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CROSSVALIDATION TRAINING FOR NEURAL NETWORKS
Posted:
Feb 15, 2013 4:08 PM
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Although f-fold XVAL is a very good and popular way for designing and testing NNs, there is no MATLAB NNTBX function for doing so. I have done it for classification and regression by brute force using do loops. Unfortunately, that code is not available since my old computer crashed. Nevertheless, the coding was straightforward because random weights are automatically assigned when the obsolete functions NEWPR, NEWFIT or NEWFF are created. With the current functions FITNET, PATTERNNET and FEEDFORWARDNET, you either have to use a separate step with CONFIGURE or let the TRAIN function initialize the weights.
I did add a few modifications. With f >=3 partitions there are F = f*(f-1)/2 ( = 10 for f = 5) ways to choose a holdout nontraining pair for validation and testing. So, for each of F (=10) nets I trained untill BOTH holdout set errors were minimized. I then obtained 2 nontraining estimates for error: The error of holdout2 at the minimum error of holdout1 and vice versa. Therefore for f = 5, I get 2*F = 20 holdout error estimates which is a reasonable value for obtaining min/median/mean/std/max (or even histogram) summary statistics.
However, I did get a query from one statistician who felt that somehow the multiplication factor of F/f = (f-1) ( = 4 for f=5) is biased. The factor of f-1 is from the use of f-1 different validation sets for each of f test sets. However, the f-1 different validation sets correspond to f-1 different training sets, so I don't worry about it.
In addition, for each of the F nets you can run Ntrials different weight initializations. So, for f = 5, Ntrials = 5 you can get F*Ntrials = 100 error estimates.
With timeseries, preserving order and uniform spacing is essential. I have only used f-fold XVAL with f = 3 and either DIVIDEBLOCK or DIVIDEINT types of data division. In the latter case the spacing is tripled and success will depend on the difference of the significant lags of the auto and/or cross correlation functions. The trick of two holdout error estimates per net still works. Therefore, you can get 2*Ntrials error estimates. I can't see any other way to preserve order and uniform spacing.
The MATLAB commands
lookfor crossvalidation lookfor 'cross validation' lookfor validation
may yield functions from other toolboxes which may be of use. However I think the use of 2 holdout nontraining subsets is unique to neural network training.
Hope this helps.
Greg
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