrate that sampled networks achieve comparable accuracy as iteratively trained ones, but can be constructed orders of magnitude faster. Our test cases involve a classification benchmark from OpenML, sampling of neural operators to represent maps in function spaces, and transfer learning using well-known architectures.