A Heuristic for Efficient Reduction in Hidden Layer Combinations For Feedforward Neural Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the hyper-parameter search problem in the field of machine learning and present a heuristic approach in an attempt to tackle it. In most learning algorithms, a set of hyper-parameters must be determined before training commences. The choice of hyper-parameters can affect the final model's performance significantly, but yet determining a good choice of hyper-parameters is in most cases complex and consumes large amount of computing resources. In this paper, we show the differences between an exhaustive search of hyper-parameters and a heuristic search, and show that there is a significant reduction in time taken to obtain the resulting model with marginal differences in evaluation metrics when compared to the benchmark case.

To appear in the proceedings of the 2020 Computing Conference