The Compact Support Neural Network

Neural networks are popular and useful in many fields, but they have the problem of giving high confidence responses for examples that are away from the training data. This makes the neural networks very confident in their prediction while making gross mistakes, thus limiting their reliability for s...

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Main Authors: Adrian Barbu, Hongyu Mou
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-12-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/24/8494
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author Adrian Barbu
Hongyu Mou
author_facet Adrian Barbu
Hongyu Mou
author_sort Adrian Barbu
collection DOAJ
description Neural networks are popular and useful in many fields, but they have the problem of giving high confidence responses for examples that are away from the training data. This makes the neural networks very confident in their prediction while making gross mistakes, thus limiting their reliability for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and space exploration, etc. This paper introduces a novel neuron generalization that has the standard dot-product-based neuron and the radial basis function (RBF) neuron as two extreme cases of a shape parameter. Using a rectified linear unit (ReLU) as the activation function results in a novel neuron that has compact support, which means its output is zero outside a bounded domain. To address the difficulties in training the proposed neural network, it introduces a novel training method that takes a pretrained standard neural network that is fine-tuned while gradually increasing the shape parameter to the desired value. The theoretical findings of the paper are bound on the gradient of the proposed neuron and proof that a neural network with such neurons has the universal approximation property. This means that the network can approximate any continuous and integrable function with an arbitrary degree of accuracy. The experimental findings on standard benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach has smaller test errors than the state-of-the-art competing methods and outperforms the competing methods in detecting out-of-distribution samples on two out of three datasets.
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spelling doaj.art-fb943064815b463fb7a014822ff081c92023-11-23T10:32:13ZengMDPI AGSensors1424-82202021-12-012124849410.3390/s21248494The Compact Support Neural NetworkAdrian Barbu0Hongyu Mou1Statistics Department, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USAStatistics Department, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USANeural networks are popular and useful in many fields, but they have the problem of giving high confidence responses for examples that are away from the training data. This makes the neural networks very confident in their prediction while making gross mistakes, thus limiting their reliability for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and space exploration, etc. This paper introduces a novel neuron generalization that has the standard dot-product-based neuron and the radial basis function (RBF) neuron as two extreme cases of a shape parameter. Using a rectified linear unit (ReLU) as the activation function results in a novel neuron that has compact support, which means its output is zero outside a bounded domain. To address the difficulties in training the proposed neural network, it introduces a novel training method that takes a pretrained standard neural network that is fine-tuned while gradually increasing the shape parameter to the desired value. The theoretical findings of the paper are bound on the gradient of the proposed neuron and proof that a neural network with such neurons has the universal approximation property. This means that the network can approximate any continuous and integrable function with an arbitrary degree of accuracy. The experimental findings on standard benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach has smaller test errors than the state-of-the-art competing methods and outperforms the competing methods in detecting out-of-distribution samples on two out of three datasets.https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/24/8494neural networksRBF networksOOD detectionuniversal approximation
spellingShingle Adrian Barbu
Hongyu Mou
The Compact Support Neural Network
Sensors
neural networks
RBF networks
OOD detection
universal approximation
title The Compact Support Neural Network
title_full The Compact Support Neural Network
title_fullStr The Compact Support Neural Network
title_full_unstemmed The Compact Support Neural Network
title_short The Compact Support Neural Network
title_sort compact support neural network
topic neural networks
RBF networks
OOD detection
universal approximation
url https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/24/8494
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